The NRA has nothing to do with it at all if that it what you are talking about is my point.
Gun law wise there is nothing different in Canada as would related to a familial murder-suicide.
But even that is not that related. Canada’s suicide rate is almost identical to the us for practical purposes despite the fact that they do have a medical system I find preferable to the current employer subsidized version we have.
Disclaimer: These laws differ widely due to case law and statute within both countries by a large amount. I am talking generalities here and I am not a lawyer and my only non-hobby interaction with the law was on a grand jury.
Canada: The patient must present a danger to self or others
US: The patient must present an "imminent danger” to self or others
The word “imminent” is the one that frustrates the well meaning intents of many families with loved ones who are homeless due to mental illness. Many judges have decided that it means immediate, defined threat.
This means that in many places in the US there needs to be a credible verified threat of violence or self harm. This threat needs to be verifiable as a threat in a court of law and must be concrete. E.G. “I am going to shoot up a school Tuesday” OK “I just feel like taking them out one of these days” Not “imminent”.
As quoted above in general in Canada two doctors need to sign off on the commitment. In general in the US the only body that can involuntarily commit an individual is a court of law.
That is a massive difference in the standard. Canada the patient must fight to gain their freedom, in the US the state/doctors/family must fight to get a commitment.
I do wish congress would revisit that and consider adding another layer or law that would stand up to a challenge that reached SCOTUS or at least starting the push for an amendment .
ISTM that a key question that needs to be answered is, how good is the medical establishment at predicting who is going to act out violently, either in suicide, murder, or both? And how much confidence do we need before we can intervene, possibly against the patient’s will?
If, say, 10% of the severely depressed attempt suicide (I am pulling the figure out of the air/my ass), is that a great enough risk to compel the patient to be institutionalized and/or take whatever medications are prescribed? Do we need some judicial process to decide that some individual patient is at risk, and therefore needs to be denied access to firearms (or kept away from high buildings, or whatever)?
Maybe, but I don’t see accessibility or affordability as the issue in the Connecticut anecdote referred to above. Effective? Sure, by definition an effective mental health system is going to reduce suicide. But how effective is the system currently?
The only context in which the NRA was mentioned was presuming that Voyager must have been substituting the NRA’s positions (list of “lunatics”) for what was being proposed by the op just because he read “mental health” and “guns” in the same paragraph. What are you imagining I have written about the NRA relevant to this thread? Is it endemic here that people see a word or so and then respond in some free association manner?
Now the stats on suicide rates being only marginally lower in Canada is actually pertinent and a strong counterpoint to my using Canada’s health system as a role model for decreasing suicide rates.
No Shodan that really is not so key. If all (or close to all) are effectively treated because treatment is available, affordable, and without stigma, then there is no need to do something against someone’s will. The op did not propose compelling treatment.
The connection to ANY kind of violence is not the main point. We, as a nation, need Universal Health Care. We also need to prosecute criminals. We don’t need to disarm law abiding citizens. If good health care policies benefit mental patients who may become violent at some point, all the better. It’s not a priority that gun violence be a major factor in mental health treatment, though it may be a benefit that is realized when treatment is available.
Don’t get me wrong..I am all for increasing treatment and decreasing stigma I just need to point out data when I think it is wrong, or want to know more to see if I need to change my position.
IMHO, to stop random spree shooters we do need access but the sigma part is the part that no one is talking about. Many of the recent large mass-murders seem to have been of the opinion that they were marked people and less useful in the world. Thus the motivation for getting revenge before ending it all.
I don’t want to thread jack but IMHO the main barrier in my social circles to reducing that bias is from the complementary and alternative medicine crowd…I fully understand the placebo effect is real but they have so much legal power to push woo that it is hard to fight the natural fears and ignorance that people have.
(Note in my state insurance is required to treat homeopaths the same as real doctors)
Note for other posts in the thread. More than 80% of people who seek treatment for depression see massive improvement these days and for most people it is not a life long event. The mental health professionals I have talked to do not pretend to have any ability to detect if a person will be violent (outside of past actions) and most who have those feelings do not follow through with them. I am sure at some point in your life you may have said “some times I just want to kill my brother” but most don’t really mean it nor do they follow through with it if they do.
