I know I have told this story many times before, so bear with me as there are some and new readers who haven’t heard it. True story. When my nephew was perhaps 3 or 4 years old, my brother was struggling to get him to eat his meals. On a day around noontime, I showed up at their house for a visit. My nephew didn’t want to eat his lunch and his father was being persistent that he did.
He gave the boy instructions about eating and the two of us retired to the living to discuss work. After about 5 minutes my nephew came into the living and excitedly announced, “Dad! I’m all done eating now! But don’t go look okay?”
In discussions about violent crimes with guns, guns are getting blamed – like they can kill someone all on their own. Not wanting to be included in any of these discussions are violent movies and video games and the data that shows that the common link between violent crimes and guns is drugs given to patients with mental problems.
For political and personal agenda reasons, Katherine Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, was reported to have said, “The vast majority of Americans with a mental health condition are not violent. In fact, just 3% to 5% of violent crimes are committed by individuals who suffer from a serious mental illness.”
There’s a problem here with her statement BUT I am going to go look!
She states first that, “the vast majority of Americans with ‘A’ mental health ‘condition’, are not violent.” Please consider exactly what that sentence is saying and that she does not qualify what determines “a mental health condition.”
Now let’s look at the second sentence. She states that only 3%-5% of violent crimes are committed by those, “who suffer from ‘a serious mental illness’.”
The information provided here is incomplete and therefore extremely misleading. The intent here, I believe, is to force anyone hearing or reading her statement to believe that mentally ill people are not a factor in the number of violent crimes committed. But when you examine what she said, she may not have lied, but she wasn’t very honest either. She qualifies the 3%-5% as being those with a serious mental illness.
For my money, there’s a vast difference between a person with a mental condition and someone with a serious mental illness.
