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“Since 1968, more Americans have died from gunfire than died in … all the wars of this country’s history.” Mark Shields on Friday, December 21st, 2012 in the PBS News Hour. See numbers and statistics below.

Proponents of no gun control are quick to blame these high numbers of gun violence on persons with mental health diseases rather than the number and easy availability of guns in our society. Our local Milwaukee County sheriff has gone as far as calling all citizens to arm themselves with guns over calling 911.

However, the facts are that persons with mental illness have a lower rate of committing violence crimes than the population of people without mental illness. They are frequently the victims of violent crimes. Dr. Michael B. Friedman, L.M.S.W states in article on Jan. 18th called Mass Murder: Is There A Mental Health Issue? states: “Unfortunately, there is a dearth of research about multiple or single murders of strangers by people with psychotic conditions in the United States, but research elsewhere suggests that such events take place at a rate of 1 per 14 million population. In contrast, stranger homicide in the United States takes place at a rate of 140 per 14 million populations. Obviously, stranger homicide by people with psychotic conditions is both rare and a small proportion of all such murders.”

If there is evidence facts that indicate that people with mental illnesses or brain diseases like autism, Schizophrenia, Post traumatic stress disorder, depression, Alzheimer, Bi Polar diseases are less likely than normal persons to commit violence crime why do we often look to blame mental illnesses? I believe that people with mental illness are one of the last groups in our society to get civil rights. This group is plagued by stigma so many persons who have a mental illness and blending into society hide their illnesses. Once a psychiatrist, responding to discrimination of persons with mental illness wrote that biggest factor holding people back from treatment of this illness is stigma. So people blending into society with a mental illness that is treated fear to come out and organize for civil rights and human treatment of these brain diseases.

When a person has a cancer we do not call the person cancerous. We separate the illness from who the person is. However, persons with mental illness are often called ‘mentally ill’ associating their illness with who they are. If we called persons with cancer cancerous we would be held accountable for this stigma.

Also part of these terrible illnesses is that when person is seriously ill with mental illness they often lack insight of the need for treatment. Their mind says they are well. So this group of severely ill is hard to organize for civil rights.

People with mental illness fill our jails and prisons. They have a double stigma, convict and mental illness. Illness usually get worst in prison and jail and are not respected when they come back into society, usually sicker than when they entered. Our same country sheriff that is calling for citizens to arm themselves has a notorious reputation for lack of treatment for persons with mental health illness in his custody.

So who will speak for the civil and human rights of persons with mental illness? In a few cases where an advocate has money there is a victory in court, since the law says we cannot discriminate based on an illness? But most of the time no one speaks out for those who suffer these terrible diseases.

How do we achieve civil right to this large segment of our population, affecting one of four persons in our society?

Here’s a summary of deaths by major conflict:

Revolutionary War
4,435

War of 1812
2,260

Mexican War
13,283

Civil War (Union and Confederate, estimated)
525,000

Spanish-American War
2,446

World War I
116,516

World War II
405,399

Korean War
36,574

Vietnam War
58,220

Persian Gulf War
383

Afghanistan War
2,175

Iraq War
4,486

Total
1,171,177

Another 362 deaths resulted from other conflicts since 1980, such as interventions in Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Somalia and Haiti, but the number is not large enough to make a difference.

Gunfire deaths

The number of deaths from gunfire is a bit more complicated to total. Two Internet-accessible data sets from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention allow us to pin down the number of deaths from 1981 to 1998 and from 1999 to 2010. We’ve added FBI figures for 2011, and we offer a number for 1968 to 1980 using a conservative estimate of data we found in a graph in this 1994 paper published by the CDC.

Here is a summary. The figures below refer to total deaths caused by firearms:

1968 to 1980 377,000
1981 to 1998 620,525
1999 to 2010 364,483
2011 32,163
Total 1,384,171

We should note that these figures refer to all gun-fire related deaths — not just homicides, but also suicides and accidental deaths. In 2011, about one-quarter of firearm-related deaths were homicides, according to FBI and CDC data. Using total firearm-related deaths makes the case against guns more dramatic than just using homicides alone.

When we rated a previous Facebook post, we lowered an otherwise True claim to Mostly True because it said that “nearly 100,000 people get shot every year.” We found that the number of gun deaths and non-fatal injuries added up to 104,852, but we concluded that the term “get shot” could suggest victims who got shot by someone else rather than by their own hand. We don’t see a similar problem with the way Shields’ comment was phrased — namely, “died from gunfire.”

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