He's not wrong.
Only a small minority (3-5%) of acts of violence are attributable to mental illness: https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2015/10/1/18000532/gun-viol...
edit: Even most mass shooters are not mentally ill: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/most-mass-shooters-aren...
So then you have to go around saying that serial killers are the most healthy people there can be and 100% rational. Surely this is a mistake?
Of course we have mental illnesses that describe things like this, like "antisocial personality disorder". If anything, all we need to do is invent "wants to shoot people personality disorder".
You can move away from it and ask what is unique about the mental state where someone wants to shoot children and follows through on it.
You can ask if this mental state is preventable.
Don't call it mental illness then, but mental states, neuro architecture, chemical disfunction, or bad brains.
It is clear that healthy well adjusted people don't fixate on slaughtering children
> It is clear that healthy well adjusted people don't fixate on slaughtering children
All the people who waged war and genocide throughout history have nothing to do with the suffering of the mentally ill due to their genetics , behavior and genrics.
Don't be so dismissive. It's very disrespectful.
If you just want to argue the point I'm offering to concede, I'm happy to steal man it.
If you have you ever known someone that is mentally ill, you know that their illness does not preclude the ability to harm and make those around them suffer.
Many School shooters are capable of suffering themselves, and in fact their suffering often plays a large role in their motivations.
They can also suffer during a lifetime of incarceration or the anguish of being executed.
They often have major mental disabilities, like the inability to feel empathy.
There are a large number of neuropsychiatric disorders associated with persistent antisocial and criminal behavior, such as Psychopathy, Sadistic personality disorder, narcissism, depression, and paranoia. Are these not mental illnesses by your definition?
Nobody is claiming that the mentally ill are dangerous. However, deadly mass shooters are often mentally ill.
For example, studies have found some indication of autistic spectrum disorder in ~30% of of school shooters[1]. This is but one neuropsychiatric disorder.
To ask the inverse question, Do you think that school shooters are mentally healthy?? If not, how would you fit their psychology and behavior into our scientific model of neuroscience?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00223980.2016.1...
If there was a "treatment" that worked, it'd be a good alternative to life in prison. (Although if that was some kind of future-lobotomy, it'd have a lot of its own ethical issues.)
That isn't how medicine works though.
IIRC mass killers do have some prior behaviors in common, but it’s not that they like wearing trenchcoats and violent video games, more