show you how the miracles of science... >> this is what innovation looks like. >> can affect and surprise us. >> i feel like we're making an impact. >> let's do it. >> techknow - where technology meets humanity. >> in his address at the white house, the president brought it up. gun rights advocates, keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally ill. and what is less clear is how you do that, in a way that comports with privacy laws, and the second amendment. is all of the talk about mental illness and deadly firepower attractive because it tries to supply easy answers to really

difficult questions? it's the "inside story". welcome to "inside story". i'm ray suarez. add many lans a. james holmes, jared loughner, they were all mentally ill young men, heavily armed, who together killed scores of people with firearms and along with similar shooters, open under a new front in the ongoing debate on who should be able to buy a gun in a country reluctant to limit the ownership of firearms. today we're going to look at what's promised and what's implied and what's impossible to keep guns away from those who would do harm to themselves or others. it sounds a lot easier than it is. is the promise to broaden

databases threaten to do years of work to destigmatize such problems, so people get treatment? with such a bine airy function, you can get a gun, and you can't get a gun, does it distort where neurological problems imply? it's more of a question of treatment than weapons and background checks. >> if we can still get folks proper care, we can spare more families the pain of losing a loved one to suicide. >> joining me to look at president obama's latest executive action, and the wider debate about screening gun owners, the national alliance on mental illness. the president and ceo of mental health america, and managing

attorney for arsenal attorneys, a firm specializing in gun related litigation. paul, let me start with you, is there a connection between mental illness and the are pencety to violence? >> not a strong one. there are a lot of people with mental illness, and some of them have a propensity to violence, but the vast majority of people with mental illness don't have violent thoughts, and there are two different groups. >> well, is it a problem that we so easily aligned those two groups in this conversation? that after there has been a terrible shooting or some sort of piece of legislation debated over, we seem to assume that if we kept guns away from mentally ill people, we would mop up a lot of the violence. >> it's a big problem if we put those two groups together. and here's what's good about that. we turn our attention to issues

affecting people with mental illness, the president did in his remarks, and we turn our attention to a better system for better services, better treatments and better supports. and there are bills in congress that would help do that. we need help to get behind, in an effort to get the compromises and the bills moving forward so we can get services for people with mental illness, before stage four in the disease process. >> the figure of $500 million, do you get a lot of treatment out of that, and is there a lot of money? >> it would be a significant step in the right direction. there's significant treatment for mental services, and we cut $500 million, and i'm not going to say that it's going to solve all of the problems, but it would be a significant step in the right direction. we applaud the president for including that idea and we're

looking forward to hearing more details about it. >> to the extent that we now try to keep people who have terrible mental illness from owning a gun, how does that work? you walk into a gun shop and you say here i am, john doe and they look you up, and what pins your name? what raises a red flag and puts you on a list? >> they perform a background check before you receive a firearm. and it's a check by the fbi, in virginia where i live, it's also a state background check that's performed. so that information, so it should include information, where they have been adjudicated to be a danger to themselves, and others are very incapacitated. so the background check system is not perfect, and it's often

lacked good reporting from all states, and sometimes it's understaffed by the fbi. so one of the president's proposals this week that he announced is greater manpower staffing for the fbi and the background check system. >> now, it sounds, by what you're saying, that the system even as it exists is pretty flawed. and ron, aren't there a lot of people who fall short of that very high threshold. involuntary commission, or adjudicated to be no longer in their full capacity. isn't that a pretty high threshold for owning a firearm? >> it's our position that if you're going to be included in a database maintained by the fbi and precluded from owning a firearm, there should be some evidence, some link, some link established through research with the potential for violence. so it's frequently a danger to

yourself and others. and adjudication that you're not competent to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity, often involves at least a criminal charge that may be a violent crime. so there at least you have that nexus, but the problem is when you start trying to go broader than that, and you start talking about people who may be temporarily deemed incapable of managing their personal affairs, there's no evidence whatsoever that being in that state of mind makes you -- increases your propensity for violence. >> here's where this gets sticky. because if we could quickly poll the mental health professionals of america, think of all of your patients, tell me, all other things being equal, you'd rather not see them walking around with a pistol, that list might be a lot longer than the list of people in america who have been

voluntarily committed. >> and perhaps people who don't have mental illnesses, but most psychologists and mental health professionals will tell you that it's very difficult to predict violence. the best predicter is past violence and that's true for all people with mental illness. >> stay with us, it's "inside story". >> nearly two in three gun deaths are from suicides. so a lot of our work is to prevent people from hurting themselves.

