The problem with mental health
Last week I suggested that remaining silent in the face of racism signifies complicity. Today I ponder whether, by doing nothing, I am complicit in the murders of innocent school children.
We have an epidemic on our hands. One that is peculiar to the USA.
I understand there is no quick fix—no one action that will eliminate the threat of a deranged shooter in a school. But legislators who go to extreme measures to protect a six-week-old fetus, won’t take common sense actions to protect a third grader in a classroom. The knee-jerk response is to call this epidemic a “mental health issue.” And then what? Expect the American Psychiatric Association to solve the problem?
The school shooting in Uvalde, Texas is the 199th mass shooting in our country this year. This averages to roughly 10 attacks per week in which four or more people are shot.
Health professionals tell us that while it might be so that shooters exhibit psychiatric problems, the majority of mental health patients will never commit a violent act. So, even if we could monitor all people with mental health issues, we’d be barking up the wrong tree.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the shooter in Uvalde had no known mental health issues or arrests. No previous evidence suggesting he needed tracking—other than his purchase of two semiautomatic AR-15 rifles and 375 rounds of ammo shortly after his 18th birthday. The young man wouldn’t have been allowed to buy a drink in a bar—but he could buy a weapon of mass murder.
VOX illustrated the futility of the monitoring tactic this way: Imagine we could invent a machine that could predict, with 99% accuracy (that’s pretty damn accurate) who is likely to be a mass shooter. For every 100,000 people examined by the machine, you’d have 1001 people about whom the machine is uncertain. People who would require monitoring to be sure they don’t shoot anyone. Wikipedia says the population of the USA is 332,278,200. Divided by 100,000. Times 1001. Gives us 3,326,104 Americans who must be monitored. Just in case.
Yes, this is a ridiculous scenario. But it makes the point. Trying to monitor possible suspects before shooting events occur is far too great a task for policing units. This is not a feasible way to curb these mass murders.
So what is? Everytown.org, an organization that works to prevent gun violence, has this to say:
“The United States is not the only country with mental illness, domestic violence, video games, or hate-filled ideologies, but our gun homicide rate is 25 times higher than our peer countries. The difference is easy access to guns. In fact, even within the U.S., states with weaker gun laws and higher gun ownership rates have higher rates of mass shootings. Lawmakers must act to require background checks on all gun sales, support extreme risk laws that provide a process to temporarily remove guns from people showing warning signs, keep guns out of the hands of domestic abusers, and restrict assault weapons and higher-capacity magazines.”
Another such organization, sandyhookpromise.org, says, “From 1994 to 2004, federal law made it illegal to transfer or possess large capacity magazines and certain semi-automatic firearms in the US. During this time, mass shooting fatalities were 70% less likely to occur than in periods before or after the law’s enforcement. After the law expired in 2004, there was a 183% increase in high-fatality mass shootings and a 239% increase in deaths resulting from such shootings.”
These folks have been studying the issue in much greater detail than I. They make a compelling argument for some common sense gun laws.