Kimberly Yonkers: Mental health isn’t the gun issue we need to address

This pointy-head professor at the Yale School of Medicine, Kimberly Yonkers, writes in the pages of the Washington Post that it’s “dangerous” to blame mental health for gun violence in the United States;

The elimination of severe psychiatric conditions would not solve our problems with gun violence. Despite the sensationalism of shootings that occur in schools or against police officers, they are infrequent events compared to the totality of gun violence.

And while individuals with severe psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia or bipolar illness are more likely to engage in violent behavior, the frequencies of cases of these disorders are small. And the vast majority of people with severe and persistent mental illness are non-violent. According to one distinguished study, we would see only a 4 percent reduction in gun violence if mental illnesses were eliminated.

Yeah, well, closing the “gun show loop hole” would prevent only 1 percent of criminals from getting their grubby paws on guns according to the FBI, but that doesn’t stop the gun grabbers from whining about the need to close up that boogeyman.

And while the frequencies of the cases of mental disorders appearing in society, the frequencies of those mental disorders showing up in investigations of mass casualty shootings is close to 90%, at least, in my recent memory. Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook, etc….

Gun violence is 20 times more prevalent in the United States than in other highly developed countries.

[…]

In sum, the American mental health-care system is just about on par with other high resource nations, but the United States has a dramatically higher rate of gun violence.

And if you take out the guns that are already illegal, wielded by people forbidden by existing laws to possess a firearm, that rate falls off substantially. The highest rates of gun crimes are in cities like Washington, DC, New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles…places that already have strict gun control laws. Legal gun owners who obey the laws aren’t committing the gun crimes.

As I said, the high profile shootings that the media likes to talk about are almost always committed by mentally deficient people. Some of them find easy access to guns because people like Ms. Yonkers wants us to ignore them as potential threats to society. She wants to tighten restrictions on legal, law-abiding, mentally-capable gun owners (with her eye on taking guns out of the hands of all people) instead of taking down the engines of the media-driven call to make all guns illegal – the mentally ill.

But it is time to recognize that adequate treatment for people with a mental disorder is a distinct problem from gun violence.

So why can’t we put them in NICS system and prevent them from buying guns?

If one accepts the data from CNN’s Gun Violence Project, over 80 people die from gun violence in a 24 hour period. How long do we have to wait before meaningful changes in legislation that reduce access to guns?

Conservatives want to reduce gun access to the mentally ill, while Yonkers wants to reduce the number of guns available to the rest of us who don’t have mental problems. Ms. Yonkers, you’d have more credibility if you would find out how many of those 80 deaths every 24 hours were committed with illegal guns in the hands of people who are already restrained from gun possession by current laws. My feeling is that number would fall significantly. And your credibility would rise accordingly.

Category: Gun Grabbing Fascists