Guns or Mental Health: Cause of Newtown Tragedy
Laurie McCormick, MD FAPA
I decided to focus on the mental health issues related to the horrific and very tragic shootings that took the lives of so many innocent children and teachers in Newtown, Connecticut last month. The news coverage of this event and the national discussion that ensued over gun control and improving mental health make it imperative that we psychiatrists in Iowa become an active part of this discussion. On the issue of gun control, it seems that the one point many people can agree on is that we should place a ban on assault rifles and high capacity magazines. After a school massacre in Scotland that killed 16 children and a teacher in a primary school, the UK banned private ownership of all cartridge ammunition handguns of any caliber and there have been no shootings since. That same year a mass shooting occurred in Australia and that country also enacted strict gun laws and it hasn't had a similar massacre since.1 One year ago an angry sociopathic man attempted a similar killing spree in a classroom setting in China, but since he only had access to a knife the 22 children were injured, but no one died.2
A week after the shooting, the CEO of the NRA called for no changes to gun laws and instead blamed video games and the media for causing this tragedy and proposed putting an armed guard in every U.S. school, claiming that “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." 3 Unfortunately, the good guy with a gun was unable to stop two teenagers from killing 13 students in Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in 1999. While there is no single answer about why the Sandy Hook massacre happened, or how it can be prevented in the future, it is important to note that “the vast majority of homicides are carried out by outwardly normal people in the grip of all too ordinary human aggression to whom we provide nearly unfettered access to deadly force.” 4 Dr. Richard Friedman, a psychiatrist from Cornell Medical College concluded in a commentary about the misguided focus on mental health after this tragedy that “most of these killers are young men who are not floridly psychotic, but tend to be paranoid loners who hold a grudge and are full of rage.” He also notes that there is “overwhelming epidemiological evidence that the vast majority of people with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts and only about four percent of violence in the United States can be attributed to people with mental illness.” Unfortunately, psychiatrists are still not very good at predicting who is likely to do something like this again. More