They know that there is no way to actually do that without violating doctor/patient rights, HIPPA and all of that.

Of course, he's just trying to blow off the issue, but his suggestion makes sense if you consider how we might implement a policy that keeps guns out of the hands of mentally unstable people. (1) No person ever convicted of a violent crime, even a misdemeanor, would be allowed to have a firearm. (2) No person taking any kind of "emotional stabilizer" drug would be allowed to have a firearm. (3) No person who was ever an alcoholic would be allowed to have a firearm. And so on. If they want to get serious about keeping guns away from unstable people, fine. Let's get serious. Only people who have undergone an emotionally stability check, with followups every few years, would be allowed to own firearms. Maybe add in some anger management requirements while we're at it. Since hording is an indicator of mental instability, people who hoard guns and ammo would be declared mentally ineligible to own guns. What do you think, NRA? Good idea, yes?

I agree with the NRA about certain things.

Should we abandon support for greater access to mental healthcare, just because the NRA thinks it's a good thing?

What's wrong with exploring these ideas?
Just because it comes from someone with an A rating from the NRA doesn't mean it should be immediately dismissed, it should be studied and if feasible, then make it happen.

A single DUI, or a stint in rehab? Or someone who is arrested for violent misdemeanors but not necessarily convicted? Those are the people who are more likely to kill another person.

and mass murders.

It does seem a number of mass murderers had serious mental issues. Our current metal health care system seems to be in need of improvement. Improvements to this system would not only be worthwhile for many Americans who are not a threat to others but could also decrease the number of mass murders.

Admittedly better addressing mental health issues is only part of the solution to our gun violence problem but it may be a very important step.

If you couple that with better enforcement of existing laws along with improvements to our NICS background check system we may see a significant improvement. I feel it could be an excellent start.

mostly that 'a number' is about mass murders occurring in places that happen outside where we expect them. It's not quite the same thing as cherry-picking to make a particular point, but it is cherry picking to present the type of story that gets viewers.

If you go to the mass shooting tracker

http://shootingtracker.com/wiki/Main_Page

You'll see that about 70 percent of the shooters in 2015 are UNKNOWN. Being unknown you can't really say much about their 'serious mental issues'. The Mother Jones database that compiled mass shootings from 1983 to 2012 found that about 38% of mass shooters had some history of mental health problems. But 20 million Americans have a mental health issue each year, and more than half of Americans will experience a mental health issue during their life many, roughly half of them by about age 30. So it's an open question, really, as to how far that 38% is from what might be expected in the general population.

That isn't to say that there is no connection at all between mental illness and gun violence. There probably is, but on available evidence it seems that 'a number' is not very well known. And that's a problem for a number of reasons. That, specifically makes it very hard to find an illness that can be identified as 'predictive of mass-shooting'. Another problem is that where all violence is examined across 'serious mental illnesses' it turns out that the rate violence in the serious mentally ill isn't much different from the rate of violence among the general population. The author's name you want to search for a number of such studies is Swanson. His most recent work suggests that rates of violence for the mentally ill and the general population are similar and are about 4% per year. He's found that drug and alcohol abuse is a 3x more powerful predictor of violence, and that the best predictor of violence in the mentally ill is the same predictor found in the general population...a previous history of violence.

The problem is pretty apparent when you look at gun suicides. Suicide -does have an association with mental disorders- and those disorders are depression and disorders where depression is an important component of a group of symptoms. Somewhere around 20k people commit gun suicides every year. If we assume 100% of them were depressed they would be 20,000 among a population of about 17 million people who suffer depression every year...or about .12% Stopping those suicides would require accurately identifying 1/10 of 1 percent? That's tough. It's likely that it'll never be easier than that to identify the fraction of patients in therapy who are going to commit mass murder at some time later in life.

These things put the psychiatric industry in a bad spot. Not because they are a useless profession, but because the available information doesn't provide them with the means to make meaningful and accurate predictions about the likelihood of either a mentally well or a mentally disordered person committing mass murder. All mental disorders are not the same. The Newton killer had autism, the Naval yard shooter had PTSD and depression, John Holmes had schizophrenia. The vast majority of people with these same illnesses don't commit mass-murder (as Swanson found out). There just is no very clear predictor of mass-shootings, and that isn't because the mental health industry doesn't help millions of people live better lives. The data just isn't there to make strong enough associations (tv shows like Criminal Minds, notwithstanding).

If that's not a big enough hurdle, there's another, bigger one: a majority of Americans with mental disorders never seek clinical help. Even if the mental health industry had some tools that might help screen clients in-therapy, those tools won't help the 80% that won't seek clinical help. And men, who have the highest association with mass-shootings, are the gender least likely to seek help.

Often such care is too expensive for many to afford or is hard to obtain especially in rural areas.

