Gun Control: A Mental Health Issue In America

Gun Control, a Mental Health Issue in America Gun control lately has rapidly become an even further controversial topic in America due to violent acts against the public by troubled individuals. “In the United States, popular and political discourse frequently focuses on the causal impact of mental illness in the aftermath of mass shootings” (Metzl and MacLeish sec.1). Not to mention the impact these situations have on the society, this issue, unfortunately remains so overlooked, that media sources only offer it attention after a tragedy. In America there are numerous groups of people consisting of various opinions on mental illnesses in regards to gun related violence, and in short, the two main opinions are one; no mentally stable person decides to harm people solely due to the fact that they can obtain a weapon easily, meaning that those who kill must have a mental illness of some degree; and two, that individuals who suffer from a mental illness are practically never violent, especially to other people. Nonetheless, …show more content…
The same people that make the previous argument, voice their opinions, claiming that somebody is much more likely to be shot by a disgruntled neighbor or an Ex-partner, than by a mentally ill person. The counter argument to that is, there are a greater amount of disgruntled neighbors and Ex-partners in America, than there are mentally unstable individuals. This argument makes it clear that the chances of being shot by a neighbor or somebody similar are obviously higher, however if there were an equal amount of mentally troubled individuals in America as there are mentally stable, then the chances of being shot by the mentally unstable person are now much higher than that of somebody like a neighbor. This argument however, deals with hypothesized opinions rather than