To repeat the ambiguous assertions made at the end of blogpost 1, it would seem at once highly likely that the industrial and economic might of the United States will always be sufficient to maintain the American way of life, our freedoms, to pay our collective debts, educate its people, and pass all of this power and affluence on to subsequent generations. On the other hand, it seems almost equally likely—after taking a sobering look at the mounting national and personal debt Americans have—that our current near idyllic condition must be radically changed for the worse or even destroyed by an outright failure to pay even the interest on our colossal debt. There is precedent, and for the remainder of these blogposts, the author will describe national catastrophes based almost solely on the accumulation of unmanageable debt.

First consider France in the early eighteenth century. The economy was depressed, and the government wallowed in debt. Taxes were too high and burdensome for the people. The citizens were becoming restive and began to clamor for relief. An additional burden was that the French controlled a colony they named Louisiana after the grand kings of the country. Louisiana was a vast land mass—larger than France itself–which was sparsely settled in the vast and nearly trackless interior of North America. Very few Frenchmen knew even of the existence of the area, and those who did cared almost not at all about it. It seemed to be a poor investment into which unnecessarily large amounts of French treasure were being poured. Almost every French man and woman would come to know one section of the Louisiana holdings and to rue the day they did. The Louisiana Colony included the Natchez district and the area along the Mississippi Gulf Coast in present-day Mississippi.

A rumor that this land was rich in silver and gold—the basis of French currency–began to take hold among the French people yearning to be free from the yoke of poverty and debt under which the populace and its government struggled. Into this fertile milieu came a genuine character named John Law, a Scottish financier, and a man ready to capitalize on those yearnings with a plan that promised great riches in return for a modest investment. He arrived in France in 1714 and sought out an acquaintance, the nephew of King Louis XIV, the Duke of Orleans. At that time, the duke was acting as the regent of France, serving the five-year-old Louis XV, the minor son and heir of the late King Louis, XIV. The resumption of their acquaintanceship was fortuitous for both men.

The duke was being unfairly held responsible for the severe financial straits France was left with from the many years of profligate spending of Louis XIV. Law needed a benefactor and a place in polite society from which he could generate personal wealth. XIV. The Duke of Orleans was aware of Law’s financial acumen and sought out his help to turn around the French financial depression. In 1716, with the duke’s considerable influence and help, Law was able to convince the French government to authorize him to open a major bank–the Bank Generale–that could issue paper money, or bank notes, an almost unknown concept at the time. The paper notes were to be directly based on the bank’s assets of gold and silver and would be allowed to spread freely throughout the kingdom thereby making commerce easier and more profitable by increasing the amount of money in circulation. He convinced the duke and the government that his ideas would be the catalyst needed to revitalize and rehabilitate the finances of the French government.

The following year, in August, Law convinced the duke and regent of France to support him in a major venture in North America. Law made a thorough study of the French holdings in Louisiana, then organized the Compagnie d’Occident (Company of the West). The source of income that was to provide the money and additional profits for the company had to be given the imprimatur of the duke to go forward, and he and the French government gave that one company control of all trade between France and its Louisiana and Canadian colonies—a major monopoly. The Canadians, and the French agreed to trade in beaver skins, and the Louisiana colony would trade in precious metals with the mother country. John Law would take his profit from his appointment as the overseer of the entire project and the territory which would provide the treasure.

The territory was truly vast: It included the present-day states located along the Mississippi River–Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota all the way into Canada. Shortly the Compagnie d’Occident became known by its popular name, The Mississippi Company. In return for exclusive control, trading rights, the right to appoint all governors and officers, and to make land grants to developers at a handsome profit over the territory for twenty-five years, Law’s company agreed to accept full responsibility of transporting 6,000 settlers and 3,000 slaves to the colony to ensure its growth, stability, and profitability before the expiration of its exclusive charter.

John Law was the very definition of ambition. The scheme to finance the initial operations of the Mississippi Company was simple and was the forerunner of the Ponzi scheme. Law began to raise the necessary money by selling shares in the company for cash and, more importantly, for state bonds—all with the approval of the regent of France and the French government. Law charged a low interest rate on the bonds thereby contributing to French finances and guaranteeing the company a secure cash flow. The involvement of the regent, the government, the financial wizard, and the overpowering lure of gold and silver brought eager investors flocking to put their money in the Mississippi Company.

Law pushed even further to keep the cash flowing. He added new economic activity under the aegis of the company; his ambitions saw the Mississippi Company as only a small part of a much grander empire he was about to create. In September 1718 the company acquired the monopoly in tobacco trading with Africa. The French government was so taken with Law’s Bank Generale that it took the bank over to make it, in effect, the national bank of France in 1719, renaming it The Bank Royale. Law was given full control of the new bank with the government fully guaranteeing the bank’s issue of notes and bonds and all but insuring Law against failure of any enterprise he could dream up. In May of that year he obtained control of the companies trading with China and the East Indies and renamed his entire business interest the Compagnie des Indes, but most people still knew it as the Mississippi Company; and that was the entity in which they wanted to invest. Fortunes were being made by investors, young and old, rich and those of modest means. Law was the ultimate huckster; he now controlled all trade with France and the rest of the world outside of Europe. Not only did Law advance the use of paper money, but the French word “millionaire” came into use as a result of his famous scheme–the Mississippi Company.

Law’s ambitions were not satisfied by the accumulation of great wealth and influence he achieved with his company and with his bank. The Mississippi Company next purchased the right to mint new coins for France, and by October it had purchased the right to collect most French taxes as a result of the amazing turnaround of French financial problems effected by him. In January 1720, Law was made the Controller General and Superintendent General of Finance. With this new appointment Law gained control of all of France’s finance and money creation, foreign trade, and colonial development. John Law with his business interests and success came to hold most of the French government’s debt. The Duke of Orleans recognized that the faith he had in the man who was now his firm friend was fully satisfied. The man had created a stable source of income for future business ventures for his company and for France itself. John Law had created Europe’s most successful conglomerate, and its stock values were rising fully apace. People all over Europe rushed to be sure they could put their money into the company in time to reap the great profits, even to the point of transferring nearly all of their earthly holdings to buy the stock.

Law paid for these activities and privileges by issuing additional shares in the company. These shares could be paid for with bank notes from his own bank or with government debt which he controlled. The Mississippi Company and John Law could not lose. The value of shares in the company rose dramatically as Law’s empire expanded. Investors from across France and Europe ever increasingly and eagerly played in this new market, even frugal working class small farmers and businessmen were pouring in all the small amounts they could scrape up. The financial district in Paris became so agitated at times over the fervor of investors that soldiers had to be sent in at night to maintain order. Greed was in full flower, and new millionaires were becoming commonplace.

When the company first issued shares in January 1719, the offering was a modest 500 livres tournois (the French unit of account at the time) per share. By December, the price per share prices reached 10,000 livres, a 1900 percent increase in less than a year. And here is where the comparison to present day America and Europe begins to become apparent.

Remember the world’s Great Depression of the 1930s, the community credit scandal, and the Great Recession of 2007-2008. What follows will seem reminiscent to those of you who do.

There was a weakness in Law’s grand scheme which has played out repeatedly in American history even to the present day. His relationship with the government was too cozy, and his own and his investors’ grasp of the bubble that was forming was obscured and flawed by the “greed is good” philosophy that drove stock prices ever higher—well beyond the level where a firm basis in gold and silver existed. Law’s weakness, based on greed, was his willingness to issue more bank notes to fund purchases of shares in the company—more than the real value of the company. A few major investors began to realize that there was little foundation for the soaring Stock prices.

The prices began falling in January 1720 when some those wiser investors began to sell shares to turn capital gains into gold coin. Prices began to decline, gradually at first. To halt the growing sell-off, Law restricted any payment in gold that was more than 100 livres. The paper notes of the Bank Royale were made legal tender backed by France to shore up strength of the stock values, which meant that they could be used to pay taxes and settle most debts. Law, through his Mississippi Company and his national bank made a huge effort to get people to accept the paper notes rather than gold, with an especially ardent sales pitch to his investors.
The bank subsequently promised to exchange its notes for shares in the company at the going market price of 10,000 livres. This attempt to turn stock shares into money resulted in a sudden doubling of the money supply in France. It is not surprising then that inflation started to take off. Inflation reached a monthly rate of 23 percent in January 1720. Unfortunately, the company’s prospects turned out to be little more than empty promises; hyperinflation set in; and the company shares crashed back down to earth, taking down France’s stock market and public finances with it.

Law devalued shares in the company in several stages during 1720, and the value of bank notes was reduced to 50 percent of their face value. By September 1720 the price of shares in the company had fallen to 2,000 livres and to 1,000 by December. The fall in the price of stock allowed Law’s enemies to take control of the company by confiscating the shares of investors who could not prove they had actually paid for their shares with real assets rather than credit. This reduced investor shares, or shares outstanding, by two-thirds. By September 1721 share prices had dropped to 500 livres, where they had been at the beginning. Courtesy of Jon Moen, PhD, John Law and the Mississippi Bubble: 1718-1720, MississippiHistoryNow, Mississippi Historical Society, October, 2001. See also Jesse Colombo, The Mississippi Bubble of 1715-1720, article written June 23, 2012; AndrewBeattie, What burst the Mississippi bubble?

The rise and fall of the Mississippi Company became known in history as the “Mississippi Bubble.” Indeed, Law is most famous, or perhaps infamous, for his involvement in this prominent financial disaster. A “bubble” in the world of finance is a term applied to an unusually rapid increase in stock prices or the value of some other asset such as real estate. The increase is then followed by an equally rapid collapse in prices. The wild fluctuations in prices are usually viewed as irrational and the product of uncontrolled speculation rather than sensible investment practices.

The Mississippi Bubble ruined Law and his company, and brought France temporarily to its financial knees. As a result, France was forced to sell its New World holdings to the United States and Spain at a huge loss just to keep afloat and to continue the king’s endless wars of vanity. In the end, many of the new millionaires were financially destroyed, and so was France; it took eighty years before France’s economic status among nations again allowed it to introduce its paper money into its economy and as a medium of exchange on the world stage. And the French example is not unique as will be made clear in the next posting.

As of this writing, February, 2016, the national debt of the United States is $18,994,034,667,585.44 and increasing an average of a staggering $2.38 billion a day since September 40, 2012. The estimated population of the United States as of the same date was 322,353,391 and rising. Doing the math; that translates into $58,923.01 for every man, woman, and child in the country; and the debt accumulation starts from birth. The level of debt is such that it is now105% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)–and is rising at a rate that will find it over $20 trillion by 2020. By that time, the interest costs of that debt will be greater than defense and nondefense discretionary spending, according to Real Time Economics, Economic Insight and analysis from the Wall Street Journal.

According to Josh Zumbrun, writing in the Wall Street Journal, “currently, the government’s interest costs are around $200 billion a year, a sum that’s low due to the era of low interest rates. Forecasters at the White House and Congressional Budget Office believe interest rates will gradually rise, and when that happens, the interest costs of the U.S. government are set to soar, from just over $200 billion to nearly $800 billion a year by decade’s end…[and at the end of FY 2016 the total government debt in the United States, including federal, state, and local, is expected to be $22.4 trillion with 47% owed to foreign investors.]

The level of U.S. debt may be safely contained or mortally high depending on when, if, and by how much interest rates rise in the future. We neither know the timing or the extent interest rates will rise in the future—not to mention the level of debt that will need to be refinanced. This means that the debt situation is in a sort of limbo—relatively safe for the time being, but rising into the red alert zone. “We simply do not know when, or if, it will explode.” Zumbrun says. But we do know that the Fed raised the rates a full quarter of a percent in January, 2016 and threatens new raises in its next meeting in three months.

And that federal debt does not even include local and state debt, “agency debt”, or unfunded liabilities of entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. In addition, there is At the end of FY 2016 the federal agency debt in the United States is estimated to be $8.24 trillion–debt issued by federal agencies and government-sponsored enterprises not included in the total debt of the federal government. At the end of FY 2016 the state government debt in the United States is expected to be $1.17 trillion, and local debt will be $1.88 trillion.

It would seem at once highly likely that the industrial and economic might of the United States will always be sufficient to maintain the American way of life, our freedoms, to pay our collective debts, educate its people, and pass all of this power and affluence on to subsequent generations. On the other hand, it seems almost equally likely—after taking a sobering look at the mounting national and personal debt Americans have—that our current near idyllic condition must be radically changed for the worse or even destroyed by an outright failure to pay even the interest on our colossal debt. There is precedent, and for the remainder of these blogposts, the author will describe national catastrophes based almost solely on the accumulation of unmanageable debt.

6.    It is incumbent on a combination of sincere students of the problem to determine what the factors leading to violence are and to determine ongoing strategies to combat those factors. That process will take decades, but it must begin now; and it must be robust.

7.    Gun rights versus gun abuse must be addressed head-on; and rationality must prevail. Compromise must occur in real time and with real and evidence bases. While study goes on, the killing must stop; and ultimately, the government must make that happen. As James Dudley said in Allowing the Mentally Ill Guns is Insane, Political Magazine, October 5, 2015 said, “Talking about mental health and guns is easy. Doing something is not.” It is time posthumous that we do something.

8.    We must improve our mental health record system to allow a smooth interconnection between the mental health professionals and their findings with the National Instant Background Check and with the NICS [National Instant Criminal Background Check System] at least until guns start turning up at crime scenes and an investigation is opened by law enforcement. “One study estimated that private sales account for 40% of all gun sales in the United States.” Dudley, op cit. The present author agrees with D.J. Jaffe, Huffington Post, Healthy Living, 03.19.2013. “We proposed that county mental health directors be required to accept reports of individuals with serious mental illness who are becoming danger to self or others, directly from family members. This would generate higher-quality reports than those that come from psychiatrists, many of whom still argue persons with mental illness are no more violent than others, and are therefore not likely to report many who are. Mental health directors could triage these calls from families and investigate ones that warrant it. But the mental health industry and mental health directors also opposed letting families report their loved ones need help.

