While I do think that mental health is a very important topic for american discussion... I don't think that the place to really hash it out is in the terms of violence that persons with mental illnesses perpetrate. Self-harm comes much more to mind with mental illnesses, as does suicide, and also disability.
It's, hah... actually harder to do some things, for example, shooting people... with a disability that turns a person inward. Sure... it's possible that you could give someone schizophrenic a gun, or they could find one, or they could even seek one... but the statistics suggest that the first person they'll use that thing on is either themselves.... or, say they're experiencing the double positive symptoms of paranoia and hallucination: those in their *immediate* vicinity.
Otherwise, they're going to have a hard time simply navigating to where they might want to go to kill someone (if under the particular influence of their mind garbling stuff). Mentally ill people definitely shouldn't have guns, though... because they have a damn good shot of killing themselves, or hurting someone else (in the immediate vicinity) whom they do not recognize as themselves any longer. It takes a lot of will to get up, get a gun, go outside, navigate a city, arrive at the destination you wanted, and shoot people (or, more likely, a person) up... have to be pretty stable to maintain something like that.
....
Calculation is the sane man's game.
It's, hah... actually harder to do some things, for example, shooting people... with a disability that turns a person inward. Sure... it's possible that you could give someone schizophrenic a gun, or they could find one, or they could even seek one... but the statistics suggest that the first person they'll use that thing on is either themselves.... or, say they're experiencing the double positive symptoms of paranoia and hallucination: those in their *immediate* vicinity.
Otherwise, they're going to have a hard time simply navigating to where they might want to go to kill someone (if under the particular influence of their mind garbling stuff). Mentally ill people definitely shouldn't have guns, though... because they have a damn good shot of killing themselves, or hurting someone else (in the immediate vicinity) whom they do not recognize as themselves any longer. It takes a lot of will to get up, get a gun, go outside, navigate a city, arrive at the destination you wanted, and shoot people (or, more likely, a person) up... have to be pretty stable to maintain something like that.
....
Calculation is the sane man's game.
Please give me a home where cloud buffalo roam
Where the dear and the strangers can play
Where sometimes is heard a discouraging word
But the skies are not stormy all day
