Is More Gun Control the RIght Prescription?
- Mass murders committed by young males have become a new phenomenon in American life.
- Individuals who should not be permitted to own a firearm can legally purchase one.
- Many other advanced nations have much lower incidences of mass killings.
- There is no political solution to this issue in sight.
I remain skeptical that restricting guns will make us safer.
- Mass murders committed by young males have become a new phenomenon in American life.
- Individuals who should not be permitted to own a firearm can legally purchase one.
- Many other advanced nations have much lower incidences of mass killings.
- There is no political solution to this issue in sight.
I remain skeptical that restricting guns will make us safer. I doubt that further legal restrictions against buying guns would apply to criminals who by definition are law breakers. I concede that we should consider additional barriers to keeping guns away from those who are mentally unstable. I challenge any reader here to offer a template on how we might accomplish this. There are tens of millions of Americans with mental illness or a history of mental disease. Assuming we could identify these millions of citizens, how would we use this information in the event that some of them wanted to buy a gun? Consider these facts.
- The vast majority of mentally ill Americans will never commit violence.
- Medical ethics and privacy regulations do not permit identifying mentally ill people.
- New or existing laws would not have prevented most or all of these mass killings.
- We have no reliable method to predict a person’s violent potential.
Even if we could eliminate these horrible paroxysms of violence – a worthy and necessary societal objective – we should realize that most of the hundreds of thousands of yearly deaths by gun are not mass murders.
Like everyone, I am angry, vexed and ashamed. As physicians understand, making the diagnosis is often the easy part.
