Fixing the Mental Health Care System Needs Priority Over Gun Control

By Larry Keane
NSSF will Continue Focus on FixNICS as Our Industry’s Contribution.

Fix NICS
Fix NICS
National Shooting Sports Foundation
National Shooting Sports Foundation

NEWTOWN, Conn –-(Ammoland.com)- Our nation’s mental health care system is broken.

We have known this for many years.  Inadequate community and hospital resources were made even more so by state spending cuts necessitated by the Great Recession, as the National Alliance on Mental Illness documented in a 2011 report.  State, county and municipal budgets are all constrained.

In America today, families must struggle against a fractured system to get real help for their loved ones suffering from mental illness. In addition to services being stretched thin, laws written three decades ago intended to help protect individuals from arbitrary involuntary commitments now too often work against their families, sometimes even endangering them as well as the wider community, as Dr. Miguel Faria has persuasively shown.

Such was the case with Andrew Engeldinger, whose parents urged him for two years to seek treatment for his mental illness, even as he became increasingly paranoid and delusional.  Under Minnesota law and in many other states, individuals cannot be compelled to undergo treatment without direct proof that they are a threat to themselves or others.

In October of last year, Engeldinger went to his Minneapolis workplace, killed the owner, three employees and a UPS driver before he killed himself.

More recently, a school tragedy was averted outside of Atlanta.  A level-headed school office worker rightly is given credit for defusing the situation and talking Michael Hill out of doing the worst at the Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy.  She demonstrated great grace and compassion under pressure.  But it would be wrong to assume that what Antoinette Tuff was able to accomplish that day would have worked with another unstable person at another time and place. For a glimpse into the problems with which the Hill family had to deal, see the on-air discussion between CNN host Piers Morgan and Michael Hill’s brother. It is both disturbing and instructive.

And earlier this week at the Washington D.C. Naval Yard in the person of Aaron Alexis, as we saw last December in Newtown in Adam Lanza, young men with quite different backgrounds and experiences, but both of whom were estranged, angry, isolated and filled with pent-up rage, carried out vicious and merciless attacks on defenseless victims.

Mental health is the common denominator in all these cases. And let us add Aurora mass murderer James Holmes, former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords attacker Jared Loughner, and Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho to the aforementioned roster.

There seems to be widespread agreement on the need to do more to help those with severe mental illness who may have violent tendencies. Yet little action taken has been taken to date on the federal and state levels to even begin the work required to change laws and extend more effective treatment to assist the severely mentally ill and their families.  This is a sad and extremely discouraging commentary on our society.

“Convicted felons and mentally unstable people forfeit the right to possess arms by virtue of the fact that are a potential danger to their fellow citizens,” wrote Dr. Faria.

We agree.  That is why NSSF has been working at the federal and state levels to raise awareness that the states must send all appropriate records, including adjudicated mental health and involuntary commitment records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) used by all federally licensed firearms retailers. Our initiative is called FixNICS.

We can report some real progress, but much remains to be done. Legislatures in Louisiana, South Carolina, Mississippi and New Jersey have acted to improve their reporting to NICS.  Now is the time for Massachusetts to join these states.  Already home to some of the most restrictive gun control regulations in the country, the Massachusetts legislature is considering the adoption of even more laws.  Yet that state ranks dead last in sending records to the NICS system.  So, we were pleased that at recent public hearings around that state, officials focused most of their remarks on the mental health issue.

Massachusetts can fix its NICS reporting.  So can other states.

We know that fixing a long-broken mental health care delivery system won’t be easy. We also know it is where common ground can be found in the always contentious debate on firearms. Those with the medical mental health credentials must take that lead.  For our part at NSSF, we are working to FixNICS on behalf of our members because is the appropriate role for us based on our expertise in working on the front line to prevent firearms from being transferred to those who are prohibited under current law from having them, including the dangerously mentally ill. We are working to build coalitions of interested groups in the mental health, law enforcement and other communities also interested in helping to improve the background check system.

At the same time we will not shy away from continuing to defend our members’ interests as well as the Second Amendment rights of all Americans.

As Dr. Faria wrote, “Let’s stop demonizing guns and end the shootings by incarcerating the criminals and healing the sick, for much work needs to be done in the mental health arena …”

Larry Keane is senior vice president and general counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation. Follow him on Twitter at @lkeane.

About NSSFThe National Shooting Sports Foundation is the trade association for the firearms industry. Its mission is to promote, protect and preserve hunting and the shooting sports. Formed in 1961, NSSF has a membership of more than 6,000 manufacturers, distributors, firearms retailers, shooting ranges, sportsmen’s organizations and publishers. For more information, log on to www.nssf.org.

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Nick

Jerry, while I agree with you that psychiatry is a mostly bullshit field, there are some people who are truly psychotic. Always have been. Serial killers are one example of this. They have been around throughout history. There are people that are naturally extremely violent. But you are right. They can not be fixed. Especially by drugs. I believe you are correct about the mass shootings though. And, for lack of a better term, behavior corrective drugs only make the problem worse. They backfire in a terrible way. I believe Elizabeth is correct about political correctness being a major part… Read more »

Jerry

You guys are looking at the right area to end these mass shootings, but you are addressing the wrong “why”, which is the actual item if handled will actually produce the change we are all looking for. The problem is in the mental illness area but the resolution of the problem does not lie in further mental health treatment by psychiatry. Psychiatry treats mental illness with psychtropic drugs or putting 40,000 volts of electricity through a person’s brain; both are the most inhumane acts that can be used on a person and are actually designed to kill the patient over… Read more »

Elisabeth Baer

When are we going to admit that political correctness and infringing on individual rights is contributing to our reticence in helping those with mental illness? Until we admit that those who need treatment and have difficulty asking for it need to have others step forward and encourage them we are not going to solve this serious problem!

TEX

Mental health care needs to start with the liberal gungrabbing sombitches in DC.esp.,and then around the country.

Becker

It is time to stop mixing in ex-military who have PTSD, with these nuts who commit mass murder. I have had PTSD for 40 yrs. and have 100’s of friends who do. None of us have killed anyone after coming back. If people will take the time to check, they will see that ex-military with PTSD kill less than the general population. If course gun grabbers are only interested in targeting a large group that they can take guns from. PTSD is just a bad experience. It does not and has not changed our way of thinking. We still know… Read more »

TEX

how did mass fix this problem ?