No Link between Gun Violence and Mental Illness

Since I began advocating for protecting civil liberty for the mentally ill, the comment I hear most often is this: “But what if we let them control their own treatment, and they go and shoot up a school?” Sadly, this is a widely-held misconception. The truth is that mentally ill people are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators of it. As stated by one of the authors of the study, “Much of the limited research on gun violence and mental illness has focused on violence among individuals with severe mental illnesses or rates of mental illness among individuals arrested for violent crimes. What we found is that the link between mental illness and gun violence is not there.”

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190207102607.htm

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