Bring sanity to gun policy for mentally ill

Part of the stigma associated with mental illness is the notion that the mentally ill are uniformly dangerous.

An estimated 20 percent of Americans have some form of mental illness. These people can be helped, if legislators would treat the mentally ill with more compassion — and free up more funding to help doctors cure their problems.

It doesn’t help that any time there is a mass shooting, the immediate response is the perpetrator must be crazy.

This sad lack of knowledge about the mentally ill is perhaps only eclipsed by our lack of understanding of the underlying causes of gun violence.

When the two issues collide, the result is legislative mayhem.

Last week Republicans brought before the Senate a bill that would revoke an Obama administration regulation preventing individuals with serious mental illness from purchasing guns.

The rule, Republicans argue, abridges their constitutional rights.

The House had already passed the bill, and the Senate approved it Wednesday.

President Trump is expected to sign it into law.

Trump should veto the bill, but not out of fears that the mentally ill are a threat to the public. They aren’t. Research shows that 96 percent of the violent acts in the United States are committed by people with no mental illness.

Mentally ill people are actually much more likely to be victims of violence than culprits.

Trump should veto the bill because those with serious mental illnesses can be a threat to themselves.

More than half of all deaths cause by guns are suicides, and those suffering major depression are four times more likely than the general public to kill themselves.

An estimated 20 percent of Americans have some form of mental illness.

These people can be helped, if legislators would treat the mentally ill with more compassion — and free up more funding to help doctors cure their problems. Medical professionals know that three out of every four people with serious mental illnesses can be successfully treated.

What they don’t need is the growing belief that they are responsible for the mass shootings in the United States.

Lawmakers can’t hope to get at the root causes of gun violence as long as the Centers for Disease Control fails to conduct policy-informed research on the issue.

The CDC stopped its efforts in 1996 when the NRA intimidated Congress into threatening to strip the agency’s funding if it published studies promoting gun control.

President Obama tried to reverse the ban following the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting in 2012, but Republicans in the Senate blocked the effort.

America is never well served by efforts to block basic scientific research that could inform people on critical public health issues.

Let’s bring sanity to the connection between the mentally ill and gun violence.