Murder and Suicide are bad, but even people who desire an to end it can see problems in policy
That's especially true when public outrage after a crisis opens the door for shock doctrine... and the demand to "DO SOMETHING (!) ends up targeting the wrong people, the wrong way, and doesn't really help solve the problem people so dread...going to a public place and becoming a victim of a mass shooting.
There really are rational reasons for objecting to gun control policies, and failure to DO SOMETHING to address public fear has a cost. Perhaps fairly, perhaps not...
Society needs effective control, not scapegoats. If it chooses to act with prior restraint, then that must be well justified and there must be a uniform standard that doesn't unfairly burden some people and not others.
Consider the three part essay from Harvard Law... the Good News Bad News About Gun Laws, Mental Illness and Violence. Each part posted separately there, and excerpts selected to provide a preview..
Part 1
Jeffrey Swanson, PhD
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A study underway at Duke University, funded by the National Science Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Public Health Law Research Program, may soon provide some answers to that question. Whatever the study finds, though, the results will hinge on whether two assumptions underlying our gun prohibitions turn out to be true: that there is a strong causal relationship between serious mental illness and gun violence; and that our extant gun-disqualifying legal criteria can accurately identify the subgroup of mentally ill individuals at risk.
If the statistical predictors of gun violence are much the same as the predictors of assaultive behavior in general, we can expect that any policy targeting mental illness as a specific risk factor for gun violence will have a limited impact on the overall problem. Epidemiological studies in the community have found that the vast majority of people with serious mental illnesses do not commit violent acts toward others, and that the vast majority of violent acts are not attributable to mental illness (Fazel & Grann, 2006; Swanson, 1994). These studies would suggest that even if we completely eliminated mental illness as a violence risk factor, the population prevalence of violent acts towards others would go down by less than 4 percent.
Such are the stats that animate the mental health advocacy organizations that defend “people with mental illness” (PWMI) as if they were a peace-loving tribe that has gotten a bad rap for warmongering. The advocates, like those involved with the NAMI Stigma Busters initiative, cite statistics that PWMI are more often victims than perpetrators — and not only victims of crime but of the ill-informed, media-hyped, misplaced public outrage that emanates from the news of every mass shooting by a troubled young man.
<snip>
To be fair, the stigma fighters do have a point. The fact is that people with mental illness are mainly just people — ranging from your harmless grandmother to your neighbor’s not-so-harmless intoxicated boyfriend. So when the days and weeks after a Virginia Tech or a Tucson or a Fort Hood or an Aurora mass shooting are filled with the chatter of pundits blaming mental illness — as if “nutjobs” running amok in the land were the main and predictable cause of our societal gun homicide problem — it is worth saying that the pundits and the public opinion they feed are wrong.
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2012/10/05/good-news-and-bad-news-about-gun-laws-mental-illness-and-violence-part-1/
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Part 2
Jeffrey Swanson, PhD
It is hard to find good news in our nation’s gun violence statistics, but here’s this: If somebody shoots you today, your chances of survival are about 83 percent — up from 78 percent just ten years ago. The improving survival rate for gunshot victims has helped nudge the national homicide rate down by about half a percentage point since 2001. Of course, the cloud behind that silver lining is that more people are actually getting shot. The CDC recorded almost 600,000 injuries caused by assault with a firearm in the past decade, as the combined rate of fatal and nonfatal gun assault injuries rose from about 18 to about 21 per hundred thousand.
Now for the bad news: When the shooter and the victim happen to be the same person, the odds of survival and death are reversed: 8 out of 10 die. Suicide attempts with a gun almost always succeed, because they are almost always aimed at the brain at close range, and there is seldom anyone around to call 911.
<snip>
Depression is the particular psychiatric illness most strongly associated with suicide. Social disadvantage plays a role both in the etiology of depressive illness and disparities in its treatment. Depression is not, however, a disorder that gets most patients a gun-disqualifying record of involuntarily commitment. In other words, people suffering from the one mental health condition that is most closely and frequently linked to suicidality are unlikely to show up in a gun background check.
Even if every state were to report all of its records of mental health adjudications to the National Instant Check System (NICS), this “gap” wouldn’t close. Arguably, then, better access to evidence-based treatment for depression — particularly for poor people, the elderly, and the unemployed (not to mention college students and returning veterans) — might prevent more firearm fatalities than relying on improved NICS reporting to keep guns out of the hands of “dangerous people.”
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2012/10/08/good-news-and-bad-news-about-gun-laws-mental-illness-and-violence-part-2/
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Part 3
Jeffrey Swanson, PhD
So what can the law do about gun violence? The US Supreme Court’s decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 3025 (2010) made it pretty clear that legal solutions to our nation’s firearm violence problem do not include “getting rid of the guns,” but do include preventing dangerous people from getting their hands on them.
So, the difficult question of whether our nation’s gun laws are capturing the right “dangerous people” remains crucial, and it invites a prior question: Whose criteria are we talking about?
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For example, on the one hand, the Social Security Administration assigns a “representative payee” to SSI beneficiaries with a psychiatric disability who are deemed incapable of managing their own money. Having a federally-assigned representative payee may be one indicator of mental incapacity, but it is not a disqualifier for gun purchase.
On the other hand, the Veterans Administration assigns what it calls a “fiduciary” to veterans with psychiatric disabilities who are deemed incapable of managing their VA benefits — and then proceeds to report to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) all veterans with fiduciaries. At the state level, court-ordered guardianship of a person with a serious mental illness is typically considered a gun disqualifying (and NICS-reportable) “mental health adjudication,” but a court-assigned financial power of attorney is not.
The VA’s use of a fiduciary appointment as a putative indicator of mental incapacity sufficient to abridge firearms rights is controversial. Senators Burr and Webb recently re-introduced the Veterans Second Amendment Protection Act, a bill that would allow veterans with fiduciaries to keep their gun rights. The House already passed a version of the bill in 2011. This law, if enacted, would automatically restore gun rights to an estimated 127,000 veterans who have been reported to NICS because of having a fiduciary.
<snip>
To date, the only empirical evidence that gun restrictions on people with a history of mental illness might prevent firearm violence in the US population comes from a national evaluation of the Brady Act (Ludwig & Cook, 2000). That study found that gun purchaser background checks and waiting periods had no significant effect on homicide rates, but did reduce the suicide rate by 6 percent in people over age 55.
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