I’m mentally ill, but don’t worry, I’m more likely to shoot myself than anyone else.
I’m not going to be bipartisan about this. If there is one hallmark of the gun-toting Republican solution to violence, it’s the scapegoat. Like any good diversion, pointing at mental illness as the primary cause for mass shootings only makes sense at the surface.
Look no further than your National Rifle Association. Sure it’s an easy target to shoot for, but it’s also a target with more than five million members across the United States.
It’s not just NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch drawing the discourse toward a smoke screen of false empathy for people struggling with mental illness.
Our political leaders making school shootings synonymous with mental illness perpetuates a damning stigma which is statistically false.
The discussion around guns and mental illness needs to start with suicide.
To start with, the CDC reports that gun deaths by suicide eclipses the death toll from its belligerent counterpart homicide. Specifically, in 2013 suicides make up just over 60 percent of all gun deaths, with homicides equaling around 40 percent. Contrary to popular belief, your loved ones are more likely to shoot themselves than they are to be killed by a deranged gunman.
Harvard’s School of Public presents a bleak stat on the reality of a successful attempt and the use of a gun.
On the low end, cutting only nets only a one percent death rate. Once a gun is introduced that number skyrockets to 82 percent with drowning falling behind at 16 percent.
For stats savvy policy makers, this presents an obvious interest in limiting access to guns to those with a history of suicidality.
I should know, California is a state that has ERPO laws and I’m two years into being on one.
I’m no stranger to suicide, involuntary holds, mental hospitals or illness. Within the span of one year I was hospitalized twice, I won’t bore you with the details, but I was suicidal. I’m still suicidal.
I don’t need a gun and I couldn’t care less about being barred from owning one, just don’t make me a scapegoat for your half-baked argument.
I drive down the freeway and I see freeway dividers I could speed into. I prep food for the week and I see the cutting knife as something I could lunge into my throat. I walk up to the top floor of parking garage one and I see a place to jump.
If I had a gun I would see it as just another way to kill myself.
I only have an interest in turning that gun on myself and fuck the assumption that I would turn that barrel towards anyone else.
I empathise with you for not understanding. Part of me hopes that you reader never have that voice whispering that you’re better off dead.
If you do hear that voice, I also hope you don’t have a gun.
Soley attributing the latest mass shooting to the shooter’s mental state only adds to the stereotype. It makes me and others hesitant to seek help. This fear of others deeming me dangerous for my disease cuts deeper than any blade I could take to my wrist.
Even misrepresentations of the truth have power. This stigma is what pushed me to drop out of high school. Being seen as a danger just taught me to bury my problems for the sake of others.
My environment told me that I would never make it this far, that I needed to medicate myself to a baseline and be content with barely a will to live.
I need to self-harm just save myself from burning out. I’m constantly worried that I’ll never see outside of those boxes.
I’m not saying that premeditated mass murder is born out of the mind of a stable individual, I’m just not myopic enough to lay the blame solely on the individual.
A government that doesn’t look out for it own people and a culture that demonizes the other is part of the problem with mass shootings.
This is the same government that defunds mental health resources while diagnosing it as a key factor in mass shootings.
I don’t have faith that we’ll do anything about it either, we have one dominant political group that ignores the problem and another that’ll only pay lip service to dealing with it.
Our inability to close the pandora’s box on guns reveals our societal illness.