Kudos to MSNBC for having a thoughtful discussion of mental illness and violence this morning.

One of the topics covered today was NRA president Wayne LaPierre’s remarks yesterday about establishing a national gun registry of “the mentally ill” in this country. Interesting, isn’t it, that “the mentally ill” don’t even get a noun after their name, as if they aren’t humans at all. “The truth,” Mr. LaPierre opined, “is that our society is populated by an unknown number of genuine monsters—people so deranged, so evil, so possessed by voices and driven by demons that no sane person can possibly ever comprehend them. They walk among us every day. And does anybody really believe that the next Adam Lanza isn’t planning his attack on a school he’s already identified at this very moment?”

What underlies LaPierre’s idea is the belief that people with mental illness are inherently violent. Statistics present a different side to this story. People with mental illness are actually 14 times likelier to be victims of violence than the general population, accounting for only four percent of all violence in this country. That means 96% of all violent acts are committed by people without mental illness.

But let’s put it in different terms that are much easier to grasp. If one in 17 people in this country has a serious mental illness, that equates to seven percent of the population, or some 18 million people. Where are all of them? Shouldn’t they be coming out of the woodwork with assault rifles and mowing down thousands of strangers every day?

I am one in 17. Yes, that’s right, me, one of those people, sitting here at my computer, typing like any other logical person. A person, one of many millions, with a mental illness. A person who has been so depressed at times that I couldn’t even leave my house, much less go to the trouble of purchasing a gun and committing mass murder. And yet because I have bipolar II, a mental illness that affects an estimated 5.7 million people in this country, I am automatically declared a monster. No firearms for me, I might go to a mall and start killing people.

What steams me is that Mr. LaPierre presumes to know my story, and the story of the millions like me with mental illness. But our real story is not violence, it is shame. A full two-thirds of us, or a staggering 14 million, will never get any help at all. Stigma is a substantial reason; no one wants to be thought of as a monster, after all. It’s attitudes like Mr. LaPierre’s that kept me from getting help for a full 17 years, and in that time my disease ran rampant, taking many years out of my life. And yet I am one of the lucky ones. There are millions of people in this country who will never have my good fortune, who believe that they couldn’t possibly have a mental illness because they don’t want to kill anyone, people living in the shadows, seen only when something goes wrong, dying on the streets and by their own hand.