adjl posted...
I actually would go so far as to say that most crimes are a consequence of poor mental health, and even "simply evil" is arguably a matter of mental illness in and of itself (most obviously, antisocial personality disorder is explicitly identified as a mental disorder, and that kind of lack of empathy is common to most/all "evil" people). That's getting into - for lack of a better term - "small-m mental health" more so than more discretely identifiable mental disorders, though, and that's a much, much broader concept. It's roughly analogous to being in good physical shape vs. not being in good shape: You may not have anything specifically wrong with you if you aren't in good shape, but you're not as healthy as you would be with a more active lifestyle and better diet, and that poorer health increases the risk of later developing a more formal disorder. Good mental health is more than just not having a mental disorder, it's a matter of being in a comfortable place mentally and emotionally, which in turn is a product of pretty much everything about your environment, personal history, and attitudes toward the world around you.
When people talk about "mental health" in the context of gun crime, though, they're not generally talking about what I'll call "mental hygiene" (analogous to what you're calling "small-m mental health"); they're talking about people who have real, identifiable mental disorders that predispose them to violence, at least in the minds of those blaming "mental health" for the mass killing crisis.
The idea pushed mostly by conservatives is, "If we could just find all the schizophrenics and treat them, there wouldn't be any more mass killings!" which, I'm sure I don't need to tell you, is absolute nonsense. Most of the people who kill - and mass killers in particular - are not mentally unwell, at least not to the point where you could do a psychological exam on them and have someone say, "Yes, this person has this mental disorder and should be barred from owning guns." At least, not unless you set the threshold so low that it would de facto bar just about everyone from owning guns anyways.
Could you hypothetically solve the issue of violence with better mental hygiene? Perhaps, but we're reaching heavily into the realm of the theoretical with that argument. Even the countries with the best mental healthcare in the world still suffer crime and violence, so it's far from the most judicious use of resources if the end goal is to reduce killings (especially when, if we're talking about the US specifically, there is much lower-hanging fruit available).
marthalies posted...
Do you want to know what kind of people blame inanimate objects for the decisions people make? People who don't want to be held responsible for their own actions and decisions.
A gun cannot be held responsible for a person deciding to pull the trigger. That's on the person and the person alone. It isn't the guns fault or gun manufacturers or gun vendors or lax buying rules, it's only on the person, the person who decided to kill.
No one in this topic (or anywhere else) is saying that guns hold moral blameworthiness for killings in which they are used; that's a ridiculous misinterpretation of the argument at hand.
Guns facilitate mass-murder. It really is that simple. No one is suggesting taking away guns because they are morally corrupt or inherently evil or anything like that; people are advocating to restrict guns because people use them for evil ends, and that there is no countervailing concern of sufficient magnitude to override the evil being done with them.
marthalies posted...
Then you'd also have to magically make sure that a person deciding to kill has no access to any possible murder weapon.
Nirvana fallacy. That someone can kill without a gun is not justification to give them a tool wherein they can kill much more easily.
Ask yourself why citizens are not allowed to own artillery. Or tanks. Or nuclear weapons, if we want to go full ridiculous. Those are all inanimate objects, the same as guns, neither inherently good nor inherently evil. Yes, murderers could kill staggering numbers of people with any of the above; but they could kill people with kitchen knives as well, per your argument, so there isn't a reason to restrict them, right?
Yet it's not hard to figure out why we keep those things out of civilian hands: they can kill far more readily, and are far harder to stop, than an unarmed human. And once you accept that logic, you're pretty much at the finish line for understanding why people advocate for restricting gun ownership.