School shootings, mental health illness, and the new gun safety law | Editorial

If you thought the soul-numbing massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, would move Congress to further restrict or ban AR-15s and other rapid-firing weapons used to maim and murder innocents, you have another thing coming.

Congress instead passed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, whose title pays homage to the 15 Republican senators and 14 GOP House members who voted for it. Getting their support meant giving up on any hope of implementing an assault-weapons ban.

That doesn’t mean the legislation President Joe Biden signed on June 25 was insignificant. Quite the contrary. By funding initiatives that acknowledge a tie between mental health conditions and gun violence, the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act cleared an important hurdle.

The National Alliance on Mental Illness and similar groups typically object when that link is made after a mass shooting. They correctly point out that the gun lobby distorts the role of mental health illnesses as a ploy to divert attention from the need for better gun laws.

And some researchers have found that ascribing shootings to mental health illness is a key element of a racial disparity in media portrayals of victims of gun violence. When gun crime affects people of color in cities, it is often framed as a moral and personal failing; gun violence that affects white people, however, often depicts the assailants as an anomaly or someone living with a mental health condition.

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Studies have also shown that a person with a mental health illness is more likely to use a gun to commit suicide than to shoot other people. Even making that correlation can be shaky. Coroners attributing a suicide to a mental health condition may be making an assessment based on inaccurate comments by family members.

The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act tries to avoid some of that murkiness by focusing more on children whose behavior indicates they could become violent and intervening before they do. Who are these children?

Studies of students more likely to bring a gun to school and use it concluded that 99% were male, 76% were white, 69% were between 10 and 19 years of age, and most were academically successful, with 41% earning A’s and B’s. Prior to their violent attacks, most showed no significant change in academic performance (56%), friendship patterns (73%), interest in school (59%), or school disciplinary problems (68%).

So, how do you know who might come back to school with a gun? That’s where the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act can make a difference.

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The new law appropriates $500 million to expand a program created to increase mental health services available in public schools, and another $500 million for a program helping school districts and universities partner to prepare more school-based mental health professionals for work in high-need schools.

Another $1 billion will fund mental health resources, drug and violence prevention, mentoring, crisis intervention, and school staff training in suicide and human trafficking prevention. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will also receive $240 million for its Project AWARE to teach school personnel and other adults who interact with school-age youth how to detect and respond to mental health or behavioral health issues.

In addition to these programs, school districts should hire more counselors. Counselors aren’t mental health professionals, but their conversations with students could open the door to get someone the type of help they need. The American School Counselor Association says the average student-to-counselor ratio in this country’s high schools is 311 to one. How much can you learn about a student with that type of workload?

“America needs a cultural evolution that lessens the importance of guns.”

America needs a cultural evolution that lessens the importance of guns in a country where firearms outnumber people. Who knows when that will occur? It didn’t happen 10 years ago when 20 schoolchildren were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. It didn’t happen this year when 19 were killed in Uvalde. Instead, we’re left to reconcile ourselves with the modest progress we have made, including passage of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.