Florida Atlantic: Comparing Mental Illness, Gun Violence Connection

The United States broke the record for the most mass shootings in a single year in 2023. Because of this staggering statistic, considerable attention has focused on mental illness as a major contributor to these homicides around the country.

Researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine and collaborators compared deaths from mental illness and gun violence in the U.S., Australia and the United Kingdom and their clinical and public health challenges.

Results, published in The American Journal of Medicine, show that in the U.S., there are approximately 393 million guns owned among the general population of about 335 million people or 1.2 guns per person. In Australia, there are 3.5 million guns among a population of 26.4 million or about 0.13 guns per person, likely a result of new gun laws passed in 2021. In 2022, the U.K. launched a successful gun reform campaign, which included banning assault weapons and handguns.

Findings also reveal that in 2019, self-reports of mental illness were 15.7 percent in the U.S., 17.6 percent in Australia and 13.8 percent in the U.K.

The researchers suggest that the high rates of gun ownership and access to firearms — and not mental illness — seem like more plausible explanations for the disproportionately large number of shootings in the U.S. Furthermore, they opine that if mental illness, which is similar in the three countries, played a major role in gun homicides, one would expect gun homicide rates to be comparably similar. In fact, they are vastly different between the U.S., Australia and the U.K.

“The U.S. is experiencing more than 10 times higher death rates from gun violence than Australia and more than 40 times higher death rates than the U.K.,” said Charles H. Hennekens, M.D., Dr.PH., Sir Richard Doll Professor of Medicine and senior academic advisor in the College of Medicine. “The comparisons between Australia and the U.K. indicate that mental illness is not a major contributor to the increasing trends in death from gun violence in the U.S.”