any policymakers and commentators in the media have suggested that mental health care has a substantial role to play in reducing gun violence. Indeed, one of the prominent criticisms of the recently announced presidential plan to address gun violence is that it focuses efforts too much on guns and not enough of mental illness. Unfortunately, those suggesting that mental health treatment is the key to preventing gun crimes often mischaracterize the current state of the science in two ways.
First, commentators have widely assumed that psychiatric disorders are good predictors of gun violence and causally related to that violence. While there is some limited evidence in the literature that psychiatric disorders are associated with violence, that empirical association is weak and not generalizable across disorders. It is plausible that perceived connections are the result of shared risk factors (e.g., prior trauma exposure) rather than a causal effect of mental health. Specifically, the very limited research investigating this association has found weak correlations, suggesting that psychiatric diagnoses may not be useful for real-world predictions of who will be violent.