August 7, 2019
We grieve with all those harmed by recent mass shootings in Dayton, El Paso, and Gilroy.
DREDF unequivocally rejects attempts to scapegoat mental illness in all areas – including gun violence – and stands in solidarity with our friends, colleagues, and allies who seek real, effective policy solutions to racism, xenophobia, mental health stigma, and mass murder.
The honest, difficult, and inconvenient truth for those who would prefer to blame mental illness rather than enact genuine solutions to rampant gun violence, is that in the United States bigoted beliefs and easy access to deadly weapons and ammunition has led to increased incidents of domestic terrorism.
Elected officials in the nation’s capital and across the United States have let us down over and over again by failing to enact common sense gun control measures that could curtail mass shootings and other incidences of gun violence. Instead of getting rid of weapons that have devastated the lives of thousands, far too many political leaders continue to attempt the old magician’s trick of misdirection to falsely lay the blame on mental illness.
We are not fooled. We are also angry. Angry about chronic inaction by our government and angry about the excuses people like the President keep making.
In an address to the nation on Monday, August 5, President Trump once again asserted the false accusation that mental health issues are a root cause of mass shootings, and stated “mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun.” The President continued by saying that some should be forced into “involuntarily confinement” when necessary, without clearly defining who those people are and what that means in this context.
DREDF condemns the President’s words that seem to purposefully confuse and conflate hatred, bigotry and gun violence with mental illness. Casting mass murder as a mental health issue while repeatedly failing to act on available solutions to gun violence is not only misguided, it also distracts attention from their own failures.
Cast aside the self-serving political rhetoric and this much remains clear: All nations are home to people with mental illness and people who play violent video games, but no country experiences anywhere near the number of mass shootings that occur in the United States.
The unsubstantiated scapegoating of mental illness by the President and others conveniently sidesteps one critical factor missing elsewhere: in the U.S., we continue to allow easy access to a wide array of firearms, including assault rifles, that are more suitable for warfare than for recreation and to ammunition, like large capacity magazines, that make deadly weapons even more lethal in group or community settings.
According to the Washington Post, “Before the 1999 shooting in which two teens killed 13 and wounded 24 at Columbine High School in Littleton, CO, mass shootings took place roughly every six months. Between Columbine and the mass shooting in Charleston, SC in June 2017, the count was one every 2½ months. After Charleston? One almost every six weeks.”
Last week there were three.
Our government has had over two decades to take meaningful steps to prevent such tragedies. They clearly have not.
To continue to stigmatize mental illness rather than taking increasingly urgent, concrete steps that could actually halt mass shootings by improving background checks, closing gun show loopholes, and banning assault weapons and large capacity magazines like those ones used most recently in Gilroy, El Paso, and Dayton is a dereliction of duty. Congress and the President are increasingly complicit.