Nearly 1 in 10 Americans have severe anger issues and access to guns

Roughly 22 million Americans -- 8.9 percent of the adult population-- have impulsive anger issues and easy access to guns. 3.7 million of these angry gun owners routinely carry their guns in public. And very few of them are subject to current mental health-based gun ownership restrictions.

Those are the key findings of a new study by researchers from Harvard, Columbia and Duke University. "Anger," in this study, doesn't simply mean garden-variety aggravation. It means explosive, uncontrollable rage, as measured by responses to the National Comorbidity Survey Replication in the early 2000s. It is "impulsive, out of control, destructive, harmful," lead author Jeffrey Swanson of Duke University said in an interview. "You and I might shout. These individuals break and smash things and get into physical fights, punch someone in the nose."

Angry people with guns are typically young or middle-aged men, according to Swanson's research. They're likely to be married, and to live in suburban areas. In a recent op-ed, Swanson and a co-author point to Craig Stephen Hicks, a North Carolina man who "had frightened neighbors with his rages and had a cache of fourteen firearms" and who shot three Muslim students earlier this year, as a quintessential example of an enraged gun owner.

"To have gun violence you need two things: a gun and a dangerous person," Swanson says. "We can't broadly limit legal access to guns, so we have to focus on the dangerous people." Taken at face value this isn't a controversial claim. After all, guns don't kill people, people kill people, as gun rights advocates are fond of saying.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/08/nearly-1-in-10-americans-have-severe-anger-issues-and-access-to-guns/?utm_term=.e9a96ca40de2

A relevant quote from the linked article: "Other research has shown that people with a single prior misdemeanor conviction are "nearly 5 times as likely as those with no prior criminal history to be charged with new offenses involving firearms or violence."

Alcoholics, wife-beaters, dog-kickers, road-ragers, and other anti-social types have absolutely no problem passing a background check under the current guidelines. When these types of people are allowed to have guns, carry them in public, AND stand their ground against perceived "threats," innocent citizens are placed in harm's way.

Expanded background checks to include local police departments needs to be implemented in order to identify social misfits even though they have no criminal record. This type of investigation is a pre-hire requirement for many government positions, and other sensitive jobs. The bar should be just as high for carrying a gun in the public venue.

Along with this scrutiny, carrying an unlicensed gun in the public venue should carry stiff penalties, and strict enforcement should be a top priority for all police agencies.