Truly, the right to bear firearms is not something that should be in the domain of the psychiatrist, but in our current landscape, it’s fallen into our realm. Personally, (as opposed to professionally), it seems to me that there is no reason that someone needs to own an assault weapon, and Americans somehow survived without them for 10 years from 1994 to 2004 during a national ban on assault weapons, inspired in part by the massacre of children in a 1989 mass shooting at a Stockton, Calif., school, followed in 1993 by a street shooting where eight people were killed in San Francisco.
A CNN poll conducted in 1993 revealed that 73% of those polled opposed the manufacture, sale, or possession of assault weapons, and back then, the politics of gun control were less partisan: Former Republican President Ronald Reagan supported legislation to make them illegal. The ban on assault weapons expired in 2004, and mass shooters have been able to obtain these weapons legally and have used them for many of the highly publicized massacres we read about, now several times a year.
Dr. Dinah Miller
What shocks me is that we manufacture these weapons to allow for rapid and efficient discharge, we make these firearms easily accessible to anyone who wants them in more than 40 states, and then we are surprised when people use them to do exactly what they were designed to do: kill lots of people quickly. Those who oppose bans on these weapons insist that terrorists will find other ways: They will use illegal weapons, bombs made from pressure cookers, biologic agents, or explosives. They may be right; that doesn’t mean our government needs to make it easy for gunmen to massacre innocent people.
Until recently, the discussion about mass murder somehow pitted mental illness against gun control, so like it or not, psychiatry was pulled into the discussion of mass murder. Does this make sense? Very little of gun violence takes the form of these highly publicized mass murders – perhaps 1%. But if you’ve turned on CNN lately, they get a lot of air time, while the deaths of countless others – dozens a day in our gun-drenched cities – are now just part of the routine risks of life. If you hold your definition of mass murders to the deaths of four victims in a public place, then most mass murders are what we see in the news: Aurora, Newtown, Fort Hood, Isla Vista, and the list goes on. Of those shooters, roughly half had some history of some kind of mental illness. If you enlarge the definition, as some do, to include any shooting where four or more victims die, then the association with mental illness drops. Many of these killings are domestic and gang violence, or deaths that occur during the commission of another crime.
Overall, it is estimated that less than 10% of gun murders are caused by mental illness, and the politically correct mantra of the time is to point out that people with mental illness are more likely to be the victims of violence than to perpetrate it. Finally, most gun deaths are suicides and not homicides – a distinction not made by CNN.
Despite the staggering rise in gun deaths in our country, and the clear link between gun availability and gun deaths, our federal legislators are stuck; no new gun legislation has passed. Our Congress has made the quiet statement after Newtown that the National Rifle Association (NRA) is remarkably powerful, and perhaps the story was over when we decided that killing children is acceptable. If that’s not enough, Congress was not propelled to action when one of their own was shot in the head during a massacre.
If I feel frustrated and let off steam by tweeting, how awful former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords must feel that her former colleagues have not embraced her advocacy actions with Americans for Responsible Solutions.
Over the last week, we’ve seen Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) stage a 15-hour filibuster on two gun safety amendments. One would close the terror gap; the other sought to expand background checks for firearms purchases. Both measures failed, as did two other gun control measures in the Senate. We’ve also seen House Democrats conduct a sit-in in an effort to force gun control votes. We can’t even agree that those under FBI surveillance for terrorist activities and those on a no-fly list should not be allowed to purchase firearms of any type, including assault rifles. The response is that the right to own guns is protected by the Constitution and can’t be denied without a judicial process.