There's this basic mistake where people use proof-by-counterexample when someone is talking about a general trend or an average.

It first stuck out to me in college. My friend claimed ~"rap and country fans are less intelligent, on average, than fans of other genres." Our dormmate replied ~"that's not true, I like rap and I'm not dumb." I don't know if the initial claim was correct, but that's not a legitimate counterargument.

I was just watching a little bit of the Vance and Walz debate. In the context of gun violence, Vance talked about the mental health crisis in America.

Walz replied "Just because you have a mental health issue, doesn't mean you're violent. And I think what we end up doing is we start looking for a scapegoat. Sometimes it just is the guns."

I think that's the same mistake. Vance claimed ~"we have more gun violence than other countries with the same amount of gun ownership because more people have bad mental health here." Walz apparently heard that as ~"all people with mental health issues are violent," and so he refuted that.

(Perhaps I'm missing some context. Did conservative culture decide that people with depression/anxiety/bipolar/etc are *usually* dangerous?)

Tangentially, on the object level: do people really think that gun violence is committed by people who are totally mentally healthy? I don't think homicide is something you do when you are happy and sane...