Excerpt from: Bazelon Center (click for full article)
In the wake of the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, lawmakers have scrambled to design policy responses to reduce the likelihood of similar tragedies from occurring in the future. Despite the Surgeon General’s acknowledgment of the “exceptionally small” connection between mental illness and violence, policy advocates, journalists, and politicians have placed people with mental illnesses in the center of the debate on gun safety. This emphasis has led to reactive, ill-conceived proposals that focus on mental health despite the lack of relationship to gun violence. Some have used mental health as an excuse to divert attention from the real issue of gun regulation. Others have inappropriately championed mental health reforms—or mental health record reporting—as a key solution to prevent gun violence. Both approaches are wrong. People with psychiatric disabilities are a misplaced priority for gun legislation. In fact, people with serious mental illnesses are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators of it.Reporting their records will not meaningfully increase public safety. Studies show that “severe mental illness alone [is] not statistically related to future violence. The seminal study on risk of violence and mental illness—the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study—compared the prevalence for violence among individuals with mental illnesses to the prevalence for violence among other residents of the same neighborhoods. The study showed that the two groups’ prevalence for violence was “statistically indistinguishable.” Indeed, “if a person has severe mental illness without substance abuse and history of violence, he or she has the same chances of being violent... as any other person in the general population.
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