I was on the Hill on Thursday, when Miriam Carey drove her
car into a White House barricade with her one-year-old child in the back seat.
We locked the doors, pulled the blinds down, and one of the employees said
something about Navy Yard.  Something
about how employees didn’t have to go through metal detectors at Navy Yard but
they do on the Hill—so we’re safe. We were under “shelter in place”
instructions for a little less than an hour—I couldn’t breathe easy.

Miriam Carey was a schizophrenic. She believed President
Obama was surveilling her house. Adam Lanza suffered from Aspergers and sensory
processing disorder. Seung-Hui Cho had been in and out of mental health
consultations, suffered from consistent anxiety and depression, and had
suicidal and homicidal ideations. Jared Loughner is batshit crazy—I believe
that’s the correct medical terminology. You’ve seen pictures of James Holmes as
the Joker—he doesn’t exactly paint a picture of sanity, either. Aaron Alexis had a
history of paranoid episodes, was prone to anger-induced blackouts, and heard
voices from his microwave.

Every single person that’s ever engaged in a mass shooting
has a history of mental illness. That’s a redundant sentence—killing sprees
ipso facto indicate underlying mental illness. But our policy focus is on the
gun debate. The NRA’s unofficial slogan is “Guns don’t kill people; people kill
people.” Now, I don’t usually go around commending trigger-happy folks who know
nothing about the Constitution except that it protects their rights to bear
arms. Yeah—it also protects your right to not have to quarter soldiers in your
home. Tell me more about how that’s relevant in today’s world. But—they do have
a point, the NRA. Their point being that the genesis of our gun violence
problem is not the existence of guns and their mismanagement, but rather the
existence of people with issues. 

Now, don’t get me wrong. Guns help. But mental illness
should not be in the fringes of the debate since clearly it’s the common
denominator between all perpetrators of mass shootings. Why we are not
connecting these dots—why mental health is not getting more press—why it’s not
THE focal point of all debate—these are questions that baffle me. And they’re
about to baffle you; I’m gonna spit some knowledge.

In the last 30 years, there have been 62 mass shootings.
Fifty of the perpetrators of these shootings got their guns legally.  That’s eighty
percent. That’s an overwhelming majority. Has that stat blown your mind yet?
Let it sink in. Every time something like Sandy Hook or Aurora or Navy Yard
happens, we start up with the gun control debate again. Turns out, that’s
completely unnecessary because the problem all along has been not that guns are
being illegally obtained, but that insane folks have access to these guns. And
then—surprise!—being insane, they go out and do things characteristically
insane, such as say, shoot up a theatre or kill little children.

So let’s focus on the real problem, and how to solve it. Joe
Rogan (clearly an authority on mental health policy) Tweeted: “This country has
a mental health problem disguised as a gun problem and a tyranny problem
disguised as a security problem.” Now, Joe Rogan’s brain cells may have taken a
punishment during his MMA days, but the dude has a point. Plus, I think he’s
kind of cute so I’m tempted to agree with him. What we need is more high
profile people to recognize this and tell Congress about it, so that maybe we
can work on not having innocent victims all over Washington D.C. streets every
other week, dead kids in Connecticut, and dead moviegoers in Aurora because
some guy’s microwave speaks to him. 

Mental health services are constantly underfunded. Committing someone is incredibly difficult and complex–states craft their own laws on the process, but generally it’s required that someone be an imminent danger to society or themselves. Imminent means that the threat must have presented in the past 72 hours–even a past history of violence will not be sufficient to commit this person or even hold him/her for observation. The civil liberty pendulum has swung drastically in the other direction–whereas in the past you could convince a magistrate to have someone committed with virtually no proof, today you essentially need a death threat. Our mental health system deals with the problem only once shit has hit the fan, so to speak. It does not focus on prevention and early intervention. Even with its drastically limited involvement, once people do get committed, the hospital stay is only a few days long–that is, if the patient can get a bed at all. It is no wonder that ignored cases of severe mental health lead to acute episodes like Sandy Hook and Aurora. The state laws on committing someone need to be revised, funding needs to increase, intervention needs to take place earlier. We need to establish more programs like Wraparound Milwaukee that provide “comprehensive individualized and cost-effective care to children with complex mental health needs.” These things can only happen once we recognize the direct link between violence and mental health problems.