9.    All states must comply completely and promptly via electronic transmission, and all pertinent records must become readily available as soon as they are entered. All records must be entered into the federal system. All responsible and appropriately vetted participants must have ready access to the records. Every gun sale must be entered into the record. The laws that allow a loophole to have free-wheeling gun sales by individuals and flea markets must be rescinded. “When an individual purchases a firearm from an FFL [federally licensed firearm dealer]… he must undergo a criminal background check. First, the buyer fills out a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) Form 4473 by hand, providing simple yes or no answers to a series of questions about criminal, mental health, and substance abuse history. The dealer then queries the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) database maintained by the FBI via a toll-free telephone number or through the NICS E-Check System online (in a handful of states the dealer contacts the state police who in turn contact NICS).

“This instant computer check searches the NICS database for any disqualifying records that would prohibit that individual from buying a gun. During the check, the system does not disclose to gun dealers any actual information about these records. Dealers are simply seeing one of three responses from NICS on their computer screen: proceed, denied or delayed. If a potential gun buyer is denied, the FFL is never informed of the reason.” These laws have to be reworked to include any gun sales—by private sellers and buyers as well as FFLs—and the silly restrictions that keep information about the reasons for decisions about sellers must be eradicated, whether the NRA likes it or not. Now, when an individual purchases a firearm from an FFL, he or she must undergo a criminal background check. The same should apply for purchases between non-dealer individuals.

In some states less than one percent of purchases, even from FFLs [federally licensed firearm dealers] are reported to the NICS or the state. All of this poor recording and reporting is asinine, and must be changed to a full disclosure system.

10.    Gun control and responsibility must be universal and not dominated by any subgroup however well-funded, loud, persistent, or uncooperative. The killing has to stop.

11.    Education must begin as soon as the definitions and laws are part of the record, starting with law enforcement and the judicial system. Mental health professionals must become thoroughly conversant with the laws and their responsibilities and must comply forthwith.  Other vitally interested groups should have an ample opportunity to become educated, including, but not limited to, the mentally ill, their families, their caregivers, NAMI, political and religious organizations, military organizations, and school students from grammar school to the end of university careers. The mentally ill need both education—more than any other group–and treatment, if the system is to succeed.

12.    It is shameful that the United States has such a poor mental health care system—too few trained psychologists, psychiatrists, psychiatric nurses, psychiatric hospitals, inadequate training for the front line family physicians, internists, and neurologists, etc. etc. According NAMI [National Alliance on Mental Illness], “approximately 10% of children and adolescents suffer from mental illnesses. Yet only 20% of this group have been diagnosed and are receiving services. Looking at adults, approximately 1 in 17 live with a serious mental disorder such as schizophrenia, major depression, or bipolar disorder. Yet less than one third receive mental health services.”

A rather novel suggestion has been put forth by Maia Szalavitz in her new book, Unbroken Brain: A Revolutionary New Way of Understanding Addiction, due to be published, April, 2016. It is reviewed in Pacific Standard Magazine, Nov/Dec, 2015. Drug courts have been quite successful in treating abusers who commit crimes but appear to be susceptible to rehabilitation. Drug courts are more successful than imprisonment of those persons and for society, the majority of evidence shows. The same reasoning can be applied to the mentally ill; if they are treated effectively, they may be expected, like drug abusers, to commit less crime, to use guns less often in criminal acts, and to save the taxpayers the huge sums necessary for incarceration. “With at least 1.1 million inmates in the United States suffering from mental illness, expanding access to mental health courts could potentially reduce mass incarcerations.” Mental health courts were introduced in the U.S. in the 1990’s; so, they are not all that new, and have been around long enough to produce a track record. The procedures are relatively simple and are similar to those followed in drug courts: “Defendants charged with crimes linked to psychiatric problems are evaluated and given a treatment plan, which is overseen by a judge. In some mental health courts, defendants plead guilty and receive suspended sentences. If they complete the program, the sentence is not imposed; if not, they do the time. In others, charges are suspended until the defendant completes the program, then dropped when they satisfy treatment requirements. Those who don’t comply are simply returned to the regular court system to face the original charges.”

There are major differences between mental health courts and regular courts. In the mental health system, courts are less punitive and more inclined to consider treatment as opposed to punishment. In general such courts are more lenient than drug courts since the system tends to view the mentally ill as less culpable than the addict. Mental health courts are more forgiving of lapses and “are less likely to use jail terms as sanctions for noncompliance, recognizing that incarceration is likely to exacerbate symptoms and interrupt treatment.” It is generally presumed that use of guns during crimes by the mentally ill can be treated with the same degree of leniency, depending on the seriousness of the crime and the level of involvement of the firearm. Mental health courts pay more attention to medical professionals and, unlike drug courts, and far different from regular courts, “judges do not determine what treatments are allowed… [an indicator of success is that] “on average, about 60 percent of defendants who start these programs complete them.
There is more evidence in favor of mental health courts from scientific studies: There was a significant reduction in the recidivism rate, new arrests, days spent incarcerated—upwards of 44 percent fewer days spent in jail—82 days fewer overall. In one study 75% of defendants who failed to complete the mental health court requirements were rearrested within five years. Only 40% of those who completed the programs were rearrested. Graduates took five months longer to be arrested. In general, at the least, most evidence indicates that the mental health court experience is either helpful or at least not harmful to defendants who fail, whereas there is evidence that failure after drug court is harmful.

It is too early to make judgments about the usefulness of mental health courts because there are too few of them—total 400 for the whole country—and they are administered inconsistently across the country. Some of the negative results from mental health courts suggest that better selection of candidates should be made. There is evidence to indicate that the success of drug court systems is hampered by issues the courts cannot successfully address, such as poverty, co-addiction, unemployment, and association with peer groups with antisocial behavior. It is generally agreed that mental illness does not, by itself, cause crime, but it certainly hampers rehabilitation. Many members of law enforcement, court officials, and mental health specialists question the value of the mental health court system for those reasons.

13.    The disgraceful state of mental health care delivery in the United States is not a problem without a solution. We need to spend the money and expend the time necessary to make the improvements needed. For the purposes of this blogpost, however, all of that is long term; and we do not have the time to wait for such improvements before we act on the immediacy of our gun control/mental illness problem. Stop as much of the killing as possible now, and get on with the creation of critical solutions for the general mental health problems as quickly as possible starting now.

14.    The problem of terrorists of all stripes—apart from the mentally ill—is a governmental, military, and law enforcement, issue that is beyond the scope of this set of blogposts.

Guest Blog from Bonnye Matthews

http://www.booksbybonnye.com

In 1988 I had an explosive reaction to something at work. In seconds I went from normal to abnormal. I had difficulty controlling my arms and legs, difficulty speaking in a normal voice, and I had great mental blanks. I needed to write an email and couldn’t remember how to use the computer. This followed an employee’s entering my office drenched in perfume. I literally thought I’d lost my mind.

I’d been poisoned. It was common in the 1980s and 1990s. People were poisoned from carpets, from aircraft construction, from painting vehicles for the war in Iraq, driving school buses, living in mobile homes, and so on. They were also poisoned by mold.

