Guns Don’t Kill People: The Double-Standard of Mental Health As The Culprit For Crime

The Left routinely minimises the harm and destruction that certain types of criminals inflict on society (particularly when their backgrounds fit within a certain agenda). Instead, they insist on ‘defunding’ the police to address the supposed mental health crises and/or racial prejudices that result in those crimes. Of course, their tune changes drastically when that crime is carried out with a gun in the hands of a white male, with the go-to demand in such cases being the banning of all guns and the priorly noted caveats around mental health being thrown out completely.

Recall the protests surrounding the death of George Floyd in 2020, and how many more ‘victims’ of so-called police brutality were propped up by the Left. Jacob Blake, for instance: you can type his name into any search engine and the top results will simply read “Jacob Blake shooting,” as opposed to any contextual information about his criminal past. Remember that at the time he was shot by police, Blake had an open warrant out for felony sexual assault, and his victim, who had known Blake for 8 years, told police officers he would assault her “around twice a year.”

Instead of condemning him and his actions, though, Kamala Harris told him she was proud of him and the way he was “working through his pain.”

During this time, Leftists shouted for the ‘defunding’ of the police, since apparently mental health specialists were the only professionals capable of handling violent crime with empathy and tact, and in such a way that lethal outcomes could be avoided. Even now, many call for more funding for mental health workers to end crime. For the Left, it seems a minority individual can’t be capable of being genuinely evil or malicious (unless of course it’s SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas).

In light of the recent tragedy in Uvalde, Texas, people called for gun bans across the board. All of a sudden, mental health wasn’t a factor anymore.

A lot of this kind of countrywide fervour seems to be exclusively reserved for crimes committed with guns. Despite mainstream media plastering the names and faces of violent criminals all over, the focus of politicians and Leftists is on the gun rather than the person behind the trigger.

It seems as though some genuinely believe that if the killer hadn’t been able to buy the gun legally then no child would have been killed; as if he couldn’t build a bomb himself or run his car into the schoolyard at recess, or set fire to the school. Or, you know, obtain a firearm illegally. He had no qualms about killing children, an act which is already illegal, so something tells me he would have found a way regardless.

While by no means do I propose that criminals should simply be sat down with a therapist and escape justice for the pain and damage they inflict, the Left makes an interesting distinction which reveals a lot about their psychology. They are far quicker to pounce on the opportunity to disarm members of a populace who don’t seek to do illegal things than they are to hold strong in their supposed principles and championing of mental health care as a significant means of preventing crime.

Some people are so far gone, in their anger or mental illness, that killing with a gun isn’t so much the answer as much as it is to just kill. If they can’t be happy, feel content, or feel that the world is so far gone and irreparable, then it is the rest of the world that must pay. Many mass shooters were mentally ill and their reasons for executing innocents stemmed from that.

In many of the earliest school shootings in the US, for example, the perpetrator felt that they had previously been slighted and through their actions could somehow exact revenge on the victim. In some cases, the perpetrators chose to target an individual who had rejected their romantic advances, with those around the individual also falling victim.

In the deadliest US mass shootings (many of which happened in the recent past), the perpetrators had severe issues with mental health. The Columbine High School shooters for instance: one was deemed “a full-blown psychopath” by a group of psychologists and his accomplice was depressed and strongly felt like he didn’t fit into his school’s culture. With the latter being suicidal and malleable, the former was able to recruit him as his accomplice in carrying out his plan for “judgement day,” an exaction of sacrifice from those that according to him were unworthy of life itself.

Aside from being mentally unwell, both perpetrators had been arrested prior to the Columbine shooting for breaking into a van and stealing electronics. Each of them went through counselling and rehabilitation, passed, and were deemed rehabilitated. (I don’t suppose the Left has considered that people can make it through therapy or counselling sessions and still come out as dangerous individuals on the other side.)

The University of California Santa Barbara shooter was plagued with emotional and mental problems, and was reportedly in psychiatric care from the time he was a young child. Before his murder spree, he threw coffee on two women at a bus stop for supposedly not returning a smile, and had attacked a group of young adults with a water gun filled with orange juice. He felt the world owed him, for the fact that his childhood was filled with bullying and rejection.

Finally, the Uvalde shooter was described by an online acquaintance as “an angry person who was always arguing with people. At other times, he “appeared emotionless,” and frequently threatened others with shooting them; a neighbour believed the shooter was just mad at the world.

These are some of the most prominent shootings in recent history, and they continue to fuel the gun control and policy conversations around wider culture and society. But the thing is, guns haven’t changed much in the past hundred years—their looks and efficiency may have, sure, but it’s not like the most common firearm in the American gun closet is an automatic weapon. Alas, there is more regulation around automatic weapons now than there ever was before, and instead of the number of mass shootings going down, they appear to be going up.

From 2000 to 2020, the vast majority of school shootings have happened in states with the most restrictive gun policies, including Illinois, New York, and New Jersey. Chicago, where gun violence is particularly prevalent, had banned all gun possession up until 2010, and in all the aforementioned states, you need a special license to either own the firearm or carry it covertly. Until recently in New York, you were required to provide proof you had a valid need for a concealed carry permit. But now that the Supreme Court deemed the law too restrictive, New York governor Kathy Hochul made it so that you need to prove you’re of “good moral character” instead. Whatever that means, who knows. Either way, it’s apparently not enough to point to the text in the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

We ought to blame guns as much as we blame car manufacturers or alcohol companies for drunk driving incidents, or incidents of violence carried out with a vehicle or with the help of alcohol. If we’re blaming guns this much, why not start blaming knife manufacturers for stabbing incidents, or big pharma for the overwhelming narcotics crisis in the nation?

The truth that Leftists and politicians avoid, whether out of laziness, ignorance, or maliciousness (or all of the above) is that the gun violence crisis is as much an issue of mental health and the decline of society and culture as is any other crime of vengeance carried out by self-determined societal rejects.

You can blame the world, the 24-hour news cycle, lazy (or flat-out absent) parenting, the abysmal school system, social media, the internet, video games, porn, or anything else, and some of those things do deserve at least some blame. You can cast all the blame in the world on the most deserving culprit, but it isn’t going to rid the world of people that are so angry, hurt, or psychotic that they can only turn their life focus toward causing harm.

So where do we go from here? Despite what the Left would have you believe, most if not all of us on the pro-Second Amendment, pro-firearms side of the aisle are as saddened and enraged when senseless gun violence occurs. In fact, we’re even more enraged because the politicians, surrounded 24 hours a day by elite security details, continually take the chance to say we need to ban all guns and make it impossible for regular people to be able to defend themselves. (Never mind that the police we are supposed to entrust our lives and safety to could very well just sit back and say “it’s beyond my pay grade to risk my life for you.”)

So, how do we continue discussions around policy when it clearly hasn’t been helping? How do we make people care when they never have (i.e. politicians)? What do we do when a grand portion of the voting population is operating with a misdiagnosis of the issue?

Perhaps we can start by acknowledging that it is the fault of the individual before the vehicle or accessory they use, even if they have poor mental health. As much as some professionals seek to help, some of those who are ill can’t or refuse to be cured. After all, in a culture that values victimhood, the more the world is against you, the ‘better’ you are.

From there, all that’s left is accepting that it is now on us to defend ourselves, our children, our loved ones, and our properties. At this point, there’s no putting the firearm genie back in the bottle, as much as the Left will scream that it’s what we need to do.

This is part one of the ‘Guns Don’t Kill People’ Series