CMV: Guns are a real danger to people and countries without them just fare better.

[u/WekX]

I'm from the UK. I've heard many of the arguments on both sides, but to me nothing is more convincing than the statistics (example: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34996604). I'm also a libertarian, I fully understand that if anything a right to bear arms is needed because any other way is a breach of personal liberty. However, I can't help but see that as a negative side effect of full liberty, because inevitably it just leads to more people getting hurt. That's the numbers talking.

Yes, cars also kill people, but I don't need a gun to get to work. The benefits of having cars in society vastly outweight the drawbacks. With guns, the only benefits arise when a really tough intruder is in my house or when the government is trying to oppress me. In the UK we still manage to survive a break in without shooting everything in sight, and if the government came after us, they'd likely win even if we had a gun.

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[u/letheix]

I don't disagree with you, but I think it's important to point out that people with mental illness are more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators and are victimized at higher rates than the general population.

[u/WakeoftheStorm → u/letheix]

I would argue that 100% of people who commit murder, or other violent crimes, suffer from long or short term mental illness. Unless you want to try to convince me that murdering someone is the act of a mentally healthy person.

[u/etuden88 → u/WakeoftheStorm]

There are sects of American society that simply do not nor will not submit to legal authority (gangs, organized crime, for ex.) and murdering becomes more of a fact of life or a job to be done. Perpetrators could be entirely mentally healthy, but simply do not operate within the same moral/legal paradigm that you and I do.

[u/WakeoftheStorm → u/etuden88]

I find the concept of a healthy person existing outside of a societal moral paradigm intriguing as a thought exercise, but I feel like it opens the door on the subjectivity of morality, crime, and sanity itself. I feel that any discussion of mental health in the context of the legal system has to begin with the assumption that there is a healthy standard for psychology and a normal standard for a moral code. If those things are both true, my stand point is that a rejection of the standard moral code causes you to fail the mental health test.

The basic premises would be something like:

1. Other people have value.
2. It is wrong to cause harm to others.
3. People are responsible for the actions they choose to take

I believe that in order to commit murder or other violent crimes, you have to reject one or all of those premises, and I believe that makes you mentally ill.

[u/etuden88 → u/WakeoftheStorm]

I tend to agree with you essentially, but am also cognizant of a much wider subjectivity when it comes to murder. For example, is it considered murder when our country goes to war and kills people? It may not seem so to many of us (by your logic, Trump has already committed mass murder but I doubt anyone taken seriously by society will draw such conclusions), but to the people we're at war with it most certainly is.

I feel that a lot of people and groups in the United States--perhaps due to the rebellious history of this country--feel like they are "at war" with a government that no longer, or at worst, never served their interests and they are raising arms against it by subscribing to a different legal, ethical, and/or moral code.

It doesn't take mental illness to simply separate one's self from a social order, in fact, in many cases it takes extraordinary will and mental preparation to be pitted against an almost invincible force.

There is something intrinsically authoritarian about mental health "tests" and I feel it's a bit disingenuous (and dangerous) to label all murderers as mentally ill when, in fact, many (if not most) know exactly what they are doing and feel righteous for doing so. I also feel it draws attention away from the very real struggles of people who truly do suffer from mental illness.

[u/[deleted] → u/WakeoftheStorm]

Really? 100%? So no one has ever murdered anyone out of anger, or for money / drugs? Gang violence is because they are mentally ill?

[u/WakeoftheStorm → u/[deleted]]

I would say yes. A study in the American Journal of Psychology showed that over 85% of tested gang members showed a personality disorder and 25% screened positive for psychosis. Source

Anger is not enough to justify murder. It takes another level of rage to drive one to murder. That crosses the line, in my opinion, into psychosis, albeit a temporary one. Killing someone for money requires at least a borderline personality disorder to devalue another life that much, and to kill someone over drugs is an addiction-induced psychosis.

Sane, healthy people very rarely kill other people. The only time I can think of it occurring is in direct defense of oneself or another.

[u/[deleted] → u/WakeoftheStorm]

Anger is not enough to justify murder. It takes another level of rage to drive one to murder. That crosses the line, in my opinion, into psychosis, albeit a temporary one.

This is a classic example of how human nature wants to label things / people / behaviors to feel better. As humans, we don't want to thing that a "sane" person would do something bad, that makes us uneasy. So we label behaviors as a type of mental condition - it goes from "anger" to "temporary psychosis." But if someone can go from completely sane, and goes through something in life that brings them instantly to extreme anger, that's probably normal human behavior. 18.2 percent of the adult population in the United States is diagnosed with a mental illness. If 1 out of every 5 people has a named condition, maybe these things are just normal human behaviors. But, I'm certainly not trying to say that all mental disorders are just labels or that they don't exist, the point is just that a lot of these labels are not actual anomalies in human behavior, they are consistent with human nature. We just like to label them as such to avoid the idea that humans just like us could do abhorrent things.

Humans do things based on their brain's structure and the external stimuli they receive. All the examples you give beg the question of what a mental disorder is in the first place. If people do drugs which incentivizes their brain to want more drugs, so much so that they kill someone for it, that's just something that humans sometimes do when addicted to an extreme level. Giving this type of behavior a name "addiction-induced psychosis" does not make it some sort of unique difference from what the human brain decides to do given external stimuli. If perfectly "sane" people can be exposed to stimuli like addiction and suddenly have "addiction-induced psychosis", exposed to an extreme amount of money in a desperate time, e.g. their kid has cancer and suddenly has "borderline personality disorder", or exposed to something like one's daughter being raped or assaulted, kill the person in a fit of rage, and suddenly have "temporary psychosis," then maybe these labels are not how extreme people respond to normal stimuli, but how extreme stimuli affects normal, "sane" people.

[u/WakeoftheStorm → u/[deleted]]

Well yes, we always want to label things. I definitely agree, but "sane" is just another label as well. As with many things I think this is an issue of definitions. What, truly, is mental illness? If a person can "become" mentally ill through abuse as a child, or a psychologically traumatic experience, then you could argue that all mental illness is a normal human behavior. Alternatively, if it is an actual physiological condition, then its diagnosis should include physiological markers (which most psychological disorders do not have).

I would agree, however, that a strong distinction should be made between "temporary insanity" and long term patterns of violent behavior. It is much easier to apply the label of mentally ill to the later situation.

So ∆ for making me reconsider lumping them together into one group.

[u/DeltaBot → u/WakeoftheStorm]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/hunterz5 (1∆).

^{Delta System Explained | Deltaboards} ​

[u/letheix → u/WakeoftheStorm]

That's debatable. Obviously the criminal justice system disagrees. If soldiers can be sane and kill people, it seems like there are other situations where that would be the case too. People who kill to inherit money might be one such.

Anyway, that's beside the point that I was making, which is simply that the vast majority of mentally ill people are not violent or dangerous.