People were not accorded the medical or legal attention that was appropriate. I could not understand. One of my friends assured me I needed to see an attorney. I made an appointment. The attorney told me that I was out of luck. I’m not one impressed by luck. I asked what he meant. He told me that the economy of the USA would crash if they took care of the poisoned people. I was utterly outraged. I was having difficulty thinking, walking, and speaking. I was very sick. A doctor who “detoxed” patients told me he wouldn’t touch me with a ten foot pole, because he’d likely kill me. I didn’t realize that many doctors expected me to die. Meanwhile, though many tried to make unfounded assumptions, over the years people speculated I had some kind of psychological or psychiatric problem, but not one ever produced a diagnosis. A neuropsychological assessment showed that I’d lost a huge amount of IQ points. My ability to concentrate was at 6%. I had trouble in my brain, but it was because of the damage from poisoning: brain mapping showed that I saw three things with my left eye and two with my right eye; signals from my hands and feet no longer went to the motor cortex but rather bounced all over the brain avoiding the motor cortex altogether except for the right foot which transmitted to the hand on the wrong side of the brain; information arrived at the hippocampus way too late and too feeble to be useful. That doctor told me I could lose the ability to move and communicate based on what he saw. A PET scan showed a lesion on my left hippocampus and uncus. A SPECT scan showed vascular thinning not like Alzheimers. I had developed acute intermittent porphyria (AIP) and porphyria cutania tarda (PCT). Those are diseases of the metabolic pathway of the production of heme for hemoglobin. Attacks of AIP can lead to respiratory failure and PCT to terrible skin lesions from sun contact and both can contribute to liver cancer. In addition the poisoning gave me asthma, and I had severe reactions to a massive number of substances. Some reactions were from porphyria and others were from chemical sensitivity.

Doctors from the University of Washington and Group Health decided to do a study. I was a participant. I went to the study and was outraged. The study was not a study. I called one of the creators of the study, Gregg Simon, MD. I told him I was outraged at what they did. It was not a scientific study at all. His response was, “If you get me the money, I’ll do the study right.” As long as I live I’ll never forget his words. The attorney told me it was all about money. The medical people were saying the same thing. I was dumbfounded. These people in service occupations were focused on money, period. Those who funded that so-called study got what they paid for. It should go down in infamy. It did come to the University of Washington as a complaint. Some of the reviewers were outraged, but their reactions were quashed. I contributed to the complaint, but wasn’t part of it. Money? I have no proof of that.

Meanwhile medical doctors were literally making fun of people who had been poisoned. One doctor who literally performed initial reviews on chemically poisoned patients for the State of Washington and also was paid to review those cases, literally said that people who claimed to be poisoned ought to have a rocket set off under their butts. They pretended people who’d been poisoned were lazy or crazy or both. It was cruel. The doctors knew the truth but their reports were often clearly something from a word processing machine. Poisoned patients shared them. Mine was hilarious. The doctor used all the State of Washington terminology when I was a federal government worker.

I worked as an advocate for a while. Eventually I realized I was being defined as a disabled person and I had been doing everything on earth to recover. I was a virtual workaholic and separation from work was totally frustrating. With no help whatsoever, I learned to rewire my brain. I learned to see one thing instead of several. I learned to walk and use my hands to hold things instead of dropping them. It took work, hard work. I learned to use sticky notes in place of my brain for remembering.

Eventually I moved to Alaska and began to improve slightly. It is likely the cleaner air made a difference. I took heart.

Then I discovered a great wonder. I think of it as my miracle. It was a training DVD from Canada. A friend of mine who’d been poisoned at NASA insisted I buy the course and try it. It had made a huge difference for her. I looked at the website and wrote her back that there was no science on the website. At her insistence I bought it and tried it. It taught me how to cure the chemical sensitivity. I still had porphyria and asthma, but the chemical sensitivity and brain fog that would come with it was cured in half a day! The course uses neuroplasticity exercise to cure the problem. To explain it at the website, I realized, would have enabled some people to cure the problem without the course. Money.

After my cure of the chemical sensitivity, I was overjoyed. I let the doctors I knew who had poisoned patients know. I let people who worked as advocates of injured workers know. The reaction instead of joy was utter skepticism at best. How could I be cured of chemical sensitivity in half a day? I said I’d developed it in less time than that, and that they should look at me. The evidence was visible. I could take the top off a bottle of cologne and have no extreme heightened sense of smell and no reaction. My sense of smell had normalized! They were not interested. Patients weren’t interested. I was dumbfounded. Finally someone explained: doctors made money from it; advocates had carved out niches where they felt important; patients were happy in their new norm.

I was one of those poisoned people. But today I’m an author of a series of novels. Each novel has won an award and the award reviewer called me America’s pre-eminent writer of prehistoric fiction. A national book reviewer exclaimed over the series. My story in more detail is on the DVD at the link below. In it you can see the brain scans and hear the doctor tell me things nobody wants to hear. What’s important to keep in mind is that the human is resilient and will power can carry people to success when all is pitted against it. The government left me in poverty as soon as they could get doctors to say they couldn’t see anything. It was all about money. Now I’m hoping the novels and my current work, novellas on the peopling of the Americas BEFORE the Ice Age will ultimately supply enough money to live on comfortably. Until then it’s still about money. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dadn3Oz0SOU

Conclusions:

1.    Connections between mental illness and gun violence are complicated, and not as directly causal as the NRA, other gun advocates, or the anti-gun lobby would have the public believe. It is not as simple as “guns don’t kill people, people do.” The social, historical, economic, educational, ideological, and political biases of subpopulations of the United States factor into decisions about gun use, gun abuse, the criminal justice system, laws about possession of, and gun usage, the right to privacy versus the right to protection of life and property, and the power of advocacy, including the abuse of that power.

The definition of mental illness is a fluid one, but one that must be made if the country is to have an efficacious, fair, and universal, application for the purposes of personal and public safety. Mental health experts can determine such a definition, but they cannot predict individual behavior in the majority of instances. My suggestion is to go back to the 1968 definition of when the mentally ill can and should be prevented from any access to guns. Anyone who has been involuntarily committed to a mental health treatment facility for three months should be barred forever from gun access or use; anyone who is determined to be a danger to self or others as a result of a mental illness until his or her mental illness improves to the point of safety with quarterly re-evaluations by competent experts when requested by the mentally ill person. Anyone who communicates to a health care professional that he or she has murderous thoughts or intends to do harm to others needs to be prevented from owning or using firearms.

