Mental Illness, The Second Amendment and Gun Violence

The second amendment states that "A Well Regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.¹ But what does this awkwardly worded statement really mean? Many Americans think it means that except for criminals and the mentally ill, we the people, have a constitutional right to own a firearm be it a handgun, a semi-automatic rifle or an AK 47. For many Americans, the 2^nd amendment right to own a gun has the same hallowed status as the other nine amendments enshrined in the Bill of rights of the Constitution of the United States in 1791, including the right to free speech, to freedom of the press, to freedom of assembly, to be protected from unreasonable search and seizure, the right not to be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process, the right to a speedy public trial by an impartial jury of one's peers and the right to be protected from cruel and unusual punishment. If there is to be a fruitful dialogue between Gun Rights advocates and Gun Control advocates, both groups must appreciate, empathize and respect the powerful emotions on both sides of the gun divide.

Many people feel that gun violence is primarily due to criminals and the mentally ill and that if we had stricter criminal laws, longer sentences, stricter mental health regulations, better treatments for the mentally ill and more counselling for troubled people, we could reduce gun violence in the United States. This is true to an extent, but there is more to it than that. Our nation's gun violence is a public health epidemic. All nations in the world including advanced industrial countries have similar rates of mental illness and emotionally troubled people, yet they vastly differ in the number of shootings compared to the United States. According to the massive database maintained by the University of Washington which tracks lives lost in every country, in every year by every possible cause of death, gun deaths in the United States is 27 times higher than Denmark and, excluding terrorism, at least 10 times higher than Britain, Germany, Canada and Japan. Mental Illness and troubled people are everywhere—Gun violence is not!

Only a small percentage of mentally ill people are more prone to violent acts than the general population. The majority of violent acts, by sheer number are committed by people who would not meet psychiatric criteria for mental illness and a significant number have no previous criminal record. Instinctively, people think that most violent criminal acts must be a product of mental illness, but criminality is not tantamount to mental illness. Politicians have avoided taking positions on gun control reform by using an expanded category of mental illness in which troubled people are included, as a convenient and politically safe explanation for gun violence. While there may be troubled, unhappy, frustrated and angry people in the United States because of their socio-economic and domestic circumstances, and such people may be more prone to gun violence, to label these people mentally ill is a self-serving metaphorical stretch. Problems in living are not mental illness.

One of the few legally enforceable restrictions on individual gun ownership in every state involves diagnosed mental patients involuntarily hospitalized for potentially violent behavior where access to guns is assessed and suitable restrictions on gun ownership are imposed. Where there is reasonable concern about risk of violence in a person with mental illness, laws in virtually every state mandate that mental health professionals take responsibility to competently and thoroughly assess that risk and make clinical and legal recommendations about how best to deal with it, including hospitalizing the patient, warning potential victims and taking the patient's guns away. This requirement is memorialized as "The Tarasoff Principle"² based on a case that was adjudicated by the California Supreme Court and is known as the duty to protect.

Could mental health laws be stricter in terms of criteria for involuntary hospitalization and involuntary assessment and treatment of [End...