TODAY’S BIBLE VERSE

May the peoples praise you, God; may all the peoples praise you. Psalm 67:3

Assessing the real risk

According to a March 30 article (“Mental illness stalks mass attacks”), a Secret Service study has found that 64 percent of suspects linked to mass attacks in schools and other public places last year “suffered from symptoms of mental illness.” We must be careful how we use that information. We need to view the risks from the opposite direction.

Suppose, for example, that about one percent of the U.S. population — about 3,257,000 people — suffer from symptoms of mental illness. If there were 28 mass attacks in public places in the U.S. last year (the number covered in the Secret Service report), that makes the chance that a person suffering from such symptoms will become a suspect in such an attack in a particular year around 28-to-3,257,000, or

LETTERS

Email letters to letters@commercial appeal.com; mail Letters to the Editor, The Commercial Appeal, 495 Union, Memphis, TN 38103; or click on the “Submit Letter” link on the Opinion page atcommercialappeal.com. 0.0009 percent...

Some of the suspects included in the Secret Service’s survey had characteristics other than mental illness symptoms per se that many people would agree made them high risks. To gather the most relevant data, we should survey not just the people who have become suspects, but all people who can be identified as having characteristics that we think may make them high risks. Such characteristics might, by the way, include the possession of weapons or weapon-related accessories of certain types.

Daniel Case, Memphis