Stop blaming mental health for gun violence. The problem is guns.

[flamin lib]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/26/stop-blaming-mental-health-for-gun-violence-the-problem-is-guns/

This obsession with mental health as the root cause of gun violence is not only silly; it’s dangerous.

The elimination of severe psychiatric conditions would not solve our problems with gun violence. Despite the sensationalism of shootings that occur in schools or against police officers, they are infrequent events compared to the totality of gun violence.
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Gun violence is 20 times more prevalent in the United States than in other highly developed countries. But our mental health system is not substantially worse. Most wealthy countries spend between 6 and 8 percent of their health care dollars on mental health care; the U.S. spends 7 percent GDP. We have 19 mental health professionals and 3.4 psychiatric beds per 10,000 people, rates that are similar to Western Europe and other high resource nations. A patient with moderate or severe psychiatric illness is just as likely to be seen for care in the United States as in Western Europe, and is just as likely to have a follow-up mental health appointment and receive at least minimally effective mental health treatment.

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If one accepts the data from CNN’s Gun Violence Project, over 80 people die from gun violence in a 24 hour period. How long do we have to wait before meaningful changes in legislation that reduce access to guns? That is far more difficult to predict.

It's never the gun. It's not even the easy availability of the gun. It's video games, it's poverty, it's mental illness, it's never the fucking gun.