Deadly shooting on Oregon college campus

Donald Trump has done it again. At the third Republican presidential debate Wednesday night, Trump managed to once more offend a large swath of people in one breath.

“I feel that the gun-free zones and, you know, when you say that, that’s target practice for the sickos and for the mentally ill,” he told CNBC moderators. “They look around for gun-free zones.”

Trump isn’t alone in this belief. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll released this week, 63 percent of participants—and 82 percent of Republicans—said mass shootings reflect problems in identifying and treating people with mental-health problems, while just 23 percent said they reflected inadequate gun-control laws.

But mental-health advocates, individuals who suffer from mental-health issues, and the people who support them likely bristled at his remarks. In the United States, one in four adults, or approximately 61.5 million Americans, experiences some form of mental illness in a given year, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a nonprofit advocacy group. The mental-health community has long tried to rid the lexicon of language that, while once common, it now considers a driver of stigma against mental illness. She’s psycho. He’s gone mad. They’re sick in the head. A politician more concerned with public perception probably wouldn’t have used the term “sickos.” In fact, if anyone other than Trump had said it, there’s a good chance it would have been deemed a gaffe.

The reality of the connection between mental illness and violence is very different from the one delivered by Trump. People with severe mental illnesses are over 10 times more likely to be victims of violent crime than members of the general population, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Research has shown that people with a mental-illness diagnosis are more likely to be discriminated against within the justice system, and are more likely to become incarcerated than healthy people, according to the Treatment Advocacy Center, a nonprofit advocacy group. In 2005, more than half of all prison and jail inmates in the United States had “a mental-health problem,” according to the Department of Justice.

“In this sense,” wrote doctors Jonathan Metzl and Kenneth MacLeish in an American Public Health Association paper on mental illness and mass shootings in February, “persons with mental illness might well have more to fear from ‘us’ than we do from ‘them.’ And blaming persons with mental disorders for gun crime overlooks the threats posed to society by a much larger population—the sane.