No sooner than President Obama jumped the gun (no pun intended) and literally said he was politicizing the mass shooting in Oregon, John Oliver took to his Comedy Central show on Sunday and accused GOP presidential candidates as using mental illness as a “means of steering the conversation away from gun control.”
After playing clips of Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and Mike Huckabee arguing that it’s not a lack of gun control that is causing mass shootings but rather mental illness, Oliver used his main segment of Last Week Tonight, to tell his audience:
One of the only times it’s actively brought up [mental illness] is as we’ve seen yet again this week is in the aftermath of a mass shooting as a means of steering the conversation away from gun control. It seems like there’s nothing like a mass shooting to spark political interest in mental health … The aftermath of a mass shooting might be the worst time to talk about mental health because for the record, the vast majority of mentally ill people are non-violent and the vast majority of gun violence is committed by non-mentally ill people. In fact, mentally ill people are far likely to be the victims of violence instead of being the perpetrators. So the fact that we tend to only discuss mental health in a mass shooting context is deeply misleading.
There are many people walking around this world that are mentally ill – but it depends on the severity. Many take medication for depression and anxiety – which would probably account for a majority of the reported 43.8 million American adults affected with mental illness, however, there are other various forms of mental illness that are much more severe – and those suffering from the severe forms of mental illness are the ones most likely to commit mass shootings. Unfortunately, all one has to do is look at the past mass shootings to see a link, starting with Umpqua Community College shooter, Chris Mercer.
In one of Mercer’s Facebook postings, he wrote:
I have a pill bottle with like five types of pills mixed in. I don’t know which ones are the sleep aids, so I just took four of each…
According to Mercer’s mother, not finding a girlfriend was one of the many factors that contributed to his mental illness. The New York Times reports that she also, “Expressed having expertise in autism, saying that both she and her son — whom she never identified by name — had Asperger’s syndrome,” and opened up on when Mercer was placed in a psychiatric hold when he didn’t take his medication.
In May 2014 there was a tragic shooting at the Univeristy of California that left seven people dead – including shooter Elliot Rodgers who, since age eight, had a history of mental illness. An unreasonable hatred of women was apparently what sparked this shooting rampage – a year in the making.
A report based on the medical and school histories of Adam Lanza – who took the lives of innocent children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., found that Lanza was “completely untreated in the years before the shooting” for psychiatric and physical ailments like anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and was also deprived of recommended services and drugs.”
Aaron Alexis’s deteriorating mental condition was repeatedly brought to authorities’ attention, yet nothing affected his security clearance. The month before Alexis went on his Washington Navy Yard shooting rampage in 2013, he complained to police that “people were talking to him through the walls and ceilings of his hotel rooms and sending microwave vibrations into his body to deprive him of sleep.”
Aurora Theater shooter James Holmes was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he went on his killing spree at an Aurora, Co. theater in 2012. He often complained of social awkwardness and insomnia.
In 2011, Jared Loughner shot 19 people at a shopping center, gravely wounding Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, and killing six others. For a year and a half, Loughner was medicated and underwent psychiatric examinations and diagnosed with schizophrenia before he was competent enough to go to trial and enter a guilty plea.
And in 2007, Cho Seung-Hui shot and killed 32 people at Virginia Tech. According to Time magazine, Cho had exhibited classic symptoms of psychosis leading up to the shooting that included stalking women, revenge fantasies, and involuntary commitment to a mental institution.
The past seven mass shootings were all committed by individuals who were mentally ill – five committed by white men, an Asian man and a black man. Mental illness knows no color.
Obama and the liberal media want to make it seem as though guns are the problem and that mental illness is just a way to divert attention from the Second Amendment. What is even more interesting to note – Obama’s city of Chicago has seen 399 homicides this year. Just last week alone there were 54 shot and wounded, 12 shot and killed. That’s more than all of the recent mass shootings combined.
Of course the Windy City has long had some of the strictest gun laws in the country.
