In the United Stated of America, 32,000 people are killed by guns each year. In the year 2015, just 380 of those 32,000 deaths came from mass shootings. A study in 2013 showed that 46% of Americans believe that individuals with a mental illness are far more dangerous than individuals without one. (resolver.ebscohost.com) There are many unheard groups of activists that are trying to bring justice to the "mentally ill" community.  Because of the negative scope that the media places on the mentally ill, the general public has an unfair perception of them which puts the mentally ill at a disadvantage in many social aspects, especially when it comes to the gun control policies in America.

Just a few months ago, a law was passed that enables doctors to report a patient that they consider mentally ill to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (The F.B.I.) so that they can prohibit these people form buying firearms. In recent years, the amount of reporting of such patients has increased exponentially, and has resulted in the FBI denying over 6,000 purchases of firearms. (politico.com) The argument made by people in support of gun rights for people with mental illness is not that anyone should be able to buy a gun, but when one looks at the statistics, they can see that there are much more dangerous groups of people in this country than the mentally ill. A recent public health study showed that less than five percent of all gun murders in America over the past ten years have been committed by people with mental illness. This brings to light that we need to be focusing on stopping the several gun homicides that occur every day in America, and not just be focused on the heart breaking stories of mass shootings. I do not say this to down play the severity of mass public shootings, because those are tragic acts of disgusting violence that must be stopped, but we do need to realize where the main source of gun violence is coming from.  

Excluding extreme cases of mentally ill people who are considered to put others in risk of danger, I believe that everyone should have the opportunity to protect themselves with firearms of their own. The old saying, "guns don't kill people, people kill people," could not be more true. I have always believed that the criminals that kill people with guns are the same types of criminals that would illegally acquire guns in the first place. As a law abiding citizen of the United States, if I know how easy it is to illegally obtain a firearm, no part of me wants to be defenseless because I chose to obey the law and someone else did not. I do not understand how anyone can sit there and say that someone with a mental illness, who has no intention of harming anyone, does not have the same right to defend themselves that a person without a mental illness does have. Until the government finds a real solution to the gun control issue, I think there should be minimal restrictions on guns. 

The answers for these problems are few and far between. As us everything these days, it is easier said than done to fix these problems. If we want to find productive solutions, we have to come together to focus on fixing it as a team. It will take donations and fundraising for anthropologists to find a cure. Because most mental illnesses are believed to be gene-linked, it is much more complicated than just taking a pill that fixes everything. Doctors will probably have to find away to alter the genetic makeup of the effected patients so that they can think with a totally different mind set. If we put our minds to it as a group, we can work together to help slow down mental illness and mass shootings.

In a Ted Talk video about gun control, a woman named Nicole Hockley speaks to an audience. Nicole was the mother of one of the children that was shot and killed at the Sandy Hooke Elementary shooting. She shares her heartbreaking story of the day her son was killed and then tries to offer solutions to mass shootings. She clearly states several times, "every gun related death is a preventable death." Miss Hockley stated that she knows it is nearly impossible to eliminate guns from criminal hands altogether. Her suggestion is to find the "troubled kids" before they take action and get them help (TEDxTalks). Teachers in elementary and middle schools should be taught to closely monitor kids that they think might be troubled from the beginning. If the teachers really cared and kept an eye out for these sorts of things, we could prevent some of these terrible tragedies. Because Nicole Hockley had a son who was a first hand victim of a mass shooting, her opinion on the subject should be highly regarded. She has clearly put a lot of time and thought into gun control solutions, as she is traveling around the world giving lectures on it, and I believe she has the right idea by trying to help the shooters before they take action. However, in order to maintain freedom and justice in America, it is crucial that we do not associate mental illness with violence. A very small percentage of people with mental illness cause actual harm to people, and if we assume that they are all dangerous and treat them at such, it puts them at an unfair disadvantage.

How can we work to make people more aware of what mentally ill people are really like? This is a question anthropologists have struggled with for a long time. They can write as many long articles and such things online as they want, but at some point there has to be more concrete reasoning as to what defines a "dangerous" mentally ill person and one that is not "dangerous." Otherwise we will never be able to predict these random mass shootings that seem to happen more often than ever. People are tired of hearing that there are going to be more restrictions on guns because they have not seen these restrictions do anything productive yet. What anthropologists are beginning to focus on to capture the attention of the public are new ideas that can attack the violence from its roots. Studies that have been conducted by anthropologists lately about where these killers come from, what kind of environment they grew up in, and their families, are much more interesting and less cliche to the public and they seem to be more effective. If we can try to find these troubled people before they go on these seemingly random killing sprees, I believe we will have more success than by just trying to restrict guns from the mentally ill. 

