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.