>> you're watching "inside story," and i'm ray suarez. one of the key points in the president's executive action on guns dealt with mental health and ownership. it may sound like nothing but common sense to want to keep potentially deadly weapons out of the hands of mentally ill people. and it's less clear how you make it work. my guests are still with me, and do we have a problem with this, when you're adjudicated in the way that you described earlier, does your name stay on that list, or the registry, five years ago, ten years, forever? >> it's generally difficult for anyone to regain or restore

theirer firearms rights. but it's discouraging. many clients from our law firm have possibly been voluntarily committed. but they're unlikely to it discuss those issues because of the stigma, and therefore, they don't seek medical treatment for their needs, yet they're frustrated. >> because they want to keep their firearm rights? here's part of the problem. if it keeps people from seeking what they need because they don't want to lose their guns, but we know that mental illness is episodic. by the time we reach our 50s, a large portion of adults have at one time or another sought treatment of one kind or another.

and does this approach address something that's more complicated and subtle and borderless than that? >> maybe it's more complicated and maybe it's more subtle, but i would like to go back to the question you asked ron before too. you said to him, don't you think that a psychiatrist, if you asked about all of their patients, might be able to tell you that's one that should have a gun and one that should not have a gun. if you asked psychologists the same question, if they could pick out the one or two cancer patients that shouldn't have a gun, and the problem is there's not a strong correlation leer between this particular condition. so if you use this particular condition to single people out and say, okay, we're going to make it more difficult for you when you haven't been adjudicated, or if you have with the episodic nature of the condition, and now we're going to make it more difficult for you to get your rights back. of course you're going to have a chilling effect on people seeking treatment. and you're going to have a lot

of medium saying this is absolutely, categorically unfair. and that's what we don't want to be. unfair and single out a group of people for no good reason to be treated differently than everybody else. >> we don't want to be unfair, but at the same time, if you and i walked out on to m street now and asked the first 100 people that we saw, they would rather err on the side of over correcting than undercorrecting. >> there in laws the problem. so many assumptions equated with mental illness with violence that are not true and not substantiated when you look at the research evidence. and their impressions are formulated by that. and the fact of the matter is that it's very difficult for people to seek help when it's needed. it's not just to keep them from seeking firearms, but the real world consequences sometimes of receiving mental help treatment, and that fact

becoming known to others can be devastating to people. impacting on social relationships, et cetera. we want to make it easier for people to seek treatment. and it's not that we're opposed to anybody with mental illness being in the database, we think that there's a sincere effort to identify the right group of people. but let's not be overly broad because i backfire. >> a great tidal wave, if you will, and i'm part of it. and eventually millions of people will be turning 70, 75, 80 every year. and i understand this is part of your practice. are we also looking at perhaps millions of people who don't think of themselves as being in the group that we have been talking about so far who may eventually be facing being categorized that way and losing their gun rights that way. >> one of the president's

proposals this week, one of the things that he announced was the social security association to identify people who might not be able to manage their affairs, and therefore social security might identify people from prohibitive from possessing firearms, so we took care of granddad's mail and made sure that his bills were paid. and if you officially identified that to the social security association, does that mean there's a knock at the door? >> there's an invisible line between taking care of his mail and him eventually being able to balance his checkbook and driving home. is there a point? an alarm bell won't go off, and he won't send you a note, as of today, he should not be able to have a gun, and how do you police that? >> it could be an administrative process, and i think that the recurring theme

here is that a lot of the solutions offered by the president are operating at the margins, but they're aving a much greater population, and it's the same with the gun control debate. people who have their full legal rights, they're having their second amendment rights restricted by gun control. the fine line is being covered over by a brought brush with all of proposals. >> with electronic medical records, and protection of medical information, can you screen gun buyers, add a mental health filter and still protect privacy? a weapon on your hip and hippa. stay with us. it's "inside story". >> first graders. from every family you never imagined that their loved one would be taken from our lives by a bullet from a gun.

every time i think about those kids, it gets me mad. and by the way, it happens on the streets chicago every day. [ applause ]