Damn good thing too that vast majority of people are good.
AFAICT the woman in Connecticut had treatment available, but (apparently) her care-giver did not accurately predict that she would become violent. So treatment that is available and affordable and so forth is only going to “work” insofar as we can make that prediction.
The OP says
But if Canada’s rate is 10.2 vs. 10.5 in the US, that is not a very strong argument.
Suicide is more common among the elderly. Elder suicide in Canada is something like 14 out of 100,000 (as of 1993). In the US as of 2007 it is about 14.3 (cite - pdf). The elderly are covered by Medicare in the US. Yet the disparity remains.
UHC might or might not be a good idea, but I doubt it will make a major difference in suicide rates.
Can police accurately predict who, among those with no criminal record will be a violent criminal?
But if doesn’t matter if you can “accurately predict that she would become violent” if they people come in for treatment on their own. It is a highly treatable illness 17% of the population will have sever depression in their lifetime…are they all at risk of becoming killers?
The stigma against mental health treatment is high in Canada, it is not a good example but outside of elderly suicide, which is much more complex (many are due to fears about degenerative illness and a lack of death with dignity options).
But if 80% of people with clinical depression respond to medication within a few weeks and other treatments also are effective how would not being depressed cause someone to still do a murder suicide?
Also if they thought they had someone to turn to, someone who understood and that not all was lost it would help prevent it.
Also the fact that it is not 100% effective doesn’t make it of no value, there is a demonstrated positive effect. Just not in the way presented above.
Gun control doesn’t reduce suicide rates either, as was discovered in Australia. (I get that it reduces firearm suicides but it doesn’t reduce the rate overall)
I agree with this. It would be more fair. It would reduce personal bankruptcies. And it might reduce some administrative expenses.
However, I don’t see it making a measureable impact on either suicide or homicide.
The US already has much higher total heath care costs than any other country. And our government health expenditures are similar to those of other prosperous nations which do have universal heath care. So, realistically, you can’t expect the amount of health care delivered to Americans to go much higher. And consider that, in many areas of the US, community mental heath centers and other non-profits are already providing the kind of mental health care – sometimes good, sometimes not – you might expect in a universal system.
Also consider that psychiatry – and I am pro-psychiatry – does not have a permanent cure for most diagnoses. And also consider that mental health professionals are generally against telling the government the names of unstable patients who shouldn’t have guns. And the therapists have a good reason – the patients then won’t see them.
There is no one answer. Fewer high tech medical procedures with money saved used to for more psychiatric hospital beds – it should help some. Fewer prison beds with money saved going to probation would, I think, help even more.
But a third item that would help is fewer guns. I’d treat them more like automobiles in terms of licensing, and more like cigarettes in terms of trying to convince people they are a bad choice.
In case you anyone is still wondering what the heck fewer legal guns has to do with criminal guns, see:
These authors are from the International Coalition for Women in Shooting and Hunting. That raises a question of objectivity, although, of couse, even advocates can be correct.
I have access to a university library web site, but full text access to this article is embargoed for 18 months. A slightly better summary than your abstract can be found from this link:
Although neighbors, there are some major differences between Canada and the US in addition to UHC. One that stands out like a sore thumb is population size and density.
IIRC some gun enthusiasts in another thread point out that one of the border states like Minnesota firearm murder rates are roughly equal to Canada but I haven’t looked into it.
Yeah, and? How does that make focusing on a small sliver of gun violence while ignoring the vast majority make any sense? Are you under the impression that criminal gun violence will eventually shrink down to the frequency of gun violence committed by the mentally ill?
The consistently improving trend is on crime and gun violence is just coming down with crime in general. Guns still account for 2/3 of all homocides in the country.
Most successful suicides are committed with a gun.
I would add a national registry for all guns.
I haven’t read anything so far that leads me to think we can reduce the number of suicides. What are you proposing?
So? By your reasoning, we should entirely ignore suicide in favor of battling heart disease and cancer.