There are actually several overlooked positives that come from some of these mass shootings such as the one that took place at Sandy Hooke Elementary. The amount of lives that the brave teachers saved by sacrificing their bodies for the children is rarely talked about. It is good to see that we have teachers that truly care about the lives of the children in our schools, considering how much time the children of our generation spend in those schools. Another relative bright spot of the situation was how quickly the first response teams made it out to the school. They were there within minutes taking care of the injured people and making sure all the survivors were safe (onlinelibrary.wileycom). These events give us a general outline for what kind of attitude we need to have towards these shootings. We all need to unite and act as a team to protect ourselves and our generation in these situations.

There was an article written in 2015 by an anonymous bipolar person who wrote about how, even though she did not want to give up her rights, she did not think that she, or anyone with as much of an illness as her should be allowed to own guns. She says that there were days where she was just experiencing too much pain, that if she had harmful intentions towards anyone and possessed a gun, she could understand why these shootings would happen. She makes a very interesting point that the only way gun control will ever work is if it is restricted to many other groups rather than just the mentally ill. The author writes that if we ever want to live in a country where there is no fear of mass shootings, we all have to give something up, and she is willing to sacrifice her right to guns (xojane.com). While I respect and am very interested in her opinion, for the most part I do not agree. One has to respect that the author of the article is sacrificing her own right to own guns to try to make the country around her a safer place to live, but that does not mean everyone else has to give up their rights to own firearms. Because gun restrictions are not very tight at all in the United States at the moment, it is a violation of a person's basic rights to tell them they cannot own a gun, unless they represent a direct threat to the safety of others. If your single mother was living home alone and was denied the right to own a firearm, how would you feel about her safety? It does not seem right to tell her she is not allowed to defend herself to other people who will break the same laws that she is choosing to obey.

A possible solution that needs to be looked into in more detail is improving the quality of how we treat mental illness in America. There are thousands upon thousands of Americans that are not bringing everything to the table in their professional fields that they are capable of due to mental illness. This is just making America overall less successful. Because the industry of medicine and treatment for mental illness is so money-oriented, people are not looking as hard for real solutions to these illnesses. The treatment for theses mental illnesses is so poor that it is hard for some of these people to get out of bed in the morning. Many of these mentally ill people think that these medicines they are getting are ones that will cure them, but in reality, the medicines just relieve some of the symptoms. We all need to be more aware about these illnesses so that we can work on fixing them. Scientists need to continue to look for ways to fix the genetic breakdowns of the mentally ill rather than money-making medicines that relieve the symptoms. If we can find a cure to some of these mild mental illnesses, it will improve our economy, everyday social skills, and will help protect us from random attacks of violence.    Anyone can make a difference when it comes to these things. Simply raising awareness and sparking an interest in someone can make a big difference for someone one day.

Rather than looking for the "mentally ill" people and trying to keep them from possessing firearms, we should try to find the people with violent histories. I believe that we would feel more comfortable, for a good reason, if a "mentally ill" person had a gun rather than if a person who had been charged with some sort of violent crime had a gun.  People that have proven that they cannot control their tempers are much bigger threats to our safety than people who have been diagnosed with common "mental illnesses" such as depression or bipolar disorder. On the down side, even some of the more restrictive laws about gun control, cause us to stereotype people with "mental illness" as well as convicts. After all, isn't America supposed to be the place of second chances? The place where we are free to do whatever we want? That is why it is so hard to restrict some people from guns and not others. I believe that America must either go all in on gun control or back off completely.

There are so many different sides to the debate of gun control and mental illness, that it has turned into a huge never-ending debate. This is one of those topics that everyone will never agree on. There is one end of the spectrum of people who think we should try to eliminate guns altogether. Then on the other end, some people believe that if we can not remove all guns, we should let anyone own them. Then there are some people in the middle who think that just certain people should be able to own guns. While there are countless problems in this debate, there seems to be limited solutions. That is a big problem that needs to be addressed. We need to be able to find and destroy the source of these violent attacks from the root. I believe that we need to be on either end of the spectrum, not anywhere in the middle. As long as it is easy for people to legally obtain guns, it will be relatively easy for people to illegally obtain guns. In conclusion, until we can make a totally complete gun control plan, I believe that we should put all of our focus into bettering the way we treat mental illness as well as the way that we detect the threats before the threats act on us.