A side effect of improvement to our mental healthcare system could be a reduction in the frequency of mass murders. The primary result would be better mental healthcare for many people and consequently a better society to live and work in.

Of course as you suggest, available and affordable mental healthcare doesn't mean that all people with issues will seek treatment. There is a social stigma associated with mental illness that has to be overcome.

While I would like to see an overhaul of our mental healthcare system I am realistic enough to realize that it would be extremely expensive and hard to pass through Congress. Still in the long run it might prove to be a worthwhile investment.

I have known a number of people who would have benefited by visiting a mental healthcare professional and simply could not afford to. One tragically commited suicide with a gun. Mental illness and severe depression ran in her family and she was sexually abused as a young child. Her insurance would not cover the cost adequately so she didn't seek the treatment that might have saved her life.

I'd also like to see improvement in mental health care, both in accessibility and effectiveness. I'd also like to see reduction in discrimination against persons with mental disorders.

But, it seems to me that if the focus on mental health is to provide that part of the solution to mass-murders, mental health care isn't going to be improved for all. It's going to be changed in manners that will assist law enforcement. It seems on it's face that such attention will serve to endorse further criminalizing mental illness and supporting cultural biases that already lead to handicapping discrimination.

You and I are concerned about stigma, but rather than reducing stigma, endorsing a consensus based on prejudice seems more likely to increase prejudice than reduce it.

Although you and I may desire to fight the stigma of mental illness, it's not an erudite sounding term that's the immediate problem for the mentally ill. It's the open and high levels of discrimination placed on people with mental disorders as revealed in headlines such as 'Bleak picture' for mentally ill: 80% are jobless - USA Today www.usatoday.com/...unemployment-mentally-ill/12186049/USA Today Jul 10, 2014 - That people with mental disorders get tagged with that sort of discrimination isn't a secret in our society and it's a huge disincentive for persons with mental disorders to seek clinical help and it exacerbates their dysfunction. I don't see how misguided stereotypic targeting of the mentally ill as criminals-in-the-making much helps reduce discrimination or ends mass-murder.

I do understand how in America perception of social problems aims spending, and the more scary a problem is, the more likely it will get funding soon. But I find it difficult to see how guiding such spending via programs based on existing cultural biases helps.

Our biases guide how we attribute cause and blame and how as a society we spend money.

Before we go off on a war against the violence of the mentally ill to stop mass shootings we ought to spend money and time on developing an empirically-based understanding of both our biases and our confidence in the evidence we consider in framing the problem. In that way, when we may develop suitable means to carry out that effort and mitigate the collateral damage it will likely create.

2.5/yr., and it seems unlikely that a mental health initiative/program can be tailored to stop a very few incidents. The best way any program can work is to ameliorate the violence overall since it would be difficult to show some kind of causal relationship between Program A and Crime B. De-stigmatizing mental health status would require a societal change in attitude and day-to-day practices. It can be done, given the many ways of communicating certain values and resource availability.

I remember over 60 yrs ago our elementary school teacher giving the class a kindly lecture about why we should Not laugh at, react dramatically or pick on a fellow student who had a behavioral problem (this was done when the student in question was absent). From then on, there was no adverse treatment of the kid. Everybody was on board.

... you probably shouldn't have one. Even if you are a cop. Maybe especially if you are a cop.

The mass shooters are very much a part of the same culture that glorifies guns for "self defense" against imaginary enemies.

I'm fine with hunting. So long as meat is considered an acceptable part of the human diet, then responsible hunting is probably more ethical than buying factory farm meat in the grocery store. The hunter knows where meat comes from.

If you can imagine yourself shooting "bad guys" of any sort, then that's disturbingly close to those who shoot their family members, boyfriends, girlfriends as "bad guys," those who shoot themselves as "bad guys," or the disturbed young men who lash out at the "bad guys" of their own tortured imaginations; students, children, black church members, movie goers, women... etc..

Everyone is someone else's "bad guy" at one point or another.

Civilized people don't solve their problems by shooting others.

Mental illness is another thing entirely. Mentally ill people are more often victims of violence than perpetrators of violence.

Gun fetishes and gun culture are the problem, not mental illness.

has anything to do with the ethics of eating meat.

More importantly, would kindly provide your peer reviewed research indicating a direct correlation, no less causation, between people who've ever ideated shooting a "bad guy" and actual criminal violence that's demonstrably different than anyone else in the population?

Your disqualification criteria would eliminate virtually all males over 12. While you obviously may find this a desirable outcome, it's patently absurd, constitutionally impermissible, will not even be considered by most elected officials, no less the population, and simply confirms the suspicions of gun rights advocates that effective firearm bans are the ultimate goal of many in the "gun safety" community, thereby making any sensible legislative and policy compromises, including on matters of mental health, all but impossible. This is in addition to the fact that even the discussion of such ridiculous gun control measures hurts Democratic candidates in important purple swing states.

