Could Kansas tax guns and ammunition to fund state’s struggling mental health system?

You could be in crisis across the street from Kansas’ Osawatomie state psychiatric hospital and still not be able to check yourself in. There’s currently a moratorium on voluntary admissions due to lack of space, and there has been for nearly five years.

“So, that means you have to go to a judge and be involuntarily committed,” says Kansas Mental Health Coalition lobbyist Amy Campbell. “Why on Earth would anybody want to do that?”

The state’s mental health system, which is supposed to help Kansans in crisis, is itself in crisis.

“I would say we are crawling out of a hole,” Campbell says. “Kansas allowed the economic downturn back in 2008 to throw our mental health system into a state of decline to the point of crisis.”

A January 2019 Mental Health Task Force report ordered by the Legislature concluded that more than 220 new beds, nearly double the current supply, and as much as $20 million a year more are needed to meet mental health demands at the state’s psychiatric hospitals in Osawatomie and Larned.

While Gov. Laura Kelly, key legislative committees and the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services are slowly implementing some of the task force’s recommendations, an infusion of money is needed, and absolutely obligatory, if the state is to bring its mental health services into anything resembling the 21st century.

State Rep. Jerry Stogsdill thinks so, anyway. The Democrat from Prairie Village has filed a bill in the House that would levy a 5% tax on the sale of guns and ammunition to help pay for mental health services. The measure would raise an estimated $5 million to $8 million a year.

That would be enough to get the state more than halfway to the task force’s upper-end recommendation of 60 new beds by 2021.

Getting insurers to pay for mental health services, especially once there is more space for inpatient treatment, is a huge problem as well. Current Kansas law requires insurance parity between physical and mental health coverage, but that didn’t help Kristi Bennett of Paola, who died last April after being refused help repeatedly. A bipartisan bill in her name that would ensure 14 days of inpatient and 180 days of outpatient coverage, if deemed medically necessary, didn’t make it out of the Senate in time to survive the 2020 session, although legislative leaders are said to be mulling a task force on the issue.

Stogsdill’s aim to provide more funding for mental health services is beautifully organic and poignantly powerful: He simply asked Prairie Village Police Chief Tim Schwartzkopf what he could do as a legislator to help the force. Did the chief want more guns or ammo? Nope. He asked Stogsdill for more mental health resources, as often the only avenue for someone in crisis is jail, where help is fairly nonexistent.

Stogsdill’s logic in targeting gun and ammo sales to fund increases in mental health services is inspired, too. He figures the NRA and other like-minded folks have sincerely argued that mass shootings are more about mental health than access to guns.

“I wanted to give them an opportunity to put their money where their mouths are,” he says.

He’s absolutely right. If the country’s spate of mass shootings in recent years isn’t a gun issue and is, instead, a matter of mental illness as Second Amendment supporters argue, then why not agree to dedicate more resources to mental health? Like, yesterday?

Mental health advocates rightly recoil at the notion of a direct link between mental illness and mass shootings. But a dearth of mental health services can’t be helping any situation.

“People with mental illness are no more likely to pick up a gun than other people who are dealing with other stressors in their life,” Campbell says. “However, the lack of access to effective treatment certainly can be a complicating factor that leads people to choose suicide or self-medication or other terrible outcomes.

“Thank God we seem to be reaching a point where we as a country are willing to talk about this. But talking won’t be enough at the end of the day.”

She’s right. It’s going to take commitment.