There is one more myth that is widely held in the general U.S. public—that of the unpredictable and suddenly violent lone gunman. Most serious research shows that “social relationships also predict gun violence. Regression analyses by Papachristos et al. demonstrate that up to 85% of shootings occur within social networks.” [such as gangs, disenfranchised subgroups who feel angry and alienated including minorities, and persons who gravitate to violent ideologies stemming from an “us versus them” theme. “In other words, people are far more likely to be shot by relatives, friends, enemies, or acquaintances than they are by lone violent psychopaths.” To put the killings into statistical perspective, “a report by the police department of New York City found that, in 2013, a person was ‘more likely to die in a plane crash, drown in a bathtub, or perish in an earthquake, than be murdered by a crazed stranger in that city.”
Other researchers have found evidence that “…certain persons with mental illness undoubtedly commit violent acts. Reports argue that mental illness might even be underdiagnosed in people who commit random school shootings.” Statisticians, however, point to a fallacy of viewing numbers—that of “basing gun crime–prevention efforts on the mental health histories of mass shooters risks building “common evidence” from “uncommon things.”, i.e. going from the singular to the general rather than the more logical other way around. “Such an approach thereby loses the opportunity to build common evidence from common things—[such as…medical specialties might catalog as a result of their necessarily robust use of practical, verifiable, and useful information]. A rapid jump to conclusions blaming mental illness as the core cause of gun violence, as found in communities around the country, ignores what is known “about substance abuse, domestic violence, availability of firearms, suicidality, social networks, economic stress, and other factors.”
Conservative commentators such as Anne Coulter take the self-serving NRA proclivity to “blame ‘the mentally ill’ for violence, and even psychiatric journals are more likely to publish articles about mentally ill aggression than about victimhood.” But, in the real world with which law enforcement and the courts must deal when faced with the best factual information is that “persons with mental illness might well have more to fear from ‘us’ than we do from ‘them.’” Blaming persons with mental disorders for gun crime overlooks the threats posed to society by a much larger population and skews the basis for the process of pursuing a logical course for prevention of gun violence and of dealing with the mentally ill.
In terms of predicting whether or not mentally ill persons in general or those more narrowly suspected of being a threat to society, there is “legislation in a number of states now [that] mandates that psychiatrists assess their patients for the potential to commit violent gun crime. New York State law requires mental health professionals to report anyone who “is likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others” to the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services, which then alerts the local authorities to revoke the person’s firearms license and confiscate his or her weapons. California adopted a 5-year firearms ban for anyone who communicates a violent threat against a ‘reasonably identifiable victim’ to a licensed psychotherapist.” All of this legislation presumes that mental health workers hold a singularly better set of knowledge than do law enforcement, judges, science-based students of the subject, and investigative journalists, and is therefore naïve. Even broader is the one in Tennessee, “passed as a response to mass shootings” [which] requires Tennessee-based mental health professionals to report “threatening patients” to local law enforcement. Of course definitions both medically and legally beg definition.” Supporters of these types of laws argue that they provide important tools for law enforcement officials to identify potentially violent persons.
“History suggests, however, that psychiatrists are inefficient gatekeepers in this regard. Data supporting the predictive value of psychiatric diagnosis in matters of gun violence is thin at best.” Psychiatric diagnosis is largely an observational tool, not an extrapolative one, a limitation largely accepted by mental health professionals—a group which is unenthusiastic about being given such responsibility, arguing that a nuanced and complicated subject is overly simplified as a solution. …“There is actually very little literature that provides empirical evidence dealing with psychiatric predictions of dangerousness… and that ‘despite statutory and procedural trends to the contrary, the data available suggest no reason for involving psychiatrists in the dispositional processes of violent offenders under the expectation of [successfully] predictive expertise.’”… Swanson put it even more succinctly: “Psychiatrists using clinical judgment are not much better than chance at predicting which individual patients will do something violent and which will not.…The lack of prognostic specificity is in large part a matter of simple math. Psychiatric diagnosis is–in and of itself–not predictive of violence, and even the overwhelming majority of psychiatric patients who fit the profile of recent U.S. mass shooters—gun-owning, angry, paranoid White men—do not commit crimes.
“In this sense, population-based literature on guns and mental illness suggests that legislatures risk drawing the wrong lessons from mass shootings if their responses focus on asking psychiatrists to predict future events. Though rooted in valid concerns about public safety, legislation that expands mental-health criteria for revoking gun rights puts psychiatrists in potentially untenable positions, not because they are poor judges of character, but because the urgent political and social conditions psychiatrists are asked to diagnose are at times at odds with the capabilities of their diagnostic tools and prognostic technologies.”