Mental health questions re-emerge after shooting deaths in Washington

Mental health is again front and center in the gun control debate with some consensus on Capitol Hill that more resources are needed to treat the mentally ill. A new study also examines the relationship between gun ownership and mental illness in several countries.

The New York Times: Mental Health Again An Issue In Gun Debate
Despite deep divisions that have kept Congress from passing new gun safety laws for almost two decades, there is one aspect of gun control on which many Democrats, Republicans and even the National Rifle Association agree: the need to give mental health providers better resources to treat dangerous people and prevent them from buying weapons (Peters and Luo, 9/18).

Los Angeles Times: Do Guns Make Us Safer? 
Just days after a Washington naval installation became the site of the fourth mass shooting in the span of a year, a pair of new studies asks a shop-worn but timely question: Do more guns make us safer? Both studies conclude the answer is no. ... The latest study, published Wednesday in the American Journal of Medicine, is ambitious: It aims to tease out the relationship among gun ownership, crime, violent death and mental illness by looking across 27 industrialized countries that keep reliable data on all of those measures. The second study, published last week in the American Journal of Public Health, focuses entirely on the United States -- a patchwork of states with differing demographics, gun cultures, gun laws and crime patterns -- and examines whether, over time, more guns have meant more or less gun-related homicides (Healy, 9/18).