The U.S.A. needs to tackle PSYCHOLOGY!
What sort of legislation would you enact to do that? Seems airy fairy and meaningless.
I meant along with gun-safety laws, we need to put better funding and effort into psychiatric care and helping those with issues "upstairs".
Better mental health awareness. Not "Tackle Psychology"...that came out all wrong.
But I've already pointed out how treating mass shootings as a mental health issue is not only patently absurd, but purely a smokescreen to detract from the real issue. Fact of the matter is, it is easy to say that "[Cho Seung Hui/ Eric Harris/ Dylan Klebold/ Adam Lanza/ James Eagan Holmes/ Jared Lee Loughner] is crazy." They just shot a lot of people and nobody really knows why. Nobody will step up and defend them from accusations of insanity or mental health issues, and several will lob those adjectives out of anger. Unfortunately though, it is a giant non-issue. We as a society of laws cannot just put random people in prison before they commit a crime absent some pretty convincing evidence before the fact. Combine this with the fact that the same gun group that cries mental health whenever there is a shooting is the first to defend the "gun rights" of
domestic abusers or people with
violent criminal convictions, and, well, what do you expect? Turns out that once you scratch the surface, you see that mental illness is a scape goat so that violent men with masculinity-issues can still possess firearms.
Further compounding this smokescreen is the fact that those diagnosed as mentally ill are less likely to shoot people than those who are not diagnosed.
Metzl et al. Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms, 105 American Journal of Public Health 240 (2015) ("Yet surprisingly little population-level evidence supports the notion that individuals diagnosed with mental illness are more likely than anyone else to commit gun crimes. According to Appel-baum, less than 3% to 5% of US crimes involve people with mental illness, and the percentages of crimes that involve guns are lower than the national average for persons not diagnosed with mental illness"). Combine this with the fact that the diagnosed mentally ill
are far more likely to be victims of gun violence, and you have a full-blown smokescreen on your hands.
The internal logic of the claim that mental illness is to blame for our gun problems simply belies itself. If we truly accepted the NRA's logic as correct, the logic that "only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun"* or that "Guns are responsible for 2.5 million defensive uses each year." If these slogans or fabricated studies meant anything, the NRA would lead the pack when it came to arming the mentally ill, as they are the more likely that Joe Six-Pack to be victimized by gun violence. But they don't, and this shows that self-defense is not what the NRA cares about. Disarming only the mentally ill cynically demonizes part of our society who are already among the least well off so that gun-owners can continue to enjoy their pretty little toys. Gun-owners cry "individual rights" and "self-defense" while cynically removing those "rights" from another class of people. It simply says "take guns away from them, not from me" and that is the real problem with the gun control debate: instead of asking, "what is good public policy," the pro-gun side asks "what policies will allow me to keep my man-toys?"
*The notion is that society as a whole must defend itself. It focuses on a "good person in society" standing up for himself (cause it's always a white man) and others to defend their collective selves.
As for UP citing that Australia link, it's bullshit. I just don't care enough to waste another hour on this, when I could be getting paid.
