Stopping Gun Violence - Lydia Brown writes for The Task Force

This is very good. Starts with demilitarization, which is word I'd like to hear more often from progressive policy types. And of particular interest to this crowd:

3. Do not insert mental illness or disability into gun violence policy-making. 

Linking mental health to gun violence is a myth that must be put to rest, and we are committed to countering the shaming of people with mental health issues from all sides in the gun debate.

As an intersectional progressive organization, the National LGBTQ Task Force is a strong supporter of disability rights (including the rights of people with psychiatric disabilities and mental illness, or who identify as mad), and believes that advocacy around mental health should be led by and for people with lived experience as consumers and patients.

Policies that single out people with mental illnesses or psychosocial disabilities, such as tying mental health reform advocacy to gun violence prevention advocacy, stigmatize people with mental illnesses/ psychosocial disabilities as violent, and are not effective. That stigma directly causes many harms including increased stereotyping, medical discrimination, heightened risk of police violence, and lower likelihood that people who would like to access supports, services, or treatments will seek them out. Even mention of mental health reform in the context of gun control and gun violence prevention is stigmatizing and harmful. Measures such as law enforcement registries of people with mental illness or who have been institutionalized, increased police access to mental health treatment records, imposition of a psychological or psychiatric evaluation in the gun purchasing process, or increased funding for assisted outpatient treatment (a form of coercive treatment) will not curb gun violence but will add to pervasive stigma, and will establish dangerous precedents on the legal rights of people with disabilities.

As such, we advocate strongly against any use of mental health as a criteria or category related to gun ownership or gun violence prevention. We recommend that when discussions of mental health arise, they are referred and moved to other forums unrelated to gun violence prevention because the use of mental health within this context will generally imply the outdated and mistaken notion that mental illness and psychiatric disabilities lead to violence, and by extension harm people with disabilities.

READ THE WHOLE THING.

Las Vegas, Bump Stocks, and the NRA

NEW at Pacific Standard

On the day after the deadliest mass shooting in modern United States history, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders responded to questions about gun control legislation by telling reporters that "there will certainly be a time for that policy discussion to take place, but that's not the place that we're in at this moment."

If there is a "place" and "moment," are we there yet? And if not now, when?

In the weeks since a gunman fired more than 900 rounds into a crowd of concert-goers, killing 58 and leaving over 500 more wounded, we've re-learned the key lesson about reducing gun violence in America: We still can't do it.

To be clear, the right wing is perfectly willing to use violence to make a political point, but only when it allows them to dehumanize already vulnerable people. Sanders, for example, concluded that press conference by talking about Chicago—which is to say gun violence among black people in Chicago. (In the interest of fact-checking: Chicago's gun laws fail because right-wing states like Indiana and Missouri allow individuals to purchase weapons and traffic them into the city.) Speaker of the House Paul Ryan always responds to questions about gun violence by talking about mental health. And people with unmet mental-health support needs are vastly more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it. Sanders, Ryan, and their partisans are uninterested in such details, of course, because the goal is to derail the conversation onto any topic except how to keep killers from getting powerful guns.

Sandy Hook Documents

I was writing a piece today about gun violence when news broke that the FBI was releasing 1500+ pages of documents about Sandy Hook. They are available here.

Experts in the case say there's nothing especially new here, but I haven't read them all before. Two things remain clear.

1) There were lots of warning signs and missed opportunities for interventions of all sorts.
2) Without the guns, especially the AR-15 Bushmaster, a lot of kids would still be alive.

Mental Health and Gun Violence - The President's Plan

Today, President Obama is announcing new executive actions on gun violence. I am a proponent of sensible gun control solutions. I do not believe we can arm ourselves to safety.

I am, however, always concerned when discussions around gun control stigmatize people with various types of disabilities as dangerous, so I was glad to see this.

We must continue to remove the stigma around mental illness and its treatment—and make sure that these individuals and their families know they are not alone. While individuals with mental illness are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators, incidents of violence continue to highlight a crisis in America’s mental health system. In addition to helping people get the treatment they need, we must make sure we keep guns out of the hands of those who are prohibited by law from having them. Today, the Administration is announcing the following steps to help achieve these goals:

• Dedicate significant new resources to increase access to mental health care. Despite our recent significant gains, less than half of children and adults with diagnosable mental health problems receive the treatment they need. To address this, the Administration is proposing a new $500 million investment to help engage individuals with serious mental illness in care, improve access to care by increasing service capacity and the behavioral health workforce, and ensure that behavioral health care systems work for everyone. This effort would increase access to mental health services to protect the health of children and communities, prevent suicide, and promote mental health as a top priority.

• Include information from the Social Security Administration in the background check system about beneficiaries who are prohibited from possessing a firearm. Current law prohibits individuals from buying a gun if, because of a mental health issue, they are either a danger to themselves or others or are unable to manage their own affairs. ...

• Remove unnecessary legal barriers preventing States from reporting relevant information to the background check system. Although States generally report criminal history information to NICS, many continue to report little information about individuals who are prohibited by Federal law from possessing or receiving a gun for specific mental health reasons. ...