The specific disqualifications related to mental health are currently quite narrow. Under federal law, an individual is prohibited from buying or possessing firearms if they have been “adjudicated as a mental defective” or “committed to a mental institution.” A person is “adjudicated as a mental defective” if a court — or other entity having legal authority to make adjudications — has made a determination that an individual, as a result of mental illness: 1) Is a danger to himself or to others; 2) Lacks the mental capacity to contract or manage his own affairs; 3) Is found insane by a court in a criminal case, or incompetent to stand trial, or not guilty by reason of lack of mental responsibility pursuant to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. A person is “committed to a mental institution” if that person has been involuntarily committed to a mental institution by a court or other lawful authority. This currently expressly excludes voluntary commitment. This author disagrees with that compromise arrived at in the exclusion of voluntary commitment clause. I firmly believe that every commitment should be a reason for disqualification for gun ownership or use. If a person falls under one of these two categories, they are prohibited from purchasing and possessing firearms for life–although federal law now allows states to establish procedures for such individuals to restore their right to purchase or possess firearms. Further, it is this author’s opinion that the prohibitions against owning or using firearms should also extend to persons who have been or are currently under a court-ordered conservatorship because they are, by definition, “gravely disabled” as a result of a mental disorder. The onus is on the gravely disabled person to prove competency and safety owing to successful treatment at some future date if that is what the person desires. Any person prohibited from having access to firearms for any reason, must agree to waive his or her privacy rights as part of the process to regain such rights.

A 2014 report by the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit aimed at removing the stigma of mental illness and barriers to treatment, analyzed the state of mental commitment laws state by state, looking at both the “quality of involuntary treatment (civil commitment) laws which facilitate emergency hospitalization during a psychiatric emergency and the availability of court orders mandating continued treatment as a condition of living in a community.” There must be both common sense mental commitment laws and appropriate gun laws. Mel Robbins asked, “Do we as a society have reason to intervene? To answer ‘yes,’ we must believe there is a compelling societal imperative beyond preventing imminent injury or death–an imperative to liberate a person from a hellish existence he would never–in his “right mind”–choose…The truth is that commitment laws shouldn’t [only] be a stopgap to prevent imminent harm, but rather seen as an essential tool to help a loved one needing treatment before things reach the imminent harm stage.”

2.    Drug use to excess, drug abuse, and drug addiction, including alcohol and legally prescribed drugs, should preclude the right to have or to use a gun for any purpose for a period of six months with mandatory review at the first six months, then once a year thereafter until the person is judged to no longer have a drug problem. After eighteen months, if the person is found to be free of drug dependency and no longer to be a danger to self or others, the person may appeal for reinstatement of gun ownership and/or use privileges. Review is mandatory at one year thereafter. Gun use or ownership is automatically rescinded permanently for any infraction of the law regarding drug use or gun use as adjudicated by the justice system.

3.    For all of the complexities of defining mental illness and the difficulty of creating enforceable and fair laws, they must nevertheless be created; and they must be stringently enforced. Mental health workers cannot be made into scapegoats for a failed system; the responsibility must be shared and worked on regularly by qualified mental health workers, law enforcement officers, sociologists, churches, the judicial system in all of its branches (prosecution, defense, prisons, mental institutions, legislators, etc.) with an absolute requirement to share information which is deemed to be more important than privacy laws. At this point in time, according to Michael Corcoran, Ph.D., Mental Health Checks When Purchasing a Gun, “even when individuals do undergo a background check when buying a gun in this country, the screening for mental health history is cursory at best.” Mental health screening and background checks must become a mandatory part of the privilege of purchasing a gun and/or ammunition every time and in every place and by all buyers.

4.    While it is self-evident to almost all students of the mental illness/drug abuse/and judicial system that there is a genuine and persisting problem in place, the conundrum must be simplified to the point that understandable and enforceable laws can be made. While it is indubitably true that there are other factors such as ignorance, ill-education, poverty, conditioning into an ideology that justifies gun violence, and sympathy for the drug abuser or mentally ill person or the poor or minority person, those factors must be an area of ongoing study but not a factor for excusing violence. There has been enough killing and enough obscuring talk; it is time to join forces to stop the killing.

5.    In at least this one instance, partisan politics and opinion needs to be set aside; so, the killing can stop.

The latest iteration of the “madman” killer is the entrance onto the media stage is the dangerous loner. These killers are the “unstable, angry White men who should never have had access to firearms.” Metzl and MacLeish, op cit in previous blogposts in this series. ABC news told of plans for geneticists to study the Newtown shooter’s DNA for “abnormalities or mutations”, and the Associated Press described plans to do research on the brains of mass shooters, including those loners who had, according to CBS, “trouble looking people in the eye.” The combination of the linked descriptors: unstable, angry, white, mentally disturbed, gun-obsessed, and killers to describe shooters is a relatively recent phenomenon, and strongly appears to be linked to concepts of white male chauvinism, special privileged individualism, and right wing politics—all characteristics of the gun rights advocates crowd. When the killer is black, the blame goes to so called black culture or black activist politics as opposed to individually disordered brains; and there is no demand for brain research and autopsies for killers from that culture. This is despite the fact that there are plenty of mass murders committed by people of various races who are mentally disordered.

During the era of the violent 1960s and early 1970s, for instance, Bromberg and Simon described ‘protest psychosis’ which drove ‘Negro men’ to insanity, Archives of General Psychiatry. This hypothesis which generally appeared to be intended towards excusing the behavior of black men whose hostility was aroused to the level of insanity because of maltreatment by Caucasians. Raskin et al. went so far as to propose  that Blacks with schizophrenia rated higher than Whites on a set of “hostility variables” because of delusional beliefs that “their civil rights were being compromised or violated.” Brody further argued that “growing up as a Negro in America may produce distortions or impairments in the capacity to participate in the surrounding culture which will facilitate the development of schizophrenic types of behavior.” All of this led a number of prominent psychiatrists and psychologists to champion the opinion that, “the incidence of hallucinations was significantly higher among Negro schizophrenics than among white schizophrenics first admitted to the state hospital system” and that “there are factors in the Negro culture that predispose to more severe schizophrenic illness.” [All described in Metzl and MacLeish, op cit]. The medication Haldol was advertised with an image of an angry Black Man shaking a Black Power fist. The text of the advertisement asks, “Assaultive and belligerent?” and answers, “Cooperation often begins with Haldol.”

FBI profilers of the era, “spuriously diagnosed many pro-gun Black political leaders with militant forms of schizophrenia as a way of highlighting the ‘insanity of their political activism’.” Violent Blacks, Communists, and Muslims were also similarly described. Being Black, or being Black and violent, is now recognized as nothing related to the brain disease of schizophrenia; but in those violent decades, the concept received serious consideration. By 1968, several “articles in the American Journal of Psychiatry, such as one… titled Who Should Have a Gun? urged psychiatrists to address ‘the urgent social issue’ of firearms in response to ‘the threat of civil disorder.’ It was in that atmosphere that the U.S. Congress began serious debate about gun control legislation leading to the Gun Control Act of 1968.”

More recently history cultural politics underlie anxieties about whether guns and mental illness are understood to represent individual or communal etiologies. The responses of today’s politicians, FBI profilers, and psychiatric authors who argue for the “right to use mental health criteria to limit gun access, not just to severely mentally ill persons, but also to ‘drunkards,’ ‘drug users,’ and ‘political protesters’, has a widespread and strongly believed foundation stemming from the attitudes of the 1960s and 1970s.

