June is Gun Safety Month
By Albert B. Kelly
June is gun safety month. May is mental health awareness month. I’m not sure it would make much of a difference to combine the two but it certainly couldn’t hurt. At this point anything is worth a try. I say that a few days out from the racist mass shooting that took place in Buffalo, New York that left 10 dead. I say that a few days away from the 1-year anniversary of the house party that was shot up in Fairfield Township in which 3 died and 11 were wounded.
Some might take the position that gun safety month has little to do with mental health awareness month, but the numbers don’t lie. If you want to be overwhelmed, check out the Mother Jones Guide to Mass Shootings. They’ve created a data base that lists 128 mass shootings going back to 1982. They use the FBI definition of a mass shooting which is a single attack in a public place in which four or more victims were killed and this has since been changed to 3 victims when federal baselines changed.
Of the 128 shootings listed, there were slightly more than 1,000 fatalities and over 1,300 injuries. These 128 incidences involved some 36 states and of the 143 guns used by the perps, more 75% were obtained legally. The average age of these killers was 35 years old and according to the analysis, the vast majority of the individuals had displayed mental health issues prior to the event, which is why it might not be a bad idea to combine Gun Safety Month with Mental Health Awareness Month to come out with a new hybrid.
If you’re not a reader of Mother Jones, then check out “The Violence Project”. They indicate that between 1966 and 2020, there were 168 mass shootings in the country as defined by the Congressional Research Service which defines a mass shooting as a multiple homicide incident with four or more victims killed with guns, mostly in public, and not part of another crime such as robbery or organized crime, meaning the main thing was killing a lot of people.
It is hard to say when the modern of age of mass shootings began. If one had to offer a point in time, it would be 1966 as that was the year that Charles Whitman climbed into the University of Texas Tower and spent part of the afternoon of August 1st killing 15 and injuring 31 with his rifle. This was the moment when the modern era of mass shootings began, the moment when full-blown crazy got merged with guns.
The research done by the Violence Project indicates that two-thirds of the mass shooters in their data base had a history of mental health concerns and they say that this percentage is higher than the 50% of people in the general population who would satisfy the criteria for having mental illness at some point in their lives.
Beyond that, twenty-five percent of mass shooters had a mood disorder of some sort that includes depression or bipolar disorder, consistent with rates among the general population and 27% of mass shooters had a thought disorder, which includes schizophrenia and psychosis, and this rate was significantly higher than the general population.
According to the Violence Project, most (85%) of the shooters were of the homegrown variety, meaning that 15% were immigrants. Twenty-three percent of these shooters left a suicide note, video, or “manifesto”.
In terms of weapons, 78% were handguns, 28% semiautomatic assault weapons, 24% shotguns and 23% rifles and for those who think the focus should be on gun laws, fifty percent of all weapons were purchased legally.
Setting gun laws aside for the moment, maybe we need to be better at spotting people in crisis and we need to have the legal framework to intervene. Maybe there needs to be less liability, whether for teachers, coworkers, or employers.
Spend any decent length of time with a person, and most people know when someone is off slightly- when they’re heading into the tall grass. The difficulty is how to intervene and how to connect someone in crisis with the help that they need without criminalizing them, which is why police forces need mental health professionals on board.
I don’t have the answers, but gun safety month and mental health awareness month is the right time to ask these questions and press for change.