What I like about this is that the White House leads with the statement that people with mental illness are more likely to be victims, and that their proposal is to increase resources. It is reasonable to try to limit access to firearms for people with specific conditions, especially due to suicide risk (rather than homicide risk). But we improve the situation by fighting stigma, so people who need help can ask for it, and we improve the situation by providing help to those who need it.

UPDATE: Here's a major critique of the erosion of HIPPA protections as both illegal AND useless in preventing gun violence.

Gun Violence and #DisabilityTwitter

I'll have a piece later today from CNN on the shooting in San Bernardino, CA. I've written about gun violence for them before.

I'm sitting in a small square room, cluttered with books and papers, at the end of a short dead-end corridor. I'm a history professor at a small university, sitting in my office alone, hearing the news that 800 miles away, a Delta State University history professor has been shot and killed in his office. It's all too easy to picture being trapped behind my own desk, unable to escape, to dodge, to do anything but plead.

Empathy is a powerful tool, and that will be very much the theme of my piece this morning.

In the meantime, though, I want to reflect a bit on watching the San Bernardino story unfold. I was sitting in my office working on a white paper on media coverage of police violence and disability (coming soon, with my favorite co-writer), when the news broke of the killing. Soon, we found out that the killing took place at a disability services center, and my personal network of disability rights activists, disabled individuals, parents, caregivers, service providers, and so much more encapsulated by #DisabilityTwitter fell apart emotionally.

We shared pictures, tweets, details, experiences with centers like that, debated whether disabled individuals would or wouldn't be present at the office, and explored the Inland Resource Center's social media feeds. We braced for the worst. We were relieved, if guiltily, when it became clear that the worst wasn't in fact the case.

This was the holiday party /yesterday/ at the site of the #SanBernardino shooting. https://t.co/6sbfIzvMIX

— David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) December 2, 2015

You see, we're ready for someone to target disabled people with violence. We're expecting it. We're expecting it because it's constantly happening, even though most people are unaware. We see, every day, the ways in which disabled people are marginalized, dehumanized, and excluded. We see the violence everywhere - domestic, sexual, carceral, law enforcement, legal, representational, and more. And we know that although disabled people are vastly more likely to be victims of violence than non-disabled people, that the media and politicians are far too likely to treat disability as a threat, to treat mental illness as the cause of gun violence (rather than, say, easy access to firearms), and to stigmatize rather than assist.

I saw that on the news. The local ABC affiliate was asking relatives of survivors about their family members, then pushing them to speculate about "mental patients" who might be responsible. We now know, of course, that wasn't the case, and the target was county workers, killed by one of their own, but the stigma was deployed and ready to go.

I'm glad the target wasn't disabled children or service providers, even though that fact makes this act of violence no less tragic. But the violence against people with disabilities is ongoing. We're all too ready to be triggered. It's a learned reaction.

Decouple Gun Violence and Mental Health Conversations (Democratic Debate Edition)

Disability continues to be a largely ignored issue in the presidential primaries except for when it comes to gun violence, when the candidates get things entirely wrong. Here's 100% of what Sanders or Clinton (the only candidates that actually might get nominated) said about disability last night.

SANDERS: Let's begin, Anderson, by understanding that Bernie Sanders has a D-minus voting rating from the NRA. Let's also understand that back in 1988 when I first ran for the United States Congress, way back then, I told the gun owners of the state of Vermont and I told the people of the state of Vermont, a state which has virtually no gun control, that I supported a ban on assault weapons. And over the years, I have strongly avoided instant background checks, doing away with this terrible gun show loophole. And I think we've got to move aggressively at the federal level in dealing with the straw man purchasers.

Also I believe, and I've fought for, to understand that there are thousands of people in this country today who are suicidal, who are homicidal, but can't get the healthcare that they need, the mental healthcare, because they don't have insurance or they're too poor. I believe that everybody in this country who has a mental crisis has got to get mental health counseling immediately. 

COOPER: Do you want to shield gun companies from lawsuits?

SANDERS: Of course not. This was a large and complicated bill. There were provisions in it that I think made sense. For example, do I think that a gun shop in the state of Vermont that sells legally a gun to somebody, and that somebody goes out and does something crazy, that that gun shop owner should be held responsible? I don't.
On the other hand, where you have manufacturers and where you have gun shops knowingly giving guns to criminals or aiding and abetting that, of course we should take action.

Sanders needs to stop stigmatizing mental health. He's learned to speak much better about racial injustice (good job activists. And all my white liberal friends who were complaining that BLM activists were unfairly pressuring him, that's why. So he learns). But this stigmatizing of mental health crisis as causally linked to our gun violence, rather than easy access to firearms, when people with mental health issues are vastly  more likely to be victims, has to stop.

I'm delighted to have a candidate advocating for better mental health care - so long as it doesn't involve forced institutionalization or forced medication. But we have to decouple the conversation about mental health from the conversation about gun violence. 

Whatever Sanders' intention, his comments reinforce the notion that gun violence is due to mental illness. We've got to push back hard against that. And Sanders supporters, if they want my vote for their candidate, will need to lead the way. Teach your candidate.