A difference seen in the present day is the shift more promptly to the individual; the actions of lone White male shooters lead to calls from the NRA and other gun rights advocates to expand gun rights, focus on individual brains, or limit gun rights just for the severely mentally ill. The inordinate power of the NRA and of Tea Party politics makes it seem to be political suicide for a legislator or even a doctor or law enforcement officer to hint at restricting the gun rights for White Americans, private citizens, or men, even though these groups are the very ones most frequently linked to high-profile mass shootings. The other significant distinction between then and now is that “members of political groups such as the Tea Party who advocate broadening gun rights to guard against government tyranny—indeed the same claims made by Black Panther leaders in the 1960s—take seats in the U.S. Congress [and in local and state legislative bodies] rather than being subjected to psychiatric [and FBI] surveillance.”

Metzl and MacLeish, op cit in previous blogposts in this series discussed at length the argument by the NRA and other anti-gun-control advocates that gun control will not prevent the next mass shooting. Against the increasingly strident demands by the political left which takes as gospel, the idea that confiscation of guns will do away with the horrific shootings in the U.S. and will allow America once again to hold up its head among sensible and peaceable nations is “the mantra that gun control would not have prevented Newtown. That mantra is frequently cited by opponents of such efforts. This contention generally assumes that, because none of the recent mass shooters in Tucson, Aurora, Newtown, or Isla Vista used weapons purchased through unregulated private sale or gun shows, gun control in itself would be ineffective at stopping gun crime, and that gun purchase restrictions or background checks are in any case rendered moot when shooters have mental illness.” Mayo Clinic psychiatrist J. Michael Bostwick, put it, “taking guns away from the mentally ill won’t eliminate mass shootings” unless such efforts are linked to larger prevention efforts that have a broader impact on communities.”

“Many scholars who study violence prevention hold that mass shootings occur too infrequently to allow for statistical modeling, and as such serve as poor jumping-off points for effective public health interventions. Moreover, the focus on individual crimes or the psychologies of individual shooters obfuscates attention to community-level everyday violence and the widespread symptoms produced by living in an environment engulfed by fear of guns and shootings.”

There are, in “the United States… an average of 32, 000 handgun-related deaths per year, and firearms are involved in 68% of homicides, 52% of suicides, 43% of robberies, and 21% of aggravated assaults… Everyday violence has a disproportionate impact on lower-income areas and communities of color, and is [now] widely held to be the cause of widespread anxiety disorders and traumatic stress symptoms; tensions of race and social class have an impact on the framing of the “insanity” of gun violence as [either] an individual or group problem.

The stark truth is that “a psychiatrist or other mental health professional is a class-based activity not available in many low-income neighborhoods, and that in any case the insanity of urban gun violence all too often reflects the larger madness of not investing more resources to support social and economic infrastructures.”

As if the complexities and vagueness described in the previous six blogposts on Mental Health and Gun Control were not sufficient to muddy the waters of understanding about mental illness and violence almost to make it impossible to come up with sensible objective decision making on the part of governments, law enforcement, attorneys, and judges–to say nothing of run-of-the-mill citizenry–there are still more complicating and thwarting issues. Authors, Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD and Kenneth T. MacLeish, PhD, Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms, Am J Public Health. 2015 February; 105(2): 240–249, published online February, 2015 cited previously continued their explanations of the difficulty of arriving at good legislation to deal with mental issues and gun ownership. “Complicating matters further, associations between violence and psychiatric diagnosis shift over time. For instance, schizophrenia—far and away the most common diagnosis linked by the U.S. media to mass shooters—was considered an illness of docility for much of the first half of the 20th century. From the 1920s to the 1950s, psychiatric literature often described schizophrenia as a “mild” form of insanity that affected people’s abilities to “think and feel.” Psychiatric authors frequently assumed that such patients were nonthreatening, and were therefore largely harmless to society.

“Only in the 1960s and 1970s did U.S. society begin to link schizophrenia with violence and guns. Psychiatric journals suddenly described patients whose illness was marked by criminality and aggression. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) most-wanted lists in leading newspapers described gun-toting “schizophrenic killers” on the loose.

“Historical analysis suggests that this transformation resulted, not from increasingly violent actions perpetuated by “the mentally ill,” but from diagnostic frame shifts that incorporated violent behavior into official psychiatric definitions of mental illness… In 1968, the second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) recast paranoid schizophrenia as a condition of “hostility,” “aggression,” and “projected anger”, and included text explaining that, ‘the patient’s attitude is frequently hostile and aggressive, and his behavior tends to be consistent with his delusions.’” This resulted in a new and distinctly negative mindset about schizophrenia and the condition’s propensity for violence.

PTSD [posttraumatic stress disorder] is another mental illness which is associated with gun violence with disturbing frequency. From the mid-19th century through the end of World War II, military leaders and doctors promulgated their conviction that combat-related stress afflicted only neurotic or cowardly soldiers. Research about the experience of combat veterans of the Vietnam War resulted in the DSM-III recasting PTSD as a normal mind’s response to exceptional events. Fairly soon, the image of the traumatized soldier became the common sense “knowledge” presumed by the body politic. However, serious real events caused an evolution from sick and cowardly to sympathetic victim, and then PTSD increasingly became associated with violent behavior in the public imagination and understanding. That went on to create the stereotype of the “crazy vet” which persists to the present day. Currently, supposedly sympathetic news coverage drawing attention to veterans’ suffering frequently makes its point by linking posttraumatic stress with violent crime. This generalized mind-set about this particular form of mental illness persists despite the paucity of data linking PTSD diagnosis with violence and criminality. Violence did and does happen, but it is a very infrequent manifestation of the behaviors associated with the disorder.

The result of such evolution in opinions created nearly fixed ideas associated with imagined potential for violence. Even psychiatrists–not just the general public–came to define violent acts as symptomatic of mental illness. Those fixations of opinions came to associate racial, economic, educational, and social stereotypes with a propensity to commit gun violence.

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.”

I repeat my intention in this series of blogposts to limit discussion as much as possible to the issues of mental illness and its relationship to gun violence. The previous blogpost ended with an assertion that mental health specialists might well hold the key pre-emptive solutions to the problem. The same authors, Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD and Kenneth T. MacLeish, PhD, Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms, Am J Public Health. 2015 February; 105(2): 240–249, published online February, 2015, made it very clear that the problem is not so simply understood; and the solutions are not so simply arrived upon. In fact, they point out that even the data upon which researchers and ultimately legislators must rely to formulate legal controls over the mentally ill to prevent violent outbreaks is hotly debated among experts.

Consider first the assumption that mental illness causes gun violence (and ignore for the purposes of this discussion, the violence perpetrated by hate groups in the name of their ideology, their god, or their spurious assertions of being fighters against violent oppression by outsiders). This decade is hardly the first to focus on mental illness as a cause of gun violence. There has been a multi-decades-long history of debates in psychiatry and law about guns, gun violence, and “mental competence.” As far back as the 1960s, psychiatric articles deliberated ways to assess whether mental patients were “of sound mind enough” to possess firearms. Following the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School, a researcher named Breggin decried the toxic combination of mental illness, guns, and psychotropic medications that contributed to the actions of the shooter. After the 2012 shooting at Newtown, another psychiatric researcher, Torrey, reasserted his earlier warnings about “dangerous ‘subgroups’ of persons with mental illness who;” he contended, “were perpetrators of gun crimes.” Speaking to a national television audience, Torrey, claimed that “about half of… mass killings are being done by people with severe mental illness, mostly schizophrenia, and if they were being treated they would have been preventable.”

