On Friday, the White House rolled out new regulations for health insurance providers that require insurers to cover mental health and addiction the same way they cover physical illness. The Obama Administration views the new regulations as critical to curbing gun violence because the regulations will provide potentially violent, mentally ill people with treatment.

However, despite being a positive development in the treatment of mental illness and addiction in general, the regulations will have a negligible, if any, effect on the incidence of gun violence in the United States.

There is an undeniable correlation between mental illness and mass shootings. In most of the shootings in recent years — and there have been a startling amount — the shooter has a history of mental illness. But the connection between mental illness and violence is much more nuanced than the media’s coverage of mass shootings lead us to believe.

Research from the National Institute of Mental Health has shown that about 26 percent of adults and 20 percent of children experience a diagnosable mental health condition every year.

But only about 4 percent of violent crimes can be linked to mental illness. The mass shooting sprees which inspired these regulations are horrifying tragedies that attract considerable media attention. But the sad reality is that they only make up a small portion of the total gun-related deaths each year.

People with mental illness may not seek treatment at all, and even if they do, mental health professionals will certainly not be able to identify every dangerous individual before he or she commits an act of violence.

Laws such as New York state’s “Kendra’s Law,” which allows judges to involuntarily commit people to psychiatric treatment, will also allow some killers to slip through the cracks. Many of the perpetrators of mass killings — Adam Lanza and James Holmes, for example — had no previous criminal record.

But most importantly, almost all gun homicides are committed by people with no history of mental illness, according to The New York Times. The majority of gun crimes occur in urban, low-poverty areas, and many are related to gang activities or petty crime — not severe mental illness. If we really want to lower the incidence of gun violence in the United States, we should focus on improving life in these high-risk areas.

Gun violence follows the same trends as infectious diseases. Data about gun violence show clustering almost identical to data-maps that follow the spread of diseases, proving its magnitude.

To curb gun violence in these clusters, we should invest in programs to rehabilitate ex-convicts, educate youth in high-risk areas, improve economic opportunities for citizens in impoverished areas and most importantly, reduce the number of guns on the streets. In the short-term, legislative efforts can only go so far as to affect the latter.

Two professors at Columbia University, Paul S. Appelbaum and Jeffrey A. Lieberman, wrote recently in the New York Times that “if we are serious about reducing gun violence, we need to muster the political will to also do something more about the availability of guns.”

Decreasing the availability of guns is the only action that will significantly decrease the number of gun-related deaths in the United States. This is also one of the only aspects of this complicated situation that can be directly influenced by legislative action.

President Obama promised to make “access to mental health care as easy as access to a gun.”

This is all well and good, but the president’s efforts — especially without having to deal with re-election and if his goal is reducing the number of gun-related deaths — should be focused on reducing the number of guns on the streets and making it harder for dangerous, mentally ill people to obtain deadly weapons in the first place.

Michael Hacker is a senior political science major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at mahacker@syr.edu and followed on Twitter at @mikeincuse.

Published on November 14, 2013 at 1:20 am