People With Mental Health Conditions Deserve To Own A Gun Too

This is a hard subject in the United States. Not only the question of whether someone with an illness or a disorder should be allowed to own a firearm, but whether anyone should. I keep coming back to it because of my college years. I was going to school in Colorado during the Aurora shooting, and the newscasts kept floating the idea that the shooter had bipolar disorder, along with what sounded like a list of other problems. I remember linking bipolar with violence in my head. Now that I live with the same illness, I can see how foolish that leap was.

Yes, it is frightening that a person with bipolar disorder shot people. But the real question is why he shot. A person who cannot get the help they need, or who refuses to get it, might pull a trigger, and no law stops that cleanly. What we can actually do is build facilities and care for the growing number of people who are developing mental illnesses.

Mental illness does not only show up in the teens and early twenties, either. It can arrive in someone's fifties, even their late sixties. As a society, we treat the mentally ill the way white slaveholders treated black people: as a group to pin blame on.

Where do I land? The title gives it away, but let me be plain. I would ban certain kinds of guns and pass laws limiting access to them. I am not a gun enthusiast. I am going on what I have read and what I know. Even so, you cannot strip a person of a legal right to own a gun just because they carry a diagnosis. That is no different from saying a particular ethnic group cannot have guns because some of its members form violent gangs.

We pour all our attention into the mass shootings, convinced that focusing there will keep people safe from the next maniac. I do not think that is the most useful place to put our effort. Stepping in earlier and making mental healthcare easier to reach would do more.

Education and plain word-of-mouth, people sharing what they have actually lived through, is one of the better moves available to us. If I were not mentally ill myself, I would probably be afraid of a mentally ill person owning a gun. Having been on the inside, I see things differently. People with mental illness are no more violent than anyone considered sane. Most of us are like me. I have never hit another person, and I never intend to.

The longer I sit with the gun-law debate, the more absurd the case against the mentally ill looks. Deciding who gets denied a firearm is an ugly business. One person shoots strangers in a public place, maybe because of some problem, maybe a mental illness, and suddenly everyone is afraid of mental illness in general. The media tends to get bipolar disorder wrong, so when people absorb that version, they assume anyone with the diagnosis is dangerously unhinged.

There was once a proposal, believe it or not, to put everyone who had ever gone to therapy, AA meetings, or drug counseling into a government database. A terrible, witless idea.

So who actually needs watching, and who should lose the right to carry? A person can be bipolar or have some other condition, but if you look at the actual cases, most shooters have a long, steady history of violence. When a shooter has no such history, something else is driving it. These people get judged by what they did, not by a diagnosis. After the fact, observers will guess the shooter must have been bipolar or otherwise ill, but that is somebody else reading the situation and deciding the shooter was mentally ill.

People with a mental illness have rights. We are not to blame for being sick. Nobody asked for an illness as a Christmas gift. Strip it down and everybody has the right to protect themselves, including people with psychiatric conditions. Once a person owns a gun, what they do with it is their choice.

I am not saying we should do nothing to stop shootings. I am saying that barring mentally ill patients from owning guns is ludicrous. When someone decides to carry out a mass shooting, there were usually steps along the way that could have interrupted it. It also falls on the person to learn how to advocate for themselves. And there are plenty of reasons someone pulls a trigger. A person set on killing will keep hunting for a way to get their fix.

This is only my opinion. You are welcome to your own. - Susan Page