The same kind of debates have been seen throughout those past decades in legal dialogues as well. The U.S. Supreme Court strongly affirmed a broad right to bear arms in 2008 but endorsed prohibitions on gun ownership “by felons and the mentally ill” because of their special potential for violence.

There is, however, very little population based evidence to support the hypothesis that individuals diagnosed with mental illness are more likely than anyone else to commit gun crimes. “According to [researcher] Appelbaum, less than 3-5% of U.S. crimes of any kind involve people with mental illness…[in fact] the percentages of crimes that involve guns are lower than the national average for persons not diagnosed with mental illness. Databases that track gun homicides, such as the National Center for Health Statistics, similarly show that fewer than 5% of the 120 000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness.” Furthermore, there is an accumulating body of research suggesting that mass shootings are anecdotal distortions of—instead of accurate representations of, the actions of mentally ill people as a defined subgroup. “There were fewer than 200 mass shootings reported in the United States—often defined as crimes in which four or more people are shot in an event, or related series of events—between 1982 and 2012.”

There appears to have been a change in the prevalence of such terrible events beginning in 2009. Reports in research literature and by the media suggest that 160 of these events occurred after that time “and that mass shootings rose particularly in 2013 and 2014.  Statistical analyses after 2009 were based on a different set of standards regarding what constitutes mental illness. “As anthropologists and sociologists of medicine have noted, the time since the early 1980s also marked a consistent broadening of diagnostic categories and an expanding number of persons classifiable as “mentally ill.” Statisticians who study the best means of preventing violence thus “contend that mass shootings occur far too infrequently to allow for the statistical modeling and predictability—factors that lie at the heart of effective public health interventions.” Some researchers argue that mass shootings denote “rare acts of violence” that unfortunately have little predictive or preventive validity when taking into account the finding that there are “32, 000 fatalities and 74, 000 injuries caused on average by gun violence and gun suicide each year in the United States.” The United States is by all evidence, a violent place, and mental illness is just one of the many causes.

Links between mental illness and all types of violence are similarly contentious among researchers and statisticians who study such trends. “Several studies suggest that subgroups of persons with severe or untreated mental illness might be at increased risk for violence in periods surrounding psychotic episodes or psychiatric hospitalizations [more commonly than throughout most of their lives]. Writing in the American Journal of Psychiatry, Keers et al. found that the emergence of ‘persecutory delusions’ [at least] partially explained associations between untreated schizophrenia and violence. [However], at the same time, a number of seminal studies asserting links between violence and mental illness—including a 1990 study by Swanson et al. cited as fact by the New York Times in 2013—have been critiqued for overstating connections between serious mental illness and violent acts.

Connections would seem self-evident to intelligent and informed members of the U.S. general population, and affirmed by media reports that assume an obvious distinction between mild versus severe mental illness. The more severe form of mental disease, it goes, connects severity to behavioral unpredictability and especially to lack of self-control. “However, this distinction, too, is called into question by mental health research… A number of the most common psychiatric diagnoses, including depressive, anxiety, and attention-deficit disorders, have no correlation with violence whatsoever. Community studies find that serious mental illness without substance abuse is also ‘statistically unrelated’ to community violence.” The overall accumulation of evidence confirms that the vast majority of people diagnosed with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts. Only about 4% of violence in the United States can be attributed to people diagnosed with mental illness. That suggests strongly the mental illness, per se, is not a valid reason to restrict gun ownership on the basis of mental illness alone because the stereotypes of “violent madmen” are at odds with scientific realities. There are researchers who posit the suggestion that “serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia actually reduce the risk of violence over time, as the illnesses are in many cases marked by social isolation and withdrawal.” Rather, the best evidence indicates that the risk is exponentially greater that individuals diagnosed with serious mental illness will be assaulted by others, rather than the other way around. The extensive surveys of police incident reports collected by Brekke, et al. “demonstrate that, far from posing threats to others, people diagnosed with schizophrenia have victimization rates 65% to 130% higher than those of the general public.”  “Media reports sound similar themes: a 2013 investigation by the Portland Press Herald found that ‘at least half’ of persons shot and killed by police in Maine suffered from diagnosable mental illness.”

A more accurate conclusion to be arrived at from the majority of credible research is that
the issue is the result of a number of risk factors more strongly correlated with the assortment of causes of gun violence than mental illness alone. These risk factors include alcohol and drug abuse which “increase the risk of violent crime by as much as 7-fold, even among persons with no history of mental illness.” There is less evidence against mental illness than there is against persons protected by “recent legislation that allows persons in certain U.S. states to bring loaded handguns into bars and nightclubs. Other factors as important as mental illness include, a history of childhood abuse, binge drinking, and male gender. Much as the NRA and the people who favor a lassie faire approach to gun ownership, “a number of studies suggest that laws and policies that enable firearm access during emotionally charged moments also seem to correlate with gun violence more strongly than does mental illness alone.” That is, the plethora of guns in the general population, thus making access to firearms available to persons susceptible to violence during times of stress, trumps the number of mentally ill with the proclivity to violence.

The NRA and other advocates of free or nearly free opportunity of gun ownership argue along with advocate, Lott, “that… ‘more guns’ lead to ‘less crime,’ [rather than the opposite popular view]. Serious researchers have “found that homicide was more common in areas where household firearms ownership was higher… [and that] states with high rates of gun ownership had disproportionately high numbers of deaths from firearm-related homicides.” For instance, “Webster’s analysis uncovered that the repeal of Missouri’s background check law [not mental illness] led to an additional 49 to 68 murders per year, and the rate of interpersonal conflicts resolved by fatal shootings jumped by 200% after Florida passed ‘stand your ground’ in 2005.” Availability of guns is statistically “a more predictive factor than is psychiatric diagnosis in many of the 19, 000 U.S. completed gun suicides each year.” An uncomfortable fact for the NRA is that “gun-related homicides and suicides fell precipitously, and mass-shootings dropped to zero, when the Australian government passed a series of gun-access restrictions in 1996.”

Two articles underscore the confusion—some say the schizophrenic attitudes—surrounding gun control targeting the mentally ill: Steven Rosenfeld, The NRA once supported gun control, Salon, Alternet, Monday, Jan 14, 2013 and Lexington, Why the NRA keeps talking about mental illness, rather than guns, Mar 13th 2013. I will quote and paraphrase from those articles.

“The gun lobby’s focus on mental illness as the “true” cause of such massacres. Did they really support a large expansion of officialdom’s right to declare someone mentally unfit, trumping their right to bear arms under the constitution’s second amendment? In Hartford the question provoked some debate. But most demonstrators followed the NRA’s line in opposing any talk of moving to “universal” background checks: jargon for closing the loophole that currently allows private individuals to buy and sell guns without any checks on the criminal or mental-health records of buyers. Almost 40% of gun sales currently fall through that loophole. The message discipline of the National Rifle Association and its congressional allies has been impressive. After an initial period of silence, the NRA came out with a consistent narrative about mass shootings. The problem, said such spokesmen as Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice-president, was that criminals and the dangerously ill can get their hands on guns.”

