Violence, mental illness, guns, and political rhetoric

Have I hit every hot button keyword in current discourse? Cool. Let's try to approach this question empirically. Jared Loughner is the suspect in the shootings of Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona. He is reported to be mentally ill. This raises many questions.

1. Are mentally ill people dangerous?

Perhaps the best answer is, much less than you think it does. 

The results of several recent large-scale research projects conclude that only a weak association between mental disorders and violence exists in the community. Serious violence by people with major mental disorders appears concentrated in a small fraction of the total number [of persons with major mental disorders], and especially in those who use alcohol and other drugs.

So if you are in the presence of someone struggling with a mental illness, you do not need to be concerned about your safety.  Of course, you will be careful if you are around a drunk, angry, mentally ill person; but you'd careful around that person even if you had no concerns about their mental health.

But aren't there a lot of mentally ill people in prisons? Yes. They do not endanger you very much, because you are unlikely to encounter one of them in a situation that puts you at risk. That said, the high rate of mental illness among the incarcerated raises important questions:

• Do imprisoned mentally ill people get good care for their illnesses? (No.)
• Does prison make mentally ill people more likely to be violent? Or does this mean that the mentally ill are more likely to end up in prison? (Yes to both.)
• So could we make everyone safer by providing better mental health care to people who need it, both in and out of prison? (Yes, but it would only make people a little safer, because the mentally ill are only a small risk to you in the first place. The reason to improve treatment is that mental illness causes an enormous amount of suffering to the afflicted, both in and out of prison.)

2. Should we allow mentally ill people to have guns?

This depends on your views about gun rights. Most communities allow judges and doctors to commit people to a hospital if they are thought to be a threat to themselves or others. During that time, they have no access to their guns (or automobiles, or power tools, ...). So presumably the question is about a mentally ill person for whom there is no compelling evidence that the person is a threat to themselves or others.

Now, mental illness does not deprive you of your right to vote, practice your religion, and so on. So on the one hand, if you think that gun ownership is a fundamental human right -- as opposed to a license granted to you by the government -- then I expect that you would argue that the mentally ill should have the same gun ownership rights as anyone else. On the other hand, if you think that gun ownership rights can be qualified (e.g., it depends on your age, your criminal history, or the type of weapon), then you still may worry about how 'sanity' could be used as a criterion for gun ownership. Would you want people to have to undergo mental health evaluations as part of getting gun permits?

3. Does violent political rhetoric promote violence against politicians by mentally ill people?

No one knows. How would we even study the question? (Cross-national studies of political discourse and rates of assassination?) Keep in mind that you can be skeptical of claims that violent rhetoric promotes violence, and still disapprove of violent rhetoric.

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