Following the Sandy Hook school shootings in 2012, the Conservative commentator Anne Coulter provocatively proclaimed that “Guns don’t kill people. The mentally ill do.”
“The United States sees an average of 32 000 handgun-related deaths per year (as per this paper published in 2015), and firearms are involved in 68% of homicides, 52% of suicides, 43% of robberies, and 21% of aggravated assaults. Far from the national glare, this everyday violence has a disproportionate impact on lower-income areas and communities of color, and is widely held to be the cause of widespread anxiety disorders and traumatic stress symptoms”… the stigma linked to guns and mental illness is complex, multifaceted, and itself politicized, in as much as the decisions about which crimes US culture diagnoses as “crazy” and which it deems “sane” are driven as much by the politics and racial anxieties of particular cultural moments as by the workings of individual disturbed brains. Beneath seemingly straightforward questions of whether particular assailants meet criteria for particular mental illnesses lay ever-changing categories of race, gender, violence, and, indeed, of diagnosis itself.”
“Persons in the United States live in an era that has seen an unprecedented proliferation of gun rights and gun crimes, and the data we cite show that many gun victims are exposed to violence in ways that are accidental, incidental, relational, or environmental. Yet this expansion has gone hand in hand with a narrowing of the rhetoric through which US culture talks about the role of guns and shootings. Insanity becomes the only politically sane place to discuss gun control. Meanwhile, a host of other narratives, such as displaced male anxiety about demographic change, the mass psychology of needing so many guns in the first place, or the symptoms created by being surrounded by them, remain unspoken.”
“Mass shootings represent national awakenings and moments when seeming political or social adversaries might come together to find common ground, whether guns are allowed, regulated, or banned. Doing so, however, means recognizing that gun crimes, mental illnesses, social networks, and gun access issues are complexly interrelated, and not reducible to simple cause and effect. Ultimately, the ways our society frames these connections reveal as much about our particular cultural politics, biases, and blind spots as it does about the acts of lone, and obviously troubled, individuals.”
Ref: American Journal of Public Health. 2015 February; 105(2): 240-49.
Mental Illness, Mass Shotings and the Politics of American Firearms by Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD and Kenneth T. MacLeish, PhD
PMCID: PMC4318286
PMID: 25496006
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