Washington: Nearly one in 10 adults in the US have a history of impulsive, angry behaviour and have access to guns, according to a new study.
The study, by scientists at Duke, Harvard, and Columbia universities, found that an estimated 9 per cent of US adults have a history of impulsive, angry behaviour and access to guns, while an estimated 1.5 per cent of adults report impulsive anger and carry firearms outside their homes.
Angry people with ready access to guns are typically young or middle-aged men, who at times lose their temper, smash and break things, or get into physical fights, according to the study.
Study participants who owned six or more firearms were also far more likely than people with only one or two firearms to carry guns outside the home and to have a history of impulsive, angry behaviour.
"As we try to balance constitutional rights and public safety regarding people with mental illness, the traditional legal approach has been to prohibit firearms from involuntarily-committed psychiatric patients," said Jeffrey Swanson, professor in psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Duke Medicine and lead author of the study.
"But now we have more evidence that current laws don't necessarily keep firearms out of the hands of a lot of potentially dangerous individuals," Swanson said.
The researchers analysed data from 5,563 face-to-face interviews conducted in the National Comorbidity Study Replication (NCS-R), a nationally representative survey of mental disorders in the US led by Harvard in the early 2000s.
The study found little overlap between participants with serious mental illnesses and those with a history of impulsive, angry behaviour and access to guns.
Researchers found that anger-prone people with guns were at elevated risk for a range of fairly common psychiatric conditions such as personality disorders, alcohol abuse, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress, while only a tiny fraction suffered from acute symptoms of major disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Fewer than one in 10 angry people with access to guns had ever been admitted to a hospital for a psychiatric or substance abuse problem, the study found.
As a result, most of these individuals' medical histories would not stop them from being able to legally purchase guns under existing mental-health-related restrictions.
The researchers said that looking at a prospective gun buyer's history of misdemeanor convictions, including violent offenses and multiple convictions for impaired driving, could be more effective at preventing gun violence in the US than screening based on mental health treatment history.
In 2012, more than 59,000 people were injured by the intentional use of firearms, and another 11,622 were killed in violent gun incidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in US.
The study is published in the journal Behavioral Sciences and the Law.
