(Newswire.net — April 10, 2015) — An angry man from North Carolina lost his temper, pulled out his handgun and killed three Muslim students earlier this year. Shockingly, he was married and lived in a quiet neighborhood. More shockingly, the investigation discovered that he owns 14 guns.
Nearly 9 percent of the adult population in the US, around 22 million people, are thought to have anger issues, break or smash things and easily get into fights. They all have access to at least one firearm, a new study has found.
Weaponry and military equipment manufacturing companies are one of the greatest moneymakers in the United States. No wonder why current measures to stop people with diagnosed mental illnesses from owning firearms is not sufficient, as study published Wednesday in the journal Behavioral Sciences and the Law claims.
According to researchers from Harvard, Columbia and Duke Universities, this is the first time relation between owning a gun and aggressive behavior have been found. The nationwide research was conducted on 5,563 mental disorder cases from the early 2000s, in a face-to-face survey.
“Impulsive, out of control, destructive, harmful. You and I might shout. These individuals break and smash things and get into physical fights, punch someone in the nose,” lead author Jeffrey Swanson of Duke University told the Washington Post.
Mass shootings like Sandy Hook and Aurora have focused lawmakers’ attention on keeping mentally ill people away from guns. However, the study shows that much more needs to be done to reduce the shockingly high death rates in the US from personal firearms, showing that in 2012, guns in an intentional violent act killed 11,622 people and injured 57,077.
“We can’t broadly limit legal access to guns, so we have to focus on the dangerous people,” Swanson said. However, there is no proper way to distinguish a dangerous person from one who is just having a bad day.
“The traditional legal approach has been to prohibit firearms from involuntarily committed psychiatric patients. But now we have more evidence that current laws don’t necessarily keep firearms out of the hands of a lot of potentially dangerous individuals,” Swanson said. Recently, a man treated in a mental hospital was able to own a handgun because it was a decades ago.
Federal US law limits gun access of anyone convicted of a crime, and for people with domestic violence convictions, however, Swanson and his colleagues believe the law should be extended to cover people with alcohol problems, people who have made open threats in the past and anyone with a single misdemeanor conviction.