American Madness

American Association For The Advancement Of Science:

Counter to a lot of public opinion, having a mental illness does not necessarily make a person more likely to commit gun violence. According to a new study, a better indicator of gun violence was access to firearms.

A study by researchers at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston looked into the association between gun violence and mental health in a group of 663 young adults in Texas. Their results were published in the journal Preventive Medicine.

"Counter to public beliefs, the majority of mental health symptoms examined were not related to gun violence," said Dr. Yu Lu, a postdoctoral research fellow at UTMB and the lead author of the study.

What researchers found instead was that individuals who had gun access were approximately 18 times more likely to have threatened someone with a gun. Individuals with high hostility were about 3.5 times more likely to threaten someone.

"These findings have important implications for gun control policy efforts," Lu said.

Each year, an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 Americans are injured by firearms and 30,000 to 40,000 die from firearms, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

"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," Lu said. "What we found is that the link between mental illness and gun violence is not there."

For nearly an entire generation, Republicans have blocked most of the funding CDC needs in order to study gun violence. In some states, they've made it illegal for doctors to ask if there's a gun in the home when examining patients who present with (eg) Depression or possible Domestic Abuse injuries.

One of the many shitty things that have come out of Bob Mueller's investigation of the 2016 election is the near-certainty that Russian money was (maybe still is) being laundered through the NRA and injected into (mostly) Republican campaign coffers.

So among the 3 or 4 "absolute top priority items" on the To-Do list is fixing that incredibly stoopid Citizens United thing.

There's no limit on the amount of money you can spend supporting a particular candidate (or an issue that the candidate can stand in front of and claim as his own). As long as that regime is in place, we have a de facto Plutocracy, which makes it harder not to think the republic is already dead, and we're just arguing over who gets to do what with the corpse.

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