{"id":22171,"date":"2013-09-19T00:01:47","date_gmt":"2013-09-19T05:01:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22171"},"modified":"2013-09-18T15:03:26","modified_gmt":"2013-09-18T20:03:26","slug":"qotd-guns-and-mental-illness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/09\/19\/qotd-guns-and-mental-illness\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Guns and mental illness"},"content":{"rendered":"

There isn\u2019t much of a culture-war component of discussing mental illness, other than a few folks on the Right who blame the Left for deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill in the 1960s. I suspect that there is no real constituency in favor of the Second Amendment rights of the mentally ill \u2014 provided, of course, the definition of \u201cmentally ill\u201d is clear, explicit, and taken seriously. (If you think there\u2019s a stigma to admitting you\u2019re seeing a therapist, a psychologist, or getting mental health treatment now, just wait until some of your legal rights can be restricted because of it.)<\/p>\n

Thankfully, I\u2019ve never known anyone who has had violent episodes or threatening mental illness. My sense of reading coverage and the literature is that people rarely \u201csnap\u201d and become dangerous killers overnight. As you\u2019ve probably found in your research, there are certain common threads: withdrawal from others and lack of a support network; hostile behavior and temper control, outbursts, etc. It is maddeningly infuriating to hear friends and acquaintances of past shooters describe behavior that seems, in retrospect, to be a warning sign or red flag.<\/p>\n

After Columbine, many school administrators tried to institute a new \u201cIf you see something, say something\u201d approach to individuals behaving in a threatening manner. Then we saw in Virginia Tech that many, many students reported the gunman for strange and threatening behavior, including stalking. School administrators ultimately couldn\u2019t do enough to stop him \u2014 either from fear of lawsuits or from overall bureaucratic inertia.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not clear how effective a program like this would be; one would hope that people would already know to report strange, troubling, or threatening behavior to authorities. In past writings, I\u2019ve emphasized that the only authority that can put someone on the federal firearms restriction list is a judge, and so that these sorts of concerns are best sent directly to the cops, not to a school administrator or company HR department.<\/p>\n

However, a country where more Americans are trained to spot signs of serious, untreated and potentially dangerous mental illness strikes me as a better path than yet another effort to restrict the rights of 40 million gun owners because of the actions of a handful.<\/p>\n

Jim Geraghty, “Why Post-Shooting Gun-Control Debates Are So Insufferable”, National Review Online<\/em><\/a>, 2013-09-18<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There isn\u2019t much of a culture-war component of discussing mental illness, other than a few folks on the Right who blame the Left for deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill in the 1960s. I suspect that there is no real constituency in favor of the Second Amendment rights of the mentally ill \u2014 provided, of course, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[66,9,10,41,13],"tags":[49,906,661,217],"class_list":["post-22171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-science","category-law","category-liberty","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-guns","tag-mentalhealth","tag-regulation","tag-rights"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5LB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22171"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22172,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22171\/revisions\/22172"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}