The gun violence and mental health script

Dr. John T. Monahan sums up the gun violence and mental health script thusly:

“Two things typically happen in the wake of a mass shooting. First, politicians claim that mental illness is the major cause of violence in America. Then, advocates for people with mental illness respond by denying there is any relationship whatsoever between mental illness and violence. Both groups are wrong. Research shows that the association between mental illness and violence is not strong, but it does exist.”

Monahan’s hyperbole creates something of a straw man out of advocates’ arguments. They don’t deny a relationship; instead, they emphasize that blaming gun violence on mental health simplistically vilifies an entire group of people.

So, after Trump and the NRA followed the script by emphasizing that mass gun shootings weren’t gun situations but mental health situations, predictably, article after article after article about gun violence and mental health followed.

This distraction plays out wonderfully for the NRA and the politicians they’ve pocketed. Instead of talking gun reform that would affect their bottom line, we’re talking mental health reform, stigmatizing (not guns but instead) people with mental illness as violent and dangerous.

Free pies for the NRA and for all of us they’ve distracted

The above pie illustrates I, and every child born since the 1980s, have a clear stake in this issue.

Side note on mass school shootings

There exists no agreed upon definition of a mass shooting, let alone a mass school shooting.

Everytown for Gun Safety includes in their definition each shot issued from a gun on school property, which would include shots fired that resulted in no injuries. They receive a lot of criticism for this definition, but in their defense, their whole goal is gun safety. With each fired weapon comes the potential for danger.

The Gun Violence Archive, on the other hand, defines a mass school shooting as any event on school property where at least four people are either injured or killed, not including the shooter(s). Much research and reporting goes by their definition.

However, some research and reporting goes by a much stricter definition that only counts a mass shooting when at least four people are killed, again not counting the shooter. For example, the FBI and the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service use this definition, equating mass shootings with mass murder standards.

This lack of uniformity creates unnecessary confusion in a discussion already tainted by party loyalties and greed. In hopes to avoid any confusion, my research defines a mass school shooting in line with the Gun Violence Archive: a shooting on school property resulting in at least four victims injured or killed. For example, the various school shootings and sprees with three or fewer victims on school property are not represented in my data.

I acknowledge this arbitrary limitation and emphasize that this data in no way represents the full scope of school shootings.

The above pie and the following pies are based off of data I collected from the Gun Violence Archive, fact-checking online sources, nonpartisan reports, and verified, up-to-date encyclopedic lists. The data includes 68 total mass school shootings.

Back to the pies

In the gun violence and mental health discussion, some data tend to go ignored. If mental illness really is culprit number one, then the increase of people with mental illness should reflect the increase of these mass school shootings. But it doesn’t.

And, considering that the U.S. makes up 5% of the world’s population, and that the rate of people with mental illness in the U.S. is on par with that of people with mental illness in the rest of the world, then our mass shootings should make up 5% of the world’s mass shootings total. But they don’t.

Our mass shootings make up 31% of the world’s total, six times what it statistically should be if mental illness alone were the issue.

But mental illness alone is not the only issue.

There is clearly a link between mass shootings and people with mental illness. Research Director, Dr. Grant Duwe, in the topic’s most comprehensive study to date, has found that out of the 185 U.S. mass shootings from 1900 to 2017, 59% were carried out by people diagnosed with a mental disorder or demonstrating serious mental illness signs prior to shootings.

Keep in mind, though, Duwe excluded several mass shootings that had clear motives outside the scope of mental illness that would bring that percentage down, such as military conflicts, gang violence, gun use during other crimes like robbery and drug deals, and collective violence from revenge killings. But even then, most research consistently finds that mental illness is involved in 28 – 30% of mass violence in the U.S.

Side note on gun violence and mental health

We will never hear these researchers claim that mental illness alone causes people to become mass shooters. To do so would be over-simplistic.

People with mental illness are people, nonetheless complicated and nonetheless affected by various motivators and triggers. In fact, the research shows over and over again that these violent crimes happen most often when coupled with various factors like substance abuse, alcohol, a history of domestic violence, and various life stresses. One comprehensive study found that 22% of mass shooters with mental illness were triggered by relationship issues; 13% by crime motivators; 49% by emotional stresses like fights and job trouble and bullying and revenge seeking; and 18% by financial problems. Note these percentages exceed 100%; various factors play into most mass shootings. It is almost never just one thing.

Blaming gun violence on mental illness is not only simplistic but also discriminatory.

Back to the pies, again

The above pie is based on the field’s authoritative National Institute of Mental Health Epidemiologic Catchment Area (ECA) study from 1990. A more recent study from 2012 found that only 2.9% of people with mental illness acted out violently. That number sure is close to the 2.94% of U.S. Army soldiers who, when off duty, commit violent crime.

If an entire group of people should be labeled as violent and too dangerous to be allowed to have guns based on 2.9% of their population, then by that reasoning, members of the U.S. Army should not be allowed to purchase guns either.

Speaking of discriminatory: white men.

Since white males make up the majority of mass school shooters, should we stigmatize all white men as violent and dangerous?

Speaking of violent and dangerous: men.

If I were to say that women clearly are the only ones we can trust with guns, men would, like a reflex, gripe, “but not all men are mass shooters!” True. A very small percentage of men are mass shooters. Yet there the link still remains, one much stronger than any concerning people with mental illness and mass shootings.

Men love using the “not all men [enter a predominately male atrocity here]” template, especially when it comes to violence against women. However, most mass shooters can’t say that.

Side note on the News and their deadliest mass shooting claims

Look, whenever the news uses any variant of the phrase, “deadliest mass shooting in American history,” know that there is some serious historical whitewashing going on. What often goes un-highlighted is they only take into account mass shootings that have happened since 1949.

When we think about mass shooting massacres wrought by white men like the Bear River massacre (400+ killed/injured) or Wounded Knee (300+ killed/injured) or the Opelousas massacre (300+killed/injured) or even the Mountain Meadows massacre wrought by Mormons against Missouri pioneer families (140+ killed), this elision in the headlines comes off as, at the very least, insensitive. If we include all U.S. history, not a single shooting included in the headlines’s list would make it into the actual ten deadliest.

Back to the pies, last time

Yes, men make up 99% of mass shootings in our country. What makes this statistic scary and sad is that the people with serious mental illness who are least likely to seek treatment are men. And it is not even as much a mental health problem as it is a larger societal issue. Men seek treatment less due to masculinity norms. Seeking help in our culture is seen as feminine, something men don’t do.

So, if we really want to talk about how gun violence and mental health are linked, then instead of stigmatizing people with mental illness, we should be protecting our children from our culture’s dangerous and unhealthy gender norms.

And if we really want to do away with the majority of mass shootings, then we need to start talking about misogynistic, white men. But when we consider those exact traits, it shouldn’t be surprising why Trump, of all people, wants to take the topic somewhere else.