It’s an elastic boundary, a rubber ruler, about 48 million people in the U.S. have some kind of diagnosable mental illness.

Jeffrey Swanson

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If we were to cure mental illness, all of it, tomorrow, how much of our violence problem would go down ? It would go down about 4 percent, the mass shooters, with some exception, have been angry, alienated, emotionally trouble young men who act out these incredibly deviant cultural scripts and have access to firearms.

Jeffrey Swanson

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There are tons of people who are risky, who are angry or suicidal, but who would pass a background check, they don’t have a felony conviction, they’ve never been involuntarily committed. How do you make sure dangerous people don’t get access to firearms ?

Jeffrey Swanson

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Mental health stakeholders are loath to have this conversation about improving mental health care in a context driven by violence prevention, because that's not why we need mental health reform per se, we need it because people are struggling with illnesses and they don't have access to care.

Jeffrey Swanson

Criteria for becoming a prohibited person needs to map onto risk, we need to mix criteria to make it more about contemporaneous indicators of risk.

Jeffrey Swanson

The mental health community and stakeholders are very concerned about reinforcing the false association in the public's mind between mental illness and violence, because that is a source of a great deal of discrimination.

Jeffrey Swanson

What made Dylann Roof do what he did? You know, I mean, that's the question, isn't it? I don't know, there are pieces of the puzzle, and you put them all on the jigsaw board, and you're still going to have a big hole there. What I do know is that violent behavior -- whether it's serious violence or minor violence in populations -- is never just one thing. It's not a one thing problem. It's going to be an accumulation of things, kind of a whole cocktail of factors.

Jeffrey Swanson