I agree that we need to remove the stigma of mental illness and increase access to treatment but what more can we do really?
I’m trying to find a mechanism where it would help. For improved access to mental health services to significantly reduce gun violence, it would have to either cure a significant number of people whose problem eventually will lead to violence, or somehow reduce their access to firearms. Is there evidence that those with access to mental health services have a lower rate of gun violence, correcting for economic factors? For the second, it would mean all sorts of checks which go beyond the premise of the OP.
Sure, but unless you think all criminals are mentally ill by definition, the OP seems to be talking about gun violence from people who have not been criminals up to the point they kill someone.
As for suicides, perhaps available treatment would reduce the suicide rate - but there is plenty of suicide on college campuses, and students do have access to mental health services.
Funny, I am reading yours as the post that says one should be relatively ignored until the other is addressed.
Yes, amazingly enough deceasing crime in general has been pretty effective in decreasing violent crime, including crimes with guns, including murders. Actually that seems the most effective approach. And has been pretty damn effective.
My support for a wide variety of gun control measures has been expressed in many threads over the years; it just seems to me that maybe just maybe doing more to reduce suicides would be something given some attention too when one is talking about deaths with guns, given that more die from suicide than murder and all.
Yes, I believe we can prevent many suicides. And yes I believe that identification and effective treatment of those with mental illness and, even more challenging, prevention of the social isolation that seems to be increasing in our society to my read, can be effective tools. Education about how suicide is a big risk associated with guns unsecured in a household can also help. Decreasing gun availability, especially unsecured gun availability, does help decrease suicide rates. I don’t have access to that Australian data but the overall data is pretty clear to my read anyway. The simple fact is that making it just a bit harder to complete the act helps, it forces a pause, a chance to come up with a different course. Detoxified gas in houses; smaller size bottles of aceteminophen; no easy access to guns; so on.
Canada may not be the model, but what do countries with low suicide rates (like the U.K.) do right? How can that be emulated?
I agree with this, but another way of reducing violence would be if treatment reduces the occurrence of violence even if the therapist cannot predict it. I suspect we’d be hearing this shouted from the rooftops if there was evidence of it.
There is an argument that the USA contains a specific cultural affection for guns - and using them. There are other nations where semi-automatic weapons and pistols are owned by the general populace but not used with anything like the gay abandon of the USA. Canada, Switzerland and Israel come to mind.
So it is not a mental health problem per se but rather a collective attitude which encourages weapon ownership.
The argument is that the USA came to democracy too quickly at a time when there was a general suspicion of governments and local law authorities. That suspicion has been reinforced through generations until the right to bear arms has attained sacrosanct status. That is not normal in most of the developed world.
I for example fear many things for my children but being shot is not even at the extreme range of my fears. It is so unlikely that I don’t even think about it.
If I was on the pro-gun side of the debate, I’d want to examine every claim in there pretty carefully. A few are exaggerated despite the overall picture being correct. And I wish they’d mention that most of our gun deaths are suicides (and most of our non-gun suicide attempts fail). Others will disagree, but, as far as I’m concerned, an eighteen year old being murdered and an eighteen year old committing suicide are equally tragic.
So long as you don’t bring a gun into your hotel room, there’s little reason to fear visiting us. Most of the difference in violent death mortality between your country and mine is eliminated if you just look at US households which don’t have a gun.
They couldn’t get away with it down South, but where I live, pediatricians ask if you have a gun in the house almost as often as family practice docs ask about smoking, and for similar reasons. See:
If I had mental health problems, and I knew the government would take my guns away or prohibit me from buying new guns, why would I choose to seek mental health treatment?
Obviously, nobody wants the violent crazies to have guns. But I wouldn’t seek treatment if I perceived that I would be “punished” for doing so.
I was hospitalized for depression at one point. Now every time I buy a gun or apply for a license or anything, I have to get a document from a shrink saying I’m sane enough to own one. Oddly enough, the Army has no problem handing me an M-4 but buying one for myself is a big deal.
Anyway, if I had known how much of a PITA it was going to be, and the life-long legal stigma it would create, I would not have agreed to be hospitalized.