>> welcome back to "inside story," i'm ray suarez. we're looking at munitions and mental health this time on the program. as your personal medical history is more likely live in computer code and less likely in a fat file folder stuffed with paper, some of the details in your life, with people that you have allowed and people you don't want to see. in an age of rising concern

about privacy, how do you set up a system that conveys information and protects privacy if you want to buy a gun. and once you clear that enormous hurdle, is a record that protects anything. my guests are still with me, and are there privacy concerns involved in making a more intimate connection with someone's treatment history and their ability to buy a gun? >> well, we're told that when a licensed gun dealer accesses the background check system, the name of the person pops up but not why they're on the list. if that's true, then i think that's one safeguard against compromising privacy and health information. i guess the question is what information is conveyed to the fbi? and i know at least the fact that they're on the list because they're on the mental health prohibiter list is

conveyed. so i think that potentially, there are privacy breaches, though we have been assured that there are many safeguards in place to present that from happening, and we hope that's not going to happen. but sure, with computers being able to interface with each other, and an agency that performs multiple functions, there are potential breeches that could occur. >> james holmes and the jared lawners get ought of attention and many are not published in the newspaper. but suicide in a household wouldn't be one of the things in a file that gets dinged when someone does a national check. >> in adam lanza's situation, it was his mom who had the gun, had the weapon.

and so that also would have been in the system or should she have been in the system. but i think that the question that we have got about suicide really points out the importance of focusing on early intervention identification and treatment. because suicide is the ultimate stage four event. and when we have seen suicide rates steady or continuing to go up, when death rates from all other chronic diseases have been coming down in the years, not because we have sun such a good job request stage four cancer or heart disease, but we have done a good job with early identification, and if we were to do such a good job with early identification and prevention of mental health conditions, and not wait for crisis events, that's how we bring down the suicide rates. putting guns in somebody with stage four of an illness is

closing the barn door after the horse haves escaped. and we need to start ten years sooner to make tur that we move them toward recovery. >> speaker of the house, paul ryan, and senate majority leader, mitch mcconnell and the head of the nra have all pointed to better background checks for mental illness as being part of the answer, and they said not so long ago, we can't even know how many killings mental illness has involved because "how can we even guess how many with our nation's refusal to create an active national database of the mentally ill. can you contemplate something like that being created? >> as an attorney, it disturbs me as part of the big brother data direction, and it was not that long ago when 20 million people's records were hacked by the chinese not that long ago,

so i do think that there's an emerging consensus about a database with more mental health information, and i think that it's driven by the second amendment gun control debate, because we have to protect the privacy rights of patients, and stigmatizing people. i think that we're early on, dialogue about it, but there has been som some consensus when you have pierre suing that data collection. in fact, the proposal in congress proposed by senator cornen would have been a very good measure to adopt. but i think that the stumbling block would have been that it would have been affected people voluntarily. >> what president obama said yesterday as he was finishing the mental health part of his talk. listen. >> for those in congress who so

often rush to blame mental illness for mass shootings, put your money where your mouth is. [ applause ] >> i want to make a point that tragedies involving mental illness happen every day, but those are very heavily publicized. but the fact is that the real tragedies occur for people who are homeless, who are incarcerated in jails because they didn't get time for early treatment, as paul said. people taking their lives through suicide. those are the real trans, and the magnitude of those tragedies far exceed the gun related tragedies. and so we really do need to focus on how we can put resources into early

intervention and better treatment. >> i want to thank my guests, the mental alliance, and president and ceo of mental health america, and managing attorney for arsenal attorneys, specializing in gun related litigation. i'll be back with a final thought on mental illness, and the potential threat of the nra. it's "inside story".

>> be careful when anybody says that the solution to a complex problem is really simple. highly publicized crimes by mentally ill americans give us the sense that if we could address mental illness, we could have the problem licked. that steps around the real challenge, that many people who harmed themselves and others over the past decades were not perceived as a threat to themselves and others until they were. the suicidal thoughts, and the paranoid fantasies, and the

bottomless depression didn't put them on a list or radar screen of those closest to them. and then they were dead, by their own hand or they were a murderer. as we heard earlier in the program, the link between mental illness and violence is a tenuous one. looking at people's mental histories with background checks, identifying potential trouble where none exists, or false negatives. when someone is compiling an arsenal. patients and doctors and gun dealers, and you have a recipe for eventually doing nothing, which may be why those interests, those most rig lusly opposed to adding more regulation seem so at peace with the idea of policing a lot of the blame and solution around mental health.

i'm ray suarez, and that's the "inside story". >> this is aljazeera america, live from new york city. i'm david schuster. just ahead, h bomb claims. north korea claims that it conducted a successful thermonuclear test. the white house doesn't believe that it was that powerful and the distinction matters. congress trying to end president obama's healthcare law. show of support. the professor who expresses