The Atlantic:

After a shooting, once the dust has settled, and the initial shock and panic has abated somewhat, fearful minds begin to cast about for explanations. Given the frequency with which gun deaths occur in the United States, “Why did this happen?” and “Who could do something like this?” are questions the country faces with grim regularity.

Unfortunately, a consistent and dangerous narrative has emerged—an explanation all-too-readily at hand when a mass shooting or other violent tragedy occurs: The perpetrator must have been mentally ill.

“We have a strong responsibility as researchers who study mental illness to try to debunk that myth,” says Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of psychiatry at Duke University. “I say as loudly and as strongly and as frequently as I can, that mental illness is not a very big part of the problem of gun violence in the United States.”

The overwhelming majority of people with mental illnesses are not violent, just like the overwhelming majority of all people are not violent. Only 4 percent of the violence—not just gun violence, but any kind—in the United States is attributable to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or depression (the three most-cited mental illnesses in conjunction with violence). In other words, 96 percent of the violence in America has nothing to do with mental illness.

A study from 1998 that followed patients released from psychiatric hospitals found that they were no more prone to violence than other people in their communities—unless they also had a substance abuse problem. So mental illness alone was not a risk factor for violence in this study.

Those are the facts. But cultural narratives are often more powerful than facts, and that 4 percent gets overblown in people’s minds.

It’s all as I have pointed out before (see the extensive links provided).

I don’t think it has anything whatsoever to do with statistics being overblown.  People are generally smarter than that.  The problem is always world and life view, or presuppositions.  If you reject the Biblical account of the origins of evil and the state of mankind, you have to have another explanation.  Psychiatry serves that role, with the mental health physician playing the village witch doctor for the CLEO to decide who gets to have concealed handgun permits. and recommending what kind of laws we have on the books.

To be sure, Mr. Swanson doesn’t have one iota of concern for gun rights.  His concern is for the rights of people who have been diagnosed with mental illness.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  It is a legitimate project.  And it’s just as legitimate to speak out protecting gun rights.

But what I want to emphasize is that it’s about more than speaking out for gun rights.  If you have no coherent and compelling world and life view, you’ll be thrown about by the wind.  It’s just as legitimate to say that “the fly on the wall appears to me greenly and that justifies shooting everyone with the last name of Jones every other Thursday” as it is to say that a mental illness had to do with my violence.  If you have no framework for interpretation, you may as well accept the pronouncements of the village witch doctor.

If you believe the Scriptural account of why man does evil, you have an explanation and remedy (temporal and eternal) that isn’t a corollary to any illness mental health professionals may or may not diagnose.  Here I’m trying to treat the root philosophical malady rather than merely trying stomp on people who are confused.  For the statists and collectivists, it’s never about guns.  It’s always and forever about control.  For the soccer mom, it’s about trying to live in a world she doesn’t understand.

If you believe in the duty of self defense, don’t ever make your rights a function of statists or confused soccer moms.  There is enough of both to destroy your liberty.