General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Stop Lying to yourself About Being That “Good Guy With A Gun” by STEVE MARMEL [View all]HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)I "get" the color of the reference to heroes, but I think the very unspecific reference to mentally ill quite unfortunate.
If a person wants to say "...the possibility of a suicidal person" I'm actually ok with that. Or if a person wants to identify the most common correlates of mental health symptoms with suicide I'd be ok with that. The truth is gun suicide is the major contributor to gun deaths in the US.
However, the ambiguity created by NOT stating that the strength of the association of gun deaths and mental illness is dominated by suicide and not other social violence leaves way too much room in the discussion for the mistaken belief that mental illness is the great and significant contributor to gun murders/social violence.
That just isn't true. The literature on gun violence shows that persons with diagnosed mental illnesses represent about the same risk of gun violence as the general population. Yes, it's a non-zero risk, but it's not an elevated risk that warrants special fear of every person with any mentally illness.
In a society such as ours repetition leads to acceptance of the misleading and the outright lie. And in a society such as ours where adoption of generalities and stereotypes provide significant guidance to our social interactions, lies about the dangerousness of classes of people lead to not just misunderstanding but to discrimination.