Paper: Mental Illness and Gun Violence: Lessons for the United States from Australia and Britain. Evans Richard, Farmer Clare, and Saligari Jessica. Violence and Gender. September 2016, 3(3): 150-156.

Abstract: In the United States, the nexus between mental illness and shootings has been the subject of heated argument. An extreme expression of one point of view is that “guns don’t kill people, the mentally ill do.” This article seeks to demonstrate the falsehood of this argument, by examining the real-world experience of two comparable societies. Australia and Great Britain are both Anglophone nations with numerous points of commonality with the United States, including high rates of mental illness and significant exposure to popular culture that perpetuates the stigma of the mentally ill as a violent threat. However, in Australia, it is difficult to obtain firearms, and a mentally ill person behaving aggressively is unlikely to be able to harm others. On the contrary, police are almost the only people routinely armed in Australian communities and are often too ready to use firearms against the mentally ill. In Britain, guns are even more difficult to obtain, and operational police are not usually armed. The authors examine statistical data on mental illness, homicide, and civilian deaths caused by police in all three nations. They also consider media and popular opinion environments. They conclude that mental illness is prevalent in all three societies, as is the damaging stigma of “the dangerous madman.” However, the fewer people (including police officers) who have access to firearms, the safer that community is.

The mental illness part:

The part about the police:

The part about the guns:

The part about the mass shootings:

Homicides and firearms related deaths in the UK, Australia, and US:

The homicide by firearm rate in each of the three countries that differ mainly in access to and abundance of guns:

The conclusions:

Australia, Britain, and the United States are directly comparable societies. Statistical data confirm that they have similar rates of mental illness, including those forms of mental illness most likely to be associated with violent behavior. …

The significant differences among the three societies are the number of firearms in the community and whether the police are armed….

The benefits of strict gun control and unarmed police are most starkly illustrated by the differences in deaths due to police action. The population of the United States is almost five times greater than that of Britain. This means that, according to data known to be a vast underestimate (Planty et al. 2015), a US civilian is between 171 and 226 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a person living in Britain in the worst recorded year of the past decade (Teers 2015).

The contention that “guns don’t kill people, the mentally ill do” is unsustainable. Guns kill people. The fewer guns there are in a community, whether in the hands of civilians or of police, the safer that community is.

I find the graphic they used a bit odd:

The overall form of the graph shows a decrease over time. But it really shows an increase. You just have to know how to read it. The Y axis is the number of days since the last shooting, which as we can see is very high for several shootings before about 2011, but very low after. But, once you do understand the graph it makes the point very clearly. Notice that there are several time periods prior to 2011 which also have low numbers (meaning more shooting events) but those periods are never very long. There seems to be a dramatic and sustained increase in rate of shootings.

The authors explain it this way:

As the chart above shows, a public mass shooting occurred on average every 172 days since 1982. The orange reference line depicts this average; data points below the orange line indicate shorter intervals between incidents, i.e., mass shootings occurring at a faster pace. Since September 6, 2011, there have been 14 public mass shootings at an average interval of less than 172 days. A run of nine points or more below the orange average line is considered a statistical signal that the underlying process has changed. …The standard interpretation of this chart would be that mass shootings, as of September 2011, are now part of a new, accelerated, process.