So if mental illness is the cause of gun violence,

[HereSince1628]

39. I wouldn't subject anyone to treatment based on diagnosic recommendations by the NRA

Even if one accepts that ALL the mass-shootings in 2012 were committed by mentally ill persons (30 years of data on mass homicide suggests about 90% had some indication of MI), that's 6 mentally ill mass shooters out of an estimated 63 million mentally ill people.

The mass shooters represent 0.00001% of the subpopulation of mentally ill in the country.

Any system intended to detect mass-shooters among the mentally ill would have to have an exquisitely sensitive ability to detect this vanishingly small signal. In virtually all monitoring systems, increasing sensitivity is usually accompanied by detecting false positives. Police reaction to the false positives has costs. Large proportions of false alarms would be expensive and divert pubic safety resources in a manner not unlike the costs of false alarms for fire departments. We all want protection but there are ceilings on the amount of resources available to secure it.

Between 60% and 80% of the mentally ill in the US are not diagnosed and are not in professional treatment.
Any system relying on surveillance based on mental health or pharmaceutical records would miss about 2/3's of those who are risky. And mental illness can have onsets at ANY age (although gun suicide and gun violence are most common in those aged 15-45) so one screening at say age 20, isn't going to be enough. Even if this screening is only focused on gun purchasers and gun owners, regular, at least annual mental health screening, would be required to detect changes in mental health status, which can be triggered by things like job loss, relationship failures, foreclosure, physical injury and organic illness. That means roughly an additional 80 million mental health screenings for legal gun owners per year.

And that ignores the problem that the system wouldn't be 100% effective. Accuracy of written personality assessments is hardly perfect their error rates are way above 0.00001. Accuracy of clinician assessment from single visits is likely worse than the personality tests and it tends to be applied "with an excess of caution" iow bias toward detection of those previously mentioned costly false positives.

As it is, if a system of reporting had been 100% effective on existing mental health records for the 25-30% of the mentally ill for whom such records exist, it may have reduced last years mass shooting by 1 or 2 (yes, those lives lost were precious, those reductions would be welcome), but it would have left 4 or 5.

But prevention systems are nothing like 100% effective. John Holmes received mental health treatment in a state that required psychiatric staff to report to police the identity of a person deemed dangerous. It didn't happen. The shooter of the volunteer fireman outside Rochester was assisted by an acquaintance in obtaining guns although he was banned from their purchase. Lanza, the Newtown murderer stole his mother's weapons.

These are examples of the type of failures that occur in the existing system that is associated with less than a 0.00001% annual chance of a mentally ill person committing a mass-shooting. It's pretty clear that substantially lowering the number of mass shootings is as dependent on addressing failure rates within the existing gun regulation/control system, as it is expanding and maintaining surveillance on the mental health of every legal gun owner. Preventing failures is going to be VERY tough for government agencies.

The system is going to find it very hard (as it already does) to prevent a friend, or criminal accomplice, from purchasing a gun for either an ex-con or a person with a mental illness. Moreover the system is going to find it very hard to invent socially acceptable policing actions that would prevent the theft or unauthorized use of an otherwise legally owned weapon.

The level of detailed awareness that is required to extinguish these events is something that only public participation can provide...not as vigilantes, or Stazi-like neighborhood spys...but as responsible citizens with the discipline to act properly when presented with situations like a change in mood of a family member, or when asked to make a straw purchase on a gun, or when storing weapons in the home, or when a patient who seems risky drops out of treatment.

I'm all for keeping guns out of the hands of people made dangerous by mental illness and/or criminal motive.
I'm all for increasing awareness of signs of mental illness and the availability of mental health care.

I don't expect increased surveillance on the mentally ill or new mental health surveillance on gun-owners to much reduce the number of these events per year. They are, thankfully rare.




Limiting capacity of weapons seems like it could limit the number of bullets fired, the number of wounds created, and perhaps the number of dead in each of these incidents. It seems like the most common sense







































What system for detecting mentally ill that has the capacity to detect 0.00001%



Reducing the number of mass-shootings with such an