Gunfire and Mental Health
After the mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas, Donald Trump said, “mental illness and hatred pulled the trigger. Not the gun.” Arguably, without the gun, 31 people would not have died in less than 24 hours.
In the wake of these recentmss shootings, politicians on both sides of the aisle have been working to pass new legislation. A bill for universal background checks was was passed in the House earlier this year. Senators Joe Manchin (D-W. Va) and Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) have reintroduced a bipartisan bill that enforces stricter background checks.
While these measures are being debated in Congress, Donald Trump wants to focus on “reform[ing] our mental health laws to better identify mentally disturbed individuals… and make sure those people not only get treatment but, when necessary, involuntary confinement.” Other politicians on the right have made similar arguments. Senator Rick Scott of Florida said, “there’s too many people that have mental illnesses that we’re somehow not addressing and they have access to weapons and they shouldn’t.” As ‘thoughts and prayers’ have stopped being enough, it seems that the right has found a new scapegoat for mass shootings: mental health.
According to the American Psychiatric Association, “…the overwhelming majority of people with mental illness are not violent and are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators of violence.” Additionally, “rhetoric that argues otherwise will further stigmatize and interfere with people accessing needed treatment.”
The Washington Post reported on studies of mass shootings, finding that of all the mass shooters, “only a quarter or less have diagnosed mental illness.” Other factors such as past domestic violence, narcissism, and access to firearms are “more significant commonalities in mass shooters.”
With these ideas in mind, Trump’s remarks blaming mass shootings on mental illness seem questionable at best. Despite this, the Trump administration is looking into a new, highly controversial policy to monitor those with mental illness. Bob Wright, a friend of Trump’s and the former NBC chairman, has urged the administration to form the Health Advanced Research Projects Agency (HARPA). HARPA’s proposed purpose is to explore new ways to solve health problems.
What relation does HARPA have to mass shootings in America? Members of the administration have recently created a proposal known as SAFEHOME (Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes). According to the Washington Post, SAFEHOME would explore, “whether technology including phones and smartwatches can be used to detect when mentally ill people are about to turn violent.”
There are several problems with tracking the actions of “mentally ill” people: the stigmatization of those that struggle with their mental health, the lack of definition of who is “mentally ill” and who would be part of this program, and the breaches of privacy for millions of Americans.
The concept that people who struggle with mental health are dangerous can prevent Americans from wanting to seek psychological help and be open about their mental health. When people are disinclined to seek support for their mental health, their condition worsens. Rather than increasing safety, stigmatizing mental disorders as dangerous will prevent Americans from getting mental health care and allow conditions to worsen.
If this plan is passed, would it stop mass shootings? A 2012 Defense Department Study titled “Prediction: Why It Won’t Work” found that while mass shooters may have pre-existing behaviors that could be red flags, “they are of low specificity and thus carry the baggage of an unavoidable false alarm rate.” Essentially, predicting mass shooters via these indicators is too inefficient and inaccurate to be feasible.
Why has the Trump administration turned to mental illness as the cause of mass shootings when research on other factors such as access to guns and narcissism have proved to be stronger links? A recent study by Boston University used data of gun violence and the sale of guns across different US States to show that, “laws banning people convicted of violent misdemeanors from possessing firearms can… significantly reduce gun-related deaths.” Further research showed that “state gun laws requiring universal background checks for all gun sales resulted in homicide rates 15% lower than states without such laws.”
The evidence shows that background checks and banning the sale of guns to certain individuals is effective in preventing mass shootings, yet these measure still face resistance. Instead, there is a focus on stigmatizing mental health and monitoring those with mental disorders when the facts prove that those efforts won’t effectively predict or prevent mass shootings. Mental health has become a scapegoat for mass shootings in order to stop laws for universal background checks.
Emily Angstreich ‘22 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at emily.angstreich@wustl.edu.