NYTimes Editorial Board:Don’t Blame Mental Illness for Gun Violence

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/16/opinion/dont-blame-mental-illness-for-gun-violence.html?ref=opinion&_r=0

Those who oppose expanded gun-control legislation frequently argue that instead of limiting access to guns, the country should focus on mental health problems.
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“People with mental illness are getting guns and committing these mass shootings,” said Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, after the shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., early this month. And Republicans in the Senate backed mental-health legislation even as they rejected bills to require universal background checks and bar people on the terrorism watch list from buying guns.

But mass shootings represent a small percentage of all gun violence, and mental illness is not a factor in most violent acts. According to one epidemiological estimate, entirely eliminating the effects of mental illness would reduce all violence by only 4 percent. Over all, less than 5 percent of gun homicides between 2001 and 2010 were committed by people with diagnoses of mental illness, according to a public health study published this year.

Blaming mental health problems for gun violence in America gives the public the false impression that most people with mental illness are dangerous, when in fact a vast majority will never commit violence. Still, some legal changes should be made to reduce access to firearms among the small percentage of people with mental illness who are dangerous to themselves or others.

Estimates of the percentage of mass shooters who are mentally ill vary widely, as both “mass shooting” and “mental illness” can be difficult to define. One recent analysis of murderers who killed or intended to kill four or more people found that 22 percent of male killers exhibited evidence of mental illness (the share was higher among women, but the sample was much smaller). Another analysis, by the group Everytown For Gun Safety, found that in about 11 percent of shootings between January 2009 and July 2015 in which four or more people were killed, concerns about the killer’s mental health had been reported to a doctor or other authority before the crime took place.

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