Mental Illness and Mass Shootings

0
An assortment of guns
Given the heightened threat level, it might be time to beef up your concealed carry,

Back in January, I wrote the post “The Problem isn’t Bad Guns, it’s Bad People” after a Chinese man used a Mac-10 to shoot 20 people in a California dance hall on Chinese New Year.

Yet when Audrey Hale, a 28-year-old woman who identified as a man and was under psychiatric care for an undisclosed mental illness, killed six in a Christian school in Nashville, Tenn., Joe Biden reflexively blamed it on guns. Why? Because stopping us from owning guns supports his agenda while locking up criminals and those with severe mental illnesses does not. He, and many other espousing a socialist agenda, want to ban guns because they want the people to be powerless.

Mass Shooting Trends

A few things about mass shootings are clear to anyone who follows the news:

  • As the two examples above show, mass shooters are not always white males, much to the chagrin of leftists who see white supremacists hiding behind every AR-15. In fact, most mass shootings (as defined by the Gun Violence Archive) don’t make national news because they are people of color shooting other people of color and are often gang and/or drug related.
  • Background checks and other types of gun control do not and will not stop mass shootings. In the Nashville case, the guns were legally purchased despite the shooter’s known mental illness. In the Chinese New Year case, the perpetrator used a gun and magazines that were illegal to own in California. Most gang shootings also involve illegal guns. Plus, the states and cities with the tightest gun control are frequently those with the most gun violence. Nonetheless, Biden wants to double-down on a policy that isn’t working.
  • The worst of these mass shootings, including those where many people are killed in supposed “gun-free” zones, tend to be conducted by those who are considered “troubled,” are in a crisis, or are mentally ill. The Nashville school case case is just the latest. Here are a couple other famous cases: the man who killed six people and shot former Representative Gabby Giffords was diagnosed with schizophrenia, and Seung-Hue Cho, who killed 32 People in the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, was mentally ill and a court had declared him “an imminent danger” to himself.

I expect some reading this will say, “Most people who suffer from mental illness do not kill others.” I agree. Now, will they admit “Most people who own guns do not kill others?”