every year. The avg extended family of 3 generations of a person's family includes a person with a mental disorder (whether it's been diagnosed or not, and usually not).
Realize that at present nothing near 25% of the population seek's the assistance with their mental health problems that they should. As a consequence any and every database of the mentally 'ill' only includes those thoughtful enough to seek help, and those who are so ill that they end-up adjudicated to be a threat to themselves or others.
The great majority of people with mental disorders have never sought assistance/therapy and will NEVER have their names in database of those dx'd as mentally disordered. The great majority of these people are also not dangerous to themselves or others.
To have GOOD mental wellness background checks requirese EXCELLENT mental wellness databases and such things simply don't exist due to state and municipal failures to do data entry and maintenance on required databases.
Considering how negative social consequences follow from knowledge of a person's mental disorders, GOOD Databases will probably NEVER be available in the continuing social epoch of stigmatization of mental disorders.
In another existence on DU I was an advocate cautioning against this 'common sense' approach, and many of that existence's 30000+ posts were advocating fair and just treatment of people with mental disorders.
Although you can find a lot of anecdotal evidence of 'strangeness', loner behavior, etc in newspaper accounts of gun murder's it turns out that nationally less than 40% of gun murders are ever solved as to WHO did it. That 40% mostly never sought mental health care, and so we have a very sketchy record of contribution of mental wellness histories for the known 40% of shooters. And we really can't say anything about the other 60% whose mental status is unknowable because their identities are unknown.
If you are going to advocate more strict consideration of mental health standards for gun ownership (and I really do believe not everyone should be allowed to possess let alone own a gun for mental health reasons) realize that project's success depends very much u[on greater insertion of law enforcement into surveillance, and therapist's/counselors' reporting , and the creation of virtually unprotect-able databases and phishing searches of people's mental health records for other than 'threats to the public'.
Just a brief application of imagination will reveal how such projects are going to provide tremendous opportunities for abusing people with histories mental disorders for the sake of 'doing something' that seems common-sense appropriate, but which is really a very sketchy response to the need to 'do something' about that which we know so poorly.
= new reply since forum marked as read