Rosenfeld went on to ask if the NRA had radically changed its iron stiff position on the absolute right to bear arms. He quoted Wayne LaPierre, “We have a mental health system in this country that has completely and totally collapsed.” The executive vice-president of the NRA went on to assert the NRA’s support of FBI-run NICS [instant background checks system used by gun dealers when selling firearms]. That was disingenuous because the NRA’s real objective is found in the loophole that allows private owners to buy and sell firearms at will. In addition, Mr. LaPierre strongly asserted the NRA’s support of laws which would include all persons formally adjudicated as having mental illness into the federal system and went on to deplore “the fact that many states are still putting only a small number of records into the system.” That public statement is the height of disingenuousness because behind the scenes, the NRA has successfully orchestrated measures to thwart the mental health record system thereby effectively emasculating it and allowing the mentally ill to be part of the private citizenry so revered by the NRA who can and should have guns. “The Democratic governor of Connecticut, Dannel Malloy…accused the NRA of a “bait-and-switch”, in which the gun lobby is trying to appear constructive without allowing any gun rules to change.”

Probably of more importance is the fact that the mental health/gun and violence issue is grossly exaggerated. Only a small proportion of violent crimes carried out by the mentally ill. Researchers and mental health care workers point out that “the mental-health system is good at describing behavior patterns but very poor at predicting specific acts by specific people.” …”And you can’t go around locking up all the socially awkward young men.” Looking with the clarity of hindsight, there is one area where mental illness is well known and well documented to be important, and that is suicide by gun. As of 2010, suicide “accounted for 61% of gun-injury deaths in America.” That is hardly germane to the overall problem of the killing of innocents by gun wielding killers or even the more narrow issue of the role of mental illness in such killings.

The confusing issue of the role of mental illness in mass shootings is well presented in an important recent article by Jonathan M. Metzl, MD, PhD and Kenneth T. MacLeish, PhD, Mental Illness, Mass Shootings, and the Politics of American Firearms, Am J Public Health. 2015 February; 105(2): 240–249. Published online 2015 February.

“Four assumptions frequently arise in the aftermath of mass shootings in the United States: (1) that mental illness causes gun violence, (2) that psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime, (3) that shootings represent the deranged acts of mentally ill loners, and (4) that gun control “won’t prevent” another Newtown (Connecticut school mass shooting). Each of these statements is certainly true in particular [emphasis by the author of this blogpost] instances. Yet, as we show, notions of mental illness that emerge in relation to mass shootings frequently reflect larger cultural stereotypes and anxieties about matters such as race/ethnicity, social class, and politics. These issues become obscured when mass shootings come to stand in for all gun crime, and when “mentally ill” ceases to be a medical designation and becomes a sign of violent threat. [and a political football].”

Conservative media commentator Anne Coulter provocatively and stridently proclaimed that “Guns don’t kill people—the mentally ill do,” and National Rifle Association President Wayne LaPierre blamed “delusional killers” for violence in the United States which are at the minimum overstatements and at worst impediments to the solution of even the narrow problem of massacre by mentally ill persons. (To say nothing of the larger issues of attacks by terrorists and sane persons with a violent ideological purpose.) LaPierre called for a “national registry” of persons with mental illness.

Shortly after the Newtown shooting, “a number of states passed bills that required mental health professionals to report “dangerous patients” to local officials, who would then be authorized to confiscate any firearms that these persons might own. “People who have mental health issues should not have guns,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told reporters after one such bill passed the New York Senate. “They could hurt themselves, they could hurt other people.’” It is logical to repeat the widespread opinion that “only an insane person would do such horrifying things.”… “Reports suggest that up to 60% of perpetrators of mass shootings in the United States since 1970, displayed symptoms including acute paranoia, delusions, and depression before committing their crimes.” The shooters in the Aurora, Colorado movie theater, of U.S. Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, Arizona, Columbine High School, and Isla Vista, California, for example, exhibited highly suspicious behavior suggesting an irrational violent propensity. More recently, terrorists of all stripes have taken center stage.

There is strong evidence from psychiatric, psychological, neuroscientific, public health, sociological literature, and even investigative journalism, that there are connections between mental illness and gun violence. “However, notions that mental illness caused any particular shooting, or that advance psychiatric attention might prevent these crimes, are more complicated than they often seem.” The simplistic view of even factual material tends to ignore or to downplay other significant factors such as race and ethnicity, poverty, living in a crime-ridden neighborhood, immersion in socially alienated groups and ideologies, access to firearms, failure of the reporting system, and poor response to reports when they are available. “Anxieties about insanity and gun violence are also imbued with oft-unspoken anxieties about race, politics, and the unequal distribution of violence in U.S. society.”  The authors concluded from their extensive research, that, “At the same time, the literatures we surveyed suggest that these seemingly self-evident assumptions about mass shootings are replete with problematic assumptions, particularly when read against current and historical literatures that address guns, violence, and mental illness more broadly. On the aggregate level, the notion that mental illness causes gun violence stereotypes a vast and diverse population of persons diagnosed with psychiatric conditions and oversimplifies links between violence and mental illness. Notions of mental illness that emerge in relation to mass shootings frequently reflect larger cultural issues that become obscured when mass shootings come to stand in for all gun crime and when “mentally ill” ceases to be a medical designation and becomes a sign of violent threat.” Furthermore, “linking guns and mental illness in ways that subtly connect “insane” gun crimes with oft-unspoken assumptions about “White” individualism or “Black” communal aggression.” And confuses the issue of what is the best solution for the problem.

“It is understandable that U.S. policymakers, journalists, and the general public look to psychiatry, psychology, neuroscience, and related disciplines as sources of certainty in the face of the often-incomprehensible terror and loss that mass shootings inevitably produce. This is especially the case in the current political moment, when relationships between shootings and mental illness often appear to be the only points upon which otherwise divergent voices in the contentious national gun debate agree.” The researchers went on to add, “Our brief review ultimately suggests, however, that this framework—and its implicit promise of mental health solutions to ostensibly mental health problems—creates an untenable situation in which mental health practitioners increasingly become the persons most empowered to make decisions about gun ownership and most liable for failures to predict gun violence.” While “it is undeniable that persons who have shown violent tendencies should not have access to weapons that could be used to harm themselves or others,” it should come as no revelation that health care professionals are reluctant to shoulder the blame for such complicated and broad societal problems.

Finally, the researchers concluded that there are four central assumptions that are commonly asserted in the aftermath of each new horrific mass shooting and have more than a grain of truth: “ (1) Mental illness causes gun violence, (2) Psychiatric diagnosis can predict gun crime before it happens, (3) U.S. mass shootings teach us to fear mentally ill loners, and, (4) Because of the complex psychiatric histories of mass shooters, gun control “won’t prevent” another Tucson, Aurora, or Newtown. Each of these statements is certainly true in particular instances. Evidence strongly suggests that mass shooters are often mentally ill and socially marginalized. Enhanced psychiatric attention may well prevent particular crimes. And, to be sure, mass shootings often shed light on the need for more investment in mental health support networks or improved state laws and procedures regarding gun access.”