New research found a high number of Americans struggle with anger problems and also have access to guns.
These individuals who have a history of angry behavior and easy access to guns are primarily young or middle-aged men, Duke University Medical Center reported. An estimated nine percent of adults in the U.S. exhibit impulsive and angry behavior; about 1.5 percent of American adults both report impulsive anger and carry firearms outside of their homes. The findings also showed people who owned six or more firearms were more likely to carry them outside of their homes and have angry tendencies than those who owned two or less.
"As we try to balance constitutional rights and public safety regarding people with mental illness, the traditional legal approach has been to prohibit firearms from involuntarily-committed psychiatric patients," said Jeffrey Swanson, professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke Medicine and lead author of the study. "But now we have more evidence that current laws don't necessarily keep firearms out of the hands of a lot of potentially dangerous individuals."
To make their findings, the researchers looked at 5,563 face-to-face interviews conducted in the National Comorbidity Study Replication (NCS-R). The team did not find much overlap between participants suffering from serious mental diseases and those with a history of angry, impulsive behavior and access to guns.
The team found those with anger problems and access to guns were more at risk for psychiatric conditions such as "personality disorders, alcohol abuse, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress, while only a tiny fraction suffered from acute symptoms of major disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder." Despite this link, fewer than one in 10 people with anger problems and access to guns had been hospitalized for these types of disorders, and there was nothing in their medical histories that would prevent them from purchasing a firearm.
"Very few people in this concerning group suffer from the kinds of disorders that often lead to involuntary commitment and which would legally prohibit them from buying a gun," said Ronald Kessler, professor of health care policy at Harvard and principal investigator of the NCS-R survey.
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Behavioral Sciences and the Law.
