Research Shows That Mental Illness And Support For Gun Control Appear To Be Related

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Puzzle head brain concept as a human face profile made from crumpled white paper with a jigsaw piece cut out on a rustic old wood background as a mental health symbol.

If you’re new to this site, you can be forgiven for thinking that the headline above is the lead in to a snarky joke at the expense of anti-gunners, but that’s not the case. In fact, this isn’t a joke at all. Research really has shown a correlation between self-reported mental illness and tendencies toward leaning left (and especially far left) politically. Of course, that political leaning is anti-gun.

Now, someone is going to say respond to this article, “You’ve said that correlation does not imply causation,” and they’re right. Correlation (a relationship between statistics) does not imply that one caused the other. I’m not saying that mental illness causes leftist political leanings (or, at least, I’m not aware of any research that indicates that), but it appears clear that either one causes the other or that they share a similar cause so that both of them tend to show up consistently in the same people.

A research paper posted on ResearchGate.com by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard of the Ulster Institute for Social Research discusses this correlation (hat tip to here for the lead). The abstract for the research paper reads:

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It has been claimed that left-wingers or liberals (US sense) tend to more often suffer from mental illness than right-wingers or conservatives. This potential link was investigated using the General Social Survey cumulative cross-sectional dataset (1972-2018). A search of the available variables resulted in 5 items measuring one’s own mental illness (e.g., ”Do you have any emotional or mental disability?”). All of these items were weakly associated with left-wing political ideology as measured by self-report, with especially high rates seen for the “extremely liberal” group. These results mostly held up in regressions that adjusted for age, sex, and race. For the variable with the most data (n = 11,338), the difference in the mental illness measure between “extremely liberal” and “extremely conservative” was 0.39 d. Temporal analysis showed that the relationship between mental illness, happiness, and political ideology has existed in the GSS data since the 1970s and still existed in the 2010s. Within-study meta-analysis of all the results found that extreme liberals had a 150% increased rate of mental illness compared to moderates. The finding of increased mental illness among left-wingers is congruent with numerous findings based on related constructs, such as positive relationships between conservatism, religiousness and health in general.

Now, I have no doubt that someone will say that Kirkegaard is a biased researcher, especially when they read the last sentence of the abstract. Frankly, I don’t know, as this is the first that I’ve heard of him.

Having said that, though, I will say that my experience in dealing with anti-gunners is that they make assumptions about the world based on delusions and not reality and that they are irrational (i.e. illogical) when coming to conclusions based on their assumptions about the world. So, my personal experience tends to indicate that Kirkegaard is probably right: anti-gunners and leftists in general suffer from mental illness, the more leftist, the more ill.

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8 COMMENTS

  1. well yes we know they are mentally challenged, no one in their right mind would vote over and over for the same people and expect a different outcome. the left has lied to their sheep for 100 years and the sheep keep voting for the Exact Policies.

    • Beng dismissive of scientific findings you don’t like has been the battle cry of far Left Liberals for quite a while.
      Exactly which part did you find funny?

  2. I’ve been saying for years… liberalism is a brain disease; it’s the only conclusion that can be drawn from the left’s irrational beliefs. They tend to place their own emotional-based “rights” and “needs” above the rights and needs of all others… narcissism? The left seems to want to control the lives of others, while the the right tends to live and let live.
    Example…
    – Liberal who fears firearms: “I’m afraid of guns so no one should be allowed to have a gun, I want them banned! No one should have the right to own a gun!”
    – Conservative who fears firearms: “I’m afraid of guns, so I won’t get one.”

  3. As someone who has been in this fight for 50+ years, I’ve yet to have had a conversation, discussion or debate with an Antigunner, that didn’t end with my conviction that they were a few crayons short of a box.

  4. I’ve always figured it’s because the anti-gunners are felons and can’t own a gun. So that makes him mental and hate the rest of us law abiding citizens. And yes I do think they are mental. All demonrats are mental. Look at the video of that school teacher yelling at Trump supporters and wishing they would F@#king die. Now if that isn’t a mental patient I don’t know what is darn sure shouldn’t be teaching school.

  5. This is pure FAKE News because Democraps have no brain to suffer a mental illness with. They support gun control because the WORTHLESS FECAL MATTED that fills their otherwise empty skulls to overflowing kills anything and everything that enters it.

  6. I have to disagree. I think it has more to do with them being misinformed. They have probably never been to a socialist country and gone out of the cities and seen how the real people in the country live. You have to get off the beaten path to se how the people in these countries live. I have been to many of these countries and even some monarchies and wandered out of the towns and visited with the people that live the actual life of a person under socialist rule. Until they have actually seen how bad it is you can never convince them how terrible the life there is. Communism sounds like a perfect world but a perfect world requires perfect people and I have never met one of those.

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