Shootings. . . and mental health?
The mental health explanation doesn't support the policy choices its proponents want
Gun violence is a statistically complicated topic, perhaps one for another day: depending on what kind of data you look at, you can find either a strong correlation or no correlation at all between rates of gun ownership and rates of homicide and gun deaths, and there are additional differences between school shootings, mass shootings, and all shootings.
You may, however, have heard some people say that mass shootings are not a gun ownership issue, but primarily a “mental health” issue (perhaps they are emboldened by the statistical vagueness of the link between guns and deaths). This position is thoroughly pointless. It’s pointless because it is a non-starter: how do you fix a nationwide mental health crisis that creates mass shootings?
Certainly nobody knows how to do a large-scale mental health intervention—if we could even properly diagnose what tendencies to treat. On the other hand, suppose you know that lots of people in a given demographic suffer mental health issues that make them violent, and that they also have access to guns. Wouldn’t the obvious solution be cutting off gun access first instead of worrying about the mental health issues? Yes, mental health might be the root cause, but gun access is comparatively easier to treat. You would presumably look at mental health, too, but as a secondary solution.
This is why the mental health explanation strikes me as especially odd when advanced by those in favor of a strong right to firearm ownership. If there’s really a mental health crisis on this scale, the obvious solution is gun control. Friends of firearms can make all manner of plausible arguments: perhaps gun ownership has good effects on national character, or serves as a check on government, or maybe the link between gun ownership and shootings just isn’t so strong. But saying we have a national mental health crisis? That’s an argument for fewer guns.