(A work-in-progress, on the slow course of progress...)
The current
national discussion about gun control, though plainly necessary and important,
takes a dangerous turn when it sets sights on people with mental illness.
I don't have
a mental illness and can't claim to understand the many varieties and
ramifications of that diagnosis. But I
have a physical disability, which can be just as stigmatizing.
I was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a
genetic neuromuscular weakness. I'm a
lifelong wheelchair-user with pretty much no use of my concentration-camp-thin
arms and hands.
Sometimes when people
see me they become a little afraid. I
don't want people to fear me, and I don't think we should fear people with
mental illness either.
To be
sure, the need to cut gun violence is paramount. And I'm not against background checks to
screen gun buyers for a criminal record.
Recidivism among violent offenders is alarmingly high. That's a very different kind of precaution,
though, from targeting those who rely on meds to keep their thoughts and
emotions aligned.
I
concede that mental illness enters the debate only in the context of preventing
sufferers from falling through the cracks, to help them as much as to avert a
future disaster. This is not a
modern-day witch hunt. Yet I can't help
feeling that the notion of using mental illness as a guide to identifying those
who might be likely to commit violence one day just smacks of the disability
equivalent of racial profiling.
As
someone who was not expected to live to adulthood because of a physical
condition, but is now a 50-year-old husband, father, Harvard graduate, author
and professional journalist, I don't put much stock in using a diagnosis to
predict what people are and are not capable of.
The fact
is, the majority of people who are diagnosed with a mental illness are
nonviolent. Murderers, no doubt, are not
in their right minds. Yet many fatal
shootings are never connected with a pattern of mental illness. Gang killings, to name one prevalent variety,
may be motivated as much by drug use or peer pressure as anything else. Not to mention jihadists, who kill with
religious fervor but rarely go for psychological evaluations.
To me,
the assumption that the mentally ill have especially itchy fingers stems from age-old
stereotypes. Back in the 14th century Geoffrey
Chaucer wrote that "cripples" were "crafty," in the sense
of sneaky. Where would nightmare tales
be without disfigured, limping, one-armed, hunchbacked, peg-legged, hook-handed,
and eye-patched fiends? These are the
forebears of the modern "psycho killer"—a dysfunctional, deformed mind
and body signifying a defective soul.
Science
has been in on it, too. Through the
1970s serious academic studies attempted to link particular physical traits with
criminal behavior. At some universities,
college students were routinely photographed in various states of undress to document
their proportions—the ratio between their heights and their head sizes, and
other minutia—in an attempt to forecast their fates.
Don't
get me wrong. We must do all we can to
curb gun violence. But in our rush to
solve a virulent problem, let's not resort to what is really nothing more than a
form of scapegoating. We might as well single
out people from a particular neighborhood or socioeconomic subgroup that has a
high murder rate—yet that would be unthinkable, wouldn't it? Focusing on those with mental illness should
be just as abhorrent.
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