Trump wrong to blame mass killings on mental illness rather than guns, experts say

President Trump on Monday attributed the slaughter of 26 people in a Texas church — the nation’s third mass killing in five weeks — to “a mental health problem,” saying it wasn’t a “guns situation.”

“He’s wrong on two counts,” said Michael Stone, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and author of “The Anatomy of Evil,” who has studied 360 of the most notorious mass murders of the past century. “It is a gun issue. And there are very few mass murderers who are certifiably crazy.”

Critics say blaming mass killings on “mental health problems” is not only medically inaccurate, it is politically disingenuous — a “fig leaf,” to make it appear that Trump is doing something about gun violence.

Politically, Trump’s reactions to the recent mass killings have been inconsistent.

When green-card-holding Uzbek immigrant Sayfullo Habibullaevic Saipov allegedly killed eight people with a rented truck in New York City last week, Trump called for ramping up “extreme vetting” for immigrants and blamed Democrats for the Diversity Visa Lottery immigration program that enabled Saipov to move to the United States.

Trump described Saipov, who said he committed his crime in the name of the Islamic State, as “a very sick and deranged person,” but the president’s response focused on the political, calling the immigration program a “Chuck Schumer beauty” — a dig at the New York senator who helped create the program in 1990. Stone said it is more likely that Saipov acted because he was radicalized by political and religious factors.

Trump’s reaction was different when a white, native-born American killed 58 people in Las Vegas last month and another one killed 26 at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on Sunday. Trump attributed those slaughters to mental illness.

“This isn’t a guns situation. This is a mental health problem at the highest level,” Trump said of the Texas killings while visiting Japan on a 12-day trip through Asia. “It’s a very, very sad event. A very, very sad event, but that’s the way I view it.”

That may be Trump’s view, but Stone said very few of the mass killers he has studied had a serious mental illness. And even though Stone had never examined Texas shooter Devin Patrick Kelley, he believes it is unlikely that mental illness was the reason for Kelley’s actions. Kelley, like roughly half of the mass killers Stone has studied, died shortly after committing the crime, preventing further firsthand interviews about his motives. He was 26.

Experts said Kelley’s history of domestic violence would be a more likely predictor of further violent outbursts. On Monday, the Air Force admitted that it failed to enter Kelley’s domestic-violence court-martial into a federal National Crime Information Center database, which would have barred him from buying a weapon. Kelley passed the background checks and purchased weapons last year and this year.

Yet in the aftermath of the mass violence that has become commonplace in the United States, Trump, and other politicians before him, often quickly attribute a mass killer’s actions to mental illness.

“It’s easy to dub them that, because the average person thinks (a killer) must be crazy to commit such a horrible act,” Stone said. “It feels comfortable to the public, because they don’t know very much about” mental illness.

Trump “is not the only person who jumps to that conclusion. It is a popular misconception that people who commit mass shootings must be crazy,” said Liza Gold, a forensic psychiatrist who teaches at Georgetown University and edited “Gun Violence and Mental Illness.”

The idea has permeated the public consciousness. One of the few points of widespread agreement Americans share when it comes to guns concerns mental illness.

A July Pew Research survey found that 89 percent of both gun owners and non-gun owners thought people with mental illness should have their gun access restricted. A 2015 Washington Post/ABC News Poll found that more than twice as many people (63 percent) thought mass shootings were more attributable to inadequately treating people with mental health issues than it was to inadequate gun control laws (23 percent).

But analysts said that shared sentiment might be misdirected.

“Most gun violence — 98 percent — is not attributable to people with mental illness,” Gold said Monday.

If people with mental illness have access to a gun, experts say, they’re most likely to use it on themselves, not others. Also, truly mentally ill people are unlikely to be coherent enough to handle the myriad details involved carrying out a mass attack.

Stone and others say the root of the gun violence isn’t medical but political, and can be traced to the National Rifle Association, which wants no curbs on guns. The organization has cowed lawmakers away from funding federal studies into the root of gun violence, which might provide fact-based reasons for why people commit mass murders.

Last year, the organization spent more than $50 million backing Trump and six GOP Senate candidates. It lost only one race, an open seat in Nevada that was held by retiring Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks money in politics.

During the presidential race in October, the NRA sponsored 1 of every 9 TV ads that aired in swing state North Carolina, 1 of 8 in Ohio and 1 of 20 in Pennsylvania, according to the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity.

“Blaming mental health is an old, tired NRA tactic meant to paralyze the country and make it seem like gun violence is akin to floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and other natural disasters over which we don’t have any control,” said Peter Ambler of Oakland, executive director of Giffords: Courage to Fight Gun Violence, the organization started by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., who was shot in 2011 while meeting with constituents in Tucson.

“It gives (Trump) a fig leaf to make it seem like he’s caring about another shooting,” Ambler said. “That he has something to say about it beyond offering his ‘thoughts and prayers.’”

Ambler said that if Trump were sincere about linking mental health to gun violence, he wouldn’t have signed a bill in February rolling back an Obama-era law that made it more difficult for people with mental illness to buy guns.

Instead, Gold said, by “harping on mental illness as the cause, we inevitably can’t move forward. We remain frozen, having developed a sense of learned helplessness.”

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli