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Comment by condercet | Hacker News Reader

It is not fair to place the blame for this epidemic of violence squarely on those suffering from mental health issues.

Mental health issues are distributed globally, but the gun violence problem is not.

People who suffer from mental health issues are tremendously more likely to be victims of violence, rather than the perpetrators. These individuals already suffer from tremendous discrimination and hardships in their lives.

Those who would place the blame in this direction while deflecting from the ease of access to firearms are acting disingenuously.

We continue to do nothing, and I wish I could say that nothing continues to happen - but Americans continue to die from this senseless violence with shocking regularity.

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> Mental health issues are distributed globally, but the gun violence problem is not.

I'm not so sure that is true. I'd wager that Americans are suffering more than most right now due to institutional rot (or at least the perception and portrayals of it).

I suspect you're probably right, but I'm not sure it's to the point that it discounts their point. I think the "institutional rot" is a smaller factor than other elements impacting mental well-being.

A hormonal, bullied, enraged teenager where I live is less likely to do monstrous amounts of damage to others. They can get easy access to a knife and might own a car. Out of hundreds of people here, I think I know one person who has a gun, and they live on a farm with a rifle that I'd imagine emerges once a year to shoot foxes or kangaroos.

If we're going to talk numbers - most gun deaths involve gang/drug activities. The real numbers once you remove suicide and gangs all point to mental illness and DV/Violent individuals.

False. Most, approximately 60% of the total, gun deaths in the United States are suicide.

They said after you remove suicude.

That is a separate point to the first sentence. In the second sentence they also say to remove gangs which they claim in the first sentence is the leading cause of gun deaths so applying your logic doesn’t make any sense.

it's not like this changes the debate though even if it's accurate, if anything it broadens the argument. Cartel/gang grime is a huge issue and fueled by access to arms. Not only in the US, but also in Mexico and Latin America because a large supply of weapons goes illegally across the border.

In the UK, where the civilian population does not carry arms and even most cops don't, the police fires a few hundred shots per year(!) with a population of 60 million. In the entire post war era (The Troubles aside) less police has been killed than in the US in a year.

So if you care about the safety of law enforcement an arms race has bad consequences for everyone. And the militarization of police is another bad consequence.

You cant remove gangs, because half of what is called gang is a bunch of young guys living in low socioeconomic area. When then hang around together and some of them is suspect of crime, they are fairly often classified as gang. It does not take much to be classified as gang. And then, any shooting involving them is gang shooting. Similar with drug related shooting, if one of them shoots because he is jealous of girlfriend and there are drugs in his pocket, it is drug related shooting.

Gang membership as traced by law enforcement is not something super formal.

Could you add a reference to some statistics around that?

I found this, although it mostly contradicts your claim (with the exception of gun deaths due to assaults on people in the age range 5-34): https://web.archive.org/web/20180829034947/https://injuryfac...

this is a talking point that has no proof.

Can you find numbers to refute it? It's more likely that the parent comment is true than the opposite.

This is not how the burden of proof works.

Yes, this is directly referenced in the article.

Media reports often assume a binary distinction between mild and severe mental illness, and connect the latter form to unpredictability and lack of self-control. However, this distinction, too, is called into question by mental health research. To be sure, a number of the most common psychiatric diagnoses, including depressive, anxiety, and attention-deficit disorders, have no correlation with violence whatsoever.18 Community studies find that serious mental illness without substance abuse is also “statistically unrelated” to community violence.40 At the aggregate level, the vast majority of people diagnosed with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts—only about 4% of violence in the United States can be attributed to people diagnosed with mental illness.41,42

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