While you play armchair psychologist ruminating on "gun fetishism," support for firearm rights and against restrictions steadily increases and gun laws across the nation in most areas are liberalizing, all while violent crime rates, firearm and otherwise, have been nearly halved in the last couple of decades.

It doesn't tell me I can't speak out against gun culture, gun fetishes, and moron gun heroics.

That is, in fact, speaking out against gun culture is one of my constitutional rights.

I think the U.S.A. gun culture is disgusting and indefensible.

Gun fetishists are like the guys who masturbate at the playground. Most of them are harmless, but some of them are very dangerous and eventually go on to kill and abuse children.

If my opinion offends gun fetishists and moron gun heroes-in-their-own-minds, then good.

I don't respect gun culture.

Gun love is one.

In fact, we've done so 27 times, and the procedure is specifically detailed in the document.

You can call a constitutional convention to revise the entire Constitution or seek a super-majority of both Congress and the states to repeal the Second Amendment. Good luck with that...

Your barely amateur psychology notwithstanding, I also note that you conspicuously didn't provide any data to substantiate your earlier post about denying the right to own firearms to anyone who ever possibly imagined a situation where they could shoot someone, and really didn't respond to points in my post at all.

If your strategy to implement gun regulations consists of bigoted and generalized stereotypical comments about gun owners and gun rights supporters, and a demonstrable and admitted lack of respect for tens of millions of law-abiding Americans, a great many of them Democrats, it's no wonder why support for gun rights and against restrictions is at a generational high and still increasing, with gun laws continuing to liberalize across much of the country.

...you can't imagine shooting that person to stop them?

Can you imagine using any force to stop them?

And I sure as hell don't need any more recurrent nightmares about situations like that.

Gun fetishists don't know shit. They allow imaginary bad guys to live in their heads.

I don't want to live in a world where I might need a gun, so I don't, even though I've lived in some very rough places, and experienced some very rough situations.

Even now I live in a city where one in five thousand people are murdered by guns every year. Mostly it's gang-on-gang action, but the rate of cops shooting random mentally ill and other unlikable people is higher than the California averages too. The overall violent crime rate is twice the national median. In this city there is a one in one hundred fifty chance of being the victim of a violent crime.

Most every gun story I've experienced personally features "moron heroes." Even the gangsters think they are heroes defending their honor and other useless crap. Hell they probably still think they are some kind of heroes when the are whining and crying in the hospital "It hurts! It hurts!" when they get shot.

Duh. You got shot. You're not dead, so of course it hurts. The hard ass nurses, some ex-military, will not be sympathetic. That's what happens when boys play with guns.

One of the sweetest men I've ever met was drafted and sent to Vietnam. He was a technical person, so not supposed to be on the front lines with the canon-fodder. But he was armed. One day he was doing his job and two kids appeared out of nowhere and shot him. He shot back and killed one of them. The other ran away.

My friend never got over that. He thinks the kid he killed was maybe fourteen.

Which is it?

You can choose to own a gun or not, but that doesn't change the fact that the world is one where people victimize others with brutality with and without guns.

On the high road I don't need guns to feel secure.

others feel differently.

whether it's running for the back door, climbing out a window, swinging a baseball bat, using a knife. I have one which incorporates these possible scenarios, and one which contemplates using a gun. I don't dwell on this, preferring to go through mental exercises for shooting gamebirds and deer.

has advocated for it?
And why is it a talking point?
I've read several times on DU about NRA talking points, yet I can't seem to find the list, could you please post that list so I'll know what I can or can't say without being accused of posting NRA talking points?

Quod Erat Demonstrandum

People with mental disorders face difficulties from their mental illnesses, difficulties with access to quality care, and significant discrimination against persons with mental disorders.

To consider how something called expanding healthcare helps overall, a pretty detailed proposal really has to be provided so that all the pieces of that puzzle are known and people can contemplate their consequences.

It's fairly clear that any legislation working through this republican controlled Congress would mostly be interested in going after Wayne LaPierre's monsters among us and less interested in funding socialized mental health programs (with their very limited promise of reducing mass-shootings).

So consider, if what comes along with a republican approved 'expansion' includes turning providers into mandated police surveillance, creating further rationale for criminalizing mental illness in the minds of Americans, the end result could be very little reduction in gun violence and rather more prejudice and discrimination against persons with mental illness.

All things considered the devil in the details might not be acceptable compared to yet un-assessible value in what 'expanding' mental health care means

... including addictive disorders... is roughly the same in the US as it is in other countries like us. Europe...Canada...Australia.

Only difference is that in this country the mentally ill can get guns.

Lots of guns.