Vice President Joe Biden has signed off on $100 million in taxpayer money to be divided between Health & Human Services and ObamaCare to fund mental health care in new community centers in rural areas. “The fact that less than half of children and adults with diagnosable mental health problems receive the treatment they need is unacceptable. The president and I have made it a priority to do everything we can to make it easier to access mental health services.”
Now if anyone is naive enough to think this is about mental health care, Jamison Monroe of the Newport Academy puts this mental health “crisis” into perspective. “Mental illness. . .a much more complex issue to address than a relatively simple step such as restricting the availability of guns. . .”
In other words, this little project is just another bullet in Obama’s arsenal to eventually eliminate the right to own guns from as many Americans as possible.
During the 1950s and 60s, progressives came up with a new idea to treat the mentally ill – deinstitutionalization. Rationalizing that the mentally ill would be better served being cared for in a loving and supportive environment, their actions had the unintended consequences, of dumping thousands of mentally ill onto the streets to fend for themselves.
The law of unintended consequences is best defined by sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1936. Merton wrote an article, The Unanticipated Consequences of Purposive Social Action, which covers five different ways that actions, particularly those taken on a large-scale as by governments, may have unexpected consequences. According to Merton, the framers of a social change are either ignorant of possible far-reaching effects of the law or make errors when they develop a change that don’t have the effects they desired. ObamaCare being a prime example!
While Americans with untreated severe mental illnesses represent less than one percent of our population, they commit a disproportionate number of homicides each year. Most suffer from schizophrenia or manic-depressive illness yet deinstitutionalization laws prohibit treating individuals over their objection unless they pose an immediate danger to themselves. In other words, an individual must have a finger on the trigger of a gun before any medical care will be prescribed.
Now, while the left would like to convince you that there is no correlation between mental illness and mass shootings, analysis conducted by the Central Florida Intelligence Exchange found that 79% of mass shootings since 2011 were perpetrated by individuals with “demonstrated signs of continuous behavioral health issues and mental illness.”
In a July case study titled “Acts of Violence Attributed by Behavioral and Mental Health Issues“, CFIX analyzed 14 mass shooting incidents that occurred between 2011 and 2013 and found that only three of the shooters had no history of mental illness.
Let’s face it – Mass murders are not committed by sane people. There’s no question that the nation’s mental health system needs improvement. There needs to be a balance struck between protecting the rights of the mentally ill and making it easier for them or their families to obtain treatment while still protecting the rights of law-abiding citizens. But that is not what the gun ban crowd wants.
The fifth revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), released earlier this year would, according to Dr. Allen Frances who chaired the current version of DSM, in terms of content, dramatically raise the rates of diagnosis of mental disorders while lowering the diagnostic thresholds for many existing disorders.
The DSM-V would “create tens of millions of newly misidentified false positive “patients,” thus greatly exacerbating the problems caused already by an overly inclusive DSM IV… There would be massive over-treatment with medications that are unnecessary, expensive, and often quite harmful.
DSM-V appears to be promoting what we have most feared–the inclusion of many normal variants under the rubric of mental illness, with the result that the core concept of “mental disorder” is greatly undermined…If the prospect of “millions of newly misidentified false positive patients,” whose names could possibly be added to a federally created database is not frightening enough, consider how it will affect children, and a parent’s decision to refer a child for mental health treatment. Having a child or spouse diagnosed with a new government approved mental illness could mean they lose their 2nd Amendment right and the confiscation of your guns.
Instead of an unintended consequences, the gun ban crowd would call this a Positive Intended Consequences. After all, it was Adolph Hitler who said “to conquer a nation, first disarm its citizens.”
