When I say I am annoyed by "the scapegoating of the mentally ill," obviously I am referring to the specific statements by specific individuals or groups in the media which are clearly attempting to put the focus on the mentally ill as the problem, and not lack of regulation on general access to all types of guns. Also, clearly, I do not agree with said scapegoating and don't intend to let the NRA or whomever get away with it.
So to clarify, better and more effective regulation of the gun trade would make it easier to make sure that people do not get guns if they should not have guns, for whatever reason including but not limited to, specific kinds of mental health warning signs for significant likely risk of danger to others.
Thus, let's look at two hypothetical gun buyers. Buyer A suffers a mental illness that gives him paranoid and violent command hallucinations. Buyer B is mentally healthy but is an abuser with a long record of police complaints and arrests for domestic violence and terroristic threats against his spouse, and said spouse is now suing him for divorce and is pregnant.
I say that background checks and waiting periods should raise a flag on both those buyers and they should both be denied access to guns. Plus, police should be alerted to their desire to buy a weapon (in fact, police should do the background checks and licensing).
But they should both be denied for the same reason. Buyer A should not be denied because he's sick. He should be denied because his specific condition poses a reasonable risk of danger to others. Exactly the same as the sane guy whose history and behavior flag him as very likely to try to murder his spouse.
The goal should not be to say, "This whole group of people who are in no way monolithic and very very few of whom pose any danger at all to anyone should all be put on the spot as the cause of gun violence." That's what the NRA and others would like us to do with people suffering mental illness, but we should not do that. Instead, I think we should say, "Individuals who want to own dangerous weapons need to prove it is reasonably safe for them to have such weapons, and to that end, gun buyers must undergo vetting and licensing by governmental authorities." That might have at least as much chance of picking out the Jared Loughners and the Seung-Hui Chos as it would of filtering out the likely spouse murderers and obsessed celebrity stalkers.
Also, I should say that I'm not interested in parsing out aspects of gun violence. There is no gun violence that is good in my opinion. Nothing is going to change that viewpoint for me. Very, very, VERY rarely, gun violence may be unavoidable -- as when the police have no choice but to use deadly force. But I will go to my grave saying that it is NEVER a good thing, nor should it ever be a socially acceptable thing. Under extremely rare circumstances, it may be forgivable, it may be the correct choice, it may be the lesser of available evils, but it is never good.
To me, the problem part of gun culture is the violence part. The glorifying of violence. The parsing out of okay-violence from not-okay-violence. The social acceptance of violence as an appropriate response to some things. That's a problem. As a society, we need to address it.
And to be honest, parsing out aspects of gun violence feels to me like it would be wandering off into the realm of distraction from our nation's serious problem. It's like derailing into a discussion of what time of day is appropriate for cocktails of various kinds when the actual topic at hand is someone needing an emergency intervention for being alcoholic to the point of self-destruction. It's a problem of proportion in perspective.
And to be further honest about, when I hear people like Wayne Lapierre say the crap he says, I do feel like I'm listening to the addict tell me that someone else is causing the real drug problem. His own addiction has nothing to do with it. So we should just go bother that other person and leave him to drink his booze or smoke his crack or whatever.