To the Editor:

Gun violence and mental illness, we have got to act!

But how? And on the basis of what relevant facts?

There is a common misconception that serious mental illness is a major cause of gun violence toward others. This is a flawed, overreaction to school shootings and other mass gun killings.

To think this way presents significant obstacles to advancing a thoughtful public dialogue: a dialogue on what effective interventions would be that address the connection between gun violence and mental health concerns.

Only 3 to 5  percent of all violent acts are committed by persons with serious mental illness (Fazel & Grann, “The population impact of severe mental illness on violent crime” in the American Journal of Psychiatry).

We need to be very clear as to what we actually know presently. Around 30,000 people per year, about 80 a day, die from gun violence in the United States.

Most of these do not die in a mass murder rampage committed by an individual with mental illness. Mass shootings account for less than 1 percent of deaths each year due to gun violence.

In contrast, suicide, which is associated with mental illness, accounts for about 65 percent of firearm deaths. Most of those who commit suicide have a significant psychiatric disorder. Most of those who commit homicides do not.

The great majority of homicides, the bulk of the remaining one-third of firearm deaths, are related to interpersonal disorders, frequently within a single family.

Therefore, if guns are removed from all individuals with serious mental disorders, hardly a dent would be made in the number of firearm homicides.

A MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment, 2015 Study found that only 1 percent of gun violence against strangers was committed by individuals with mental illness.

Even if all violence, not just gun violence, could somehow be eliminated from those committed by persons with mental disorders, the resulting reality is that 90 to 97  percent of violent behaviors would continue to occur, as demonstrated by Appelbaum in his 2013 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry. Most violent behavior, including firearm violence, is associated with factors other than mental illness.

Further, a 2015 study, “Guns, Impulsive Angry Behavior, and Mental Disorders,” from the National Comorbidity Survey by Swanson, Robertson, and Frisman, found that only 8 to 10 percent of individuals for whom there was evidence of psychopathology and impulsive angry behavior and who carried firearms have ever been psychiatrically hospitalized. Only a small fraction of that small percentage had been involuntarily hospitalized.

Therefore, demands for a “national database of lunatics” to get “homicidal maniacs, whackos, and nut jobs” who are going “to slaughter masses of people” “off the streets” reflects an immature impulsiveness and a serious ignorance of the complexities of what we are facing in our national levels of gun violence which, while problematically endemic, are not the epidemic it is painted as being.

So let us be very careful to discover the relevant facts before we start demanding this, that, or the other quick-fix legislation or regulation to immediately “solve” this “problem” as though obvious “solutions” were near at hand.

We are faced with a profoundly complex dilemma for which there will be only difficult and much-debated trade-offs. Let’s seek to identify common misconceptions and focus instead on evidence-based facts as we work toward sound solutions.

And, lastly, these interrelated issues can’t be distilled simply into being primarily caused by those with mental illness — whatever the spectrum of varied types of mental illnesses (from periods of depression, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder involving the use of prescribed mood control drugs to episodes of psychotic breaks or ?) is eventually deemed to require restrictions of one sort or the other.

Another related concern is how the government-approved psychiatrists and psychologists will interpret such government programs once enacted. That will require careful thought given the ways in which governments have, historically, abused such determinations.

Victor Porlier

East Berne