“Mental Health” Without Definition or Actual Legislative Remedy Has Become the new “Thoughts and Prayers” Mantra
The renewed, knee-jerk reaction among Republican leaders to hang gun violence on unaddressed mental health issues is so routine that you, like me, may have heard the response to yet another mass shooting in Texas to be as empty a practical gesture as good-meaning thoughts and prayer.
But for a few reasons, the insistence by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott that said addressing mental health — not tightening gun laws — can prevent shootings such as last weekend’s incident at a shopping mall is worth more attention.
As a large majority of Americans, as reflected in polling, think the answer to gun violence has something to do with missing regulations about who can legally obtain guns and the proliferation of weapons and ammunition that are more military in style than anything related to sporting or even home defense. After several recent shootings, we’ve learned that people with identified mental health problems were able to buy weapons.
Instead, we have heard Abbott and Republican leaders more widely and repeatedly opposing changes for gun-safety laws and regulations. Thus, mental issues without definition or actual legislative remedy has become the new “thoughts and prayers” mantra. Anything but guns themselves. Got it.
In this case, Abbotts’s position strikes as particularly hubristic since he personally cut last year’s Texas mental health agencies in half to commit the extra $211 million to border deployments of National Guardsmen. More broadly, red states have resisted using or complicated the use of so-called red flag laws to keep those who are found through court intervention to have mental or emotional problems from obtaining weapons or ammunition legally. And Republicans have specifically moved in more jurisdictions in which they control rule making to extend gun ownership for those identified in domestic violence, to expand locations where guns are legal to barrooms, or generally to widen open-carry laws.
What Are They Talking About?
So, one question is what exactly Abbott and other Republican leaders mean by expanding mental health services when they also oppose Medicaid and government-supported health services altogether.
More broadly, however, is whether there actually is real link between extending mental health insurance and services with the spiraling number of mass shootings.
From research, there is little question that most shooters involved in mass killings have had contact over time with some kind of mental health professional. The Texas suspect was ousted from the military over an undefined mental problem.
Unless there are specific immediate threats, however, the systems involving mental health are cut off from intervening in availability of guns or other weapons.
Of course, only a tiny number of people seeking mental health intervention are showing up as mass shooters. A 2016 literature review by the American Psychiatric Association found that mass shooters with serious mental illness account for less than 1 percent of annual gun-related homicides. It also found that about 3 percent of violent crimes and an even smaller share of those involving a firearm are committed by individuals with serious mental illness.
No one knows whether people ill enough to shoot up schools or malls even seek out mental health services. Anyone with an illegally obtained gun is beyond all such services or regulations.
With more shooters outwardly professing political, anti-social, racialist, hate-based manifestos, the shooters themselves are asking us to extend our understanding of societal anger and frustration as some kind of personal mental illness. Simply put: Is access to mental health services generally responsible for the country’s gun crisis? Could pumping money into health services for depression, emotional upset, reaction to uncertainty and isolation help lessen gun violence directly?
Doing so couldn’t hurt, but it seems a stretch at best that there would be any more immediate link to whatever hate drives a guy who festoons his body with Nazi symbols or issues social media posts with racist hate from picking up his automatic-style rifle or manipulated handgun to start sweeping a school or mall with scores of killing bullets.
Masking the Problem
Vox News argues that “It’s not clear that addressing (Texas’) mental health crisis will have any meaningful impact on preventing gun violence, given the large body of research that shows most individuals with serious mental health issues never become violent. Rather, Republicans’ rhetoric around mental health issues — a playbook long practiced by gun-rights advocates — serves to distract from discussions that they are unwilling to have around gun control.”
Since the covid pandemic, reports have been widespread about the increased demand facing mental health professionals for a variety of concerns from loneliness and isolation to family issues to society anxieties.
In Texas, Vox noted, a U.S. Census Bureau report suggested that about 37 percent of Texas adults reported symptoms of anxiety or a depressive disorder, compared to the national average of about 32 percent. Mental Health America, a nonprofit advocacy group, found that Texas had the worst access to mental health services overall as of 2022 when considering “access to insurance, access to treatment, quality and cost of insurance, access to special education, and workforce availability.” As of 2023, 98 percent of the state’s 254 counties were at least partially designated as “mental health professional shortage areas” by the federal government.
Other such studies have prompted the Texas legislature to consider boosting state mental health services, but less than what had been in place.
At bottom line, blaming gun violence epidemic on mental health issues masks the much stronger link between gun ownership and gun deaths, Vox argues. A 2013 Boston University-led study, for instance, found that for each percentage point increase in gun ownership at the household level, the state firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9 percent.
We need more mental health services for a wide variety of emotional stress from living with constant inflation to increased isolation, social media shaming and unresolved conflicts, and the insistence of half the country to deny realities about everything from who won the election to whether climate science is real. It would be good if Governor Abbott and colleagues could recognize that fear and frustration over of gun violence are stressors of their own.
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