Guns and mental health
Like many of us, I have had a difficult time processing the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas. As if that weren’t enough, it came within days of an alleged white supremacist killing 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, an anti-Asian shooting in Dallas’ Koreatown neighborhood, and a shooting at a Taiwanese church in Southern California that left one dead and five injured. I had a whole thing I was going to do for this week, but I’ll save it for next time. Instead, I have compiled some data and public money facts and takeaways from what I have read this week about mental health and gun policy. This newsletter is free for everyone.
The most effective state laws for curbing mass shootings
A study in 2020 found that permit requirements and magazine capacity limits—not just universal background checks—were the most effective policies at curbing mass shootings. Specifically:
Requiring people to have a permit in order to own or purchase a gun can reduce the occurrence of a mass shooting in the first place.
Laws that limit magazine capacity to less than 10 rounds in detachable magazines can be effective in reducing the number of casualties.
Background checks without permit laws are not as effective but work well in tandem with permit requirements.
The research was published by Michael Siegel, a professor at the Tufts University School of Medicine. He told Bloomberg CityLab that, in addition to the three policies above, he considers the following two violence prevention policies as necessary for curbing gun violence:
Prohibiting anyone who has been convicted of committing a violent crime at any level from possessing a gun. Currently only convicted felons can’t own a gun. Changing that would make a big difference in domestic violence cases, which are usually prosecuted as misdemeanors.
Pass a red flag law that allows law enforcement to take action when there is credible evidence that somebody does pose risk. “In most mass shootings, there is some warning sign that the perpetrator has given,” Siegel said. “It's almost always the case that there was some history of threatened violence or planned violence.”
What’s likely to happen? Prior school shootings have spurred state-level gun law changes, but generally only in blue states. That has created a widening gulf between the states when it comes to gun regulations.
For example, Route Fifty reports that red flag laws proliferated after the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida that killed 14 students and three staff members. Of the 19 states that now have such a law, only one (Indiana) is a Republican-led state. Meanwhile, some red states have deregulated gun laws in recent years. Last year, Texas lawmakers made it legal for residents to carry a handgun without a permit.
Profiling school shooters
Two criminologists who study the life histories of mass shooters in the U.S. have built a comprehensive database of mass public shootings and have found similarities among the perpetrators of the 13 school shootings since 1966.
Four killed someone at another location, always a family member at a residence.
The majority are lone gunmen.
The average age is 18 years old.
Most have a connection (i.e., former student) to the school.
Most shooters intend to die in the attack (and do either by suicide or are shot by police).
Most tend to preempt their attacks by leaving posts, messages or videos warning of their intent.
The researchers are James Densley, a professor at Metropolitan State University, and Hamline University professor Jillian Peterson. In an op-ed on The Conversation, they wrote that school shooters are motivated by a generalized anger: “Their path to violence involves self-hate and despair turned outward at the world, and our research finds they often communicate their intent to do harm in advance as a final, desperate cry for help. The key to stopping these tragedies is for society to be alert to these warning signs and act on them immediately.”
Here we are again. What started out as a gun violence question ends up as a mental health question. Fact is, it’s cheaper and easier to get a gun in most places than it is to access health care. That prospect can make it hard for cops to correctly judge a situation when they are called in to deal with someone having a mental health crisis. And no small wonder that the CDC says 60% of all gun deaths are suicides.
‘Cops and Clinicians’ programs save money and lives
One positive development in the tangled issues of criminal justice and mental health are “cops and clinicians” programs that a number of cities are piloting. The programs pair mental health practitioners with police out in the field with the goal of expanding access to mental health and reducing arrests. Initial results of are positive.
In St. Louis, for example, the city launched a program in the summer of 2021 that deploys a licensed clinical social worker with a police officer to provide on-site mental health services and reduce the need for police and EMS response. It also started a 911 diversion program that sends calls to crisis counselors and mental health specialists when needed.
The results: A study done eight months into the program found that in 5,000 cases:
95% of individuals in crisis were diverted from arrest and connected to services.
87% were diverted from hospitalization.
It saved the police department and EMS more than 2,000 work hours to help them respond to other priorities, saving the city an estimated $2.2 million.
Four out of five cases sent through the 911 diversion program were resolved on the line without requiring police or EMS.
Those diversions saved nearly 500 ambulance dispatches and an estimated $400,000.
These results remind me of a recent statistic I heard about water systems: we lose around 40% of our water just to leaks and most of those leaks are underground where we can’t see them. By directing resources to finding and solving the unseen problems, we put ourselves in a position to stop them from doing serious damage. The same can be said for gun violence: early interventions not only work, they save taxpayer dollars—and lives—in the long run.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading to the end and (as usual), if you’ve found this post useful, please tell a friend!