I don’t know how much counseling and medical treatment this guy was receiving. But it certainly doesn’t seem like we’re dealing with someone who hadn’t received any intervention. Besides institutionalizing her son for being eccentric and perhaps a little hard to live with, what could the mother have done better?
Let’s say she had known about the guns–guns he was legally entitled to possess. Was it her duty to take them away? Should she have report him to the authorities just out of general principle?
Almost everyone knows someone who is a little weird. Quiet, withdrawn, anxious. Should we be pushing these people into therapy against their wishes?
When I was in college, I suffered from horrible anxiety. I’d comfort myself by imagining certain buildings on campus exploding (with the professors screaming inside). Like the Oregon shooter, I would have been described as quiet, asocial, and weird. And an investigation would have turned up evidence of me seeking counseling–which I abandoned because of its unhelpfulness. If I had had enough testosterone, explosives, and angst to pull off my deadly fantasies, would I have been a case study for the failure of mental health services?
Should there be an official registry of everyone who has ever had a mental health diagnosis? A database that allows those individuals who “meet the profile” to be…what? Denied their 2nd Amendment rights? Institutionalized indefinitely? Bombarded with GoogleAds advertising psychotropic medication? What exactly are people proposing?
Seems to me that without carefully defining what they mean by “improve mental health services”, opponents of gun control are potentially allowing all civil rights to be trampled upon.
I’m in favor of mental health reforms as a solution to mass shootings. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of these shooters have mental health issues.) How about starting with expanded funding for the National Institute of Mental Health, especially on research into the causes of mass shootings and what warning signs there might be?
Edited to add that Wikipedia says that the NIMH had funding of $1.5 billion in 2010. Doubling that would be a start.
That is the point, isn’t it? If you wanted to put every person with a mental health problem who had a violent thought in a locked mental health facility it is an impractical situation, on many many levels.
On the other hand, if you wanted to lock up people with obsessive violent fantasies, people who had such fantasies would simply stop going to therapy.
I would, however, support legislation that made a person with mental health issues pass a test and be certified to own a firearm. A problematic idea but if a solution could be found I’d support it.
1- You must be on medication for at least a year.
2- No violent or potentially violent legal troubles for a minimum of 5 years, maybe 10.
3- Keeping a journal of things that stress you out and how you deal with that, which, is shared with mental health professional, but, not with anyone else.
4- No delusions or psychotic episodes for a minimum of 3 years, maybe 5.
Are we going to be requiring drug tests to see that people are actually taking their prescribed medication? Patients are notorious for telling their doctors they are compliant, when in actuality they aren’t. And anyone who has taken psychotrophic meds for a long time knows they aren’t cure-alls. I had some of my worst depressive spells with I was on anti-depressants.
Most of these mass shooters are young men in their early 20s (the Oregon shooter seems to be an exception). They often do not have violent records because they are young and present as non-aggressive. Like most “beta” men do.
And a lot of so-called responsible gun owners people have violent histories. Because boys will be boys, amirite?
People lie to their psychotherapists all the time. A journal wouldn’t be any different. And why should the government be mandating what goes on between a therapist and their patient anyway? Personally, I’d be scared to be completely honest in a journal that the government was requiring me to keep.
No delusions? If a therapist decides that a body dysmorphic patient is delusional because he believes he’s the ugliest man who ever lived, should this be sufficient to keep him from owning a gun to protect himself? What if he’s a police officer? How does the delusion “No one likes me and no will ever like me!” make a person dangerous?
Not to mention, people with deeply held religious convictions are fundamentally no different from people who believe in deeply held delusions. What is the difference between “God loves me!” and “I am the son of God!” There is no difference at all. And I don’t want psychotherapists erring on the side of caution and deciding everyone who hears voices is a menace to society. That’s exactly what would happen if the government started holding psychotherapists responsible for their patients’ gun purchases.
But just because an idea is unpopular doesn’t mean it’s not correct. I think it is dishonest (in general terms) to not admit there there are problems with the mentally ill and violence/gun violence. I think we do need to take extra steps to resolve this. If the mentally ill wind up being penalized, that is unfortunate but quite possibly necessary.
ETA: this is different than discrimination against skin color, gender or sexual preference. Because those factors, in reality, have no detrimental effects on society. But mental illness carries with it specific problems, which often do affect others.
ETA2: I personally consider gun ownership to be a privilege and not a right, similar to driving a tractor trailer or flying a plane. It should be controlled and heavily regulated.
According to this post by not what you’d expect, au contraire, the mother was treating her son with gun therapy. “Mr. Harper-Mercer collected handguns and rifles, and he regularly went to a shooting range with his mother, said neighbors in Torrance, Calif., where the two lived until moving to Oregon in 2013. At a barbecue shortly before they left, Mr. Harper-Mercer spent hours talking with a next-door neighbor about guns and how he and his mother were excited to leave Los Angeles and get a fresh start.”
I can remember an endless book by I think Bernard Malamud, about a jewish professor moving across the country for a fresh start. No guns were involved.
This is very graphic and disturbing to say… but… it is much easier to kill people with a gun than it is to use a knife or a lead pipe or some other hand held weapon. (I say this as “common sense” not as an expert of weapons or psychiatry). So, I think an obsession on guns from a mentally ill person is a legitimate red flag.
Yes, that is very fucked up, especially with the similarities between this guy and Adam Lanza. I don’t know what the hell the mother was thinking. I really hope this receives more attention.
Throw money at the problem? I think the OP is asking an excellent question. What, exactly, does “mental health reform” mean wrt reducing gun violence in general and mass shootings in particular. What specifically is that money supposed to be spent on, and how will it change things?
Let’s also keep in mind that as horrific as these mass shootings are, they are a tiny fraction of the deaths that occur due to gun violence in the US. So, even if you were able to reduce these significantly, you’re still not dealing with 90% of the problem (or whatever the number is).
People can’t seriously argue for the preservation of 2nd Amendment rights while arguing that the mentally ill should wear veritable scarlet letters.
If a solution deters people from seeking counseling or disclosing psychiatric symptoms to a mandated reporter or care provider, then it is not a solution. It becomes just another problem.
No, it means we’re trying to fix one problem (a small number of crazy people shooting everybody up) by creating another problem (now everyone is discouraged from seeking mental health care because no one wants to lose their civil rights).
A lot of folks with mental illness histories live in dangerous, chaotic situations where they actually need to defend themselves. I’m thinking specifically of abuse victims. It would be extremely unfair to deny these folks the right to protect themselves simply because they made the “mistake” of seeking psychiatric help sometime in the recent past. How does your proposal deal with this problem?
Is it really a civil right? Should there be no limits to the 2nd amendment? Would you want, for example, a delusional person flying an airplane with 250 passengers? I disagree with your assessment that the 2nd amendment should be a right with no restrictions attached.
I don’t know. I am looking at the greater good. If you convinced me that more people with mental health needed guns to protect themselves more than there was danger to society by people with mental health problems having guns, I’d likely support that.
I would like to see us move toward a social norm that it is not okay to keep guns in a house where a mentally ill person lives or stays. I don’t know if laws are the way to accomplish this or not. I just would like it to be a norm the same way that, say, looking both ways before you cross the street is a norm.
I strongly suspect that people with a history of abuse or mental illness histories are far, far more likely to turn guns on themselves than they are to use them to defend themselves from violence, so that argument does not hold much water with me.
I don’t think I have ever said that the 2nd Amendment shouldn’t have any restriction. I just don’t think the restrictions should be arbitrary and capricious. Making everyone who has ever visited a psychotherapist’s office or taken psychotropic medication jump through extra, burdensome hoops so can they acquire a firearm strikes me as arbitrary and capricious. And moreover, such a policy will only make mentally ill people crazier. Who in their right mind would seek counseling if they knew their name would automatically go on a national registry to be used by God knows who, for God knows what? No one, that’s who.
Because such a registry would be public information, correct? Right now, an individual can seek employment without worrying that a potential employer will know they had a bout with mental illness. A person can have a nervous breakdown, recover in a hospital, and then start all over again–clean slate. A registry changes this.
Would you want your name to go on such a registry? I know I wouldn’t, and I’m not the least bit anti-goverment or conspiracy-minded.
That is why I put in provisions about 3 and 5 and 10 years. I also do not think simply visiting a mental health professional should put you on the “black list”. I had not thought of privacy issues and employment and other issues. But let me ask, if I am taking medication for HIV, does my potential employer have access to this information? You can see my point I hope. Exactly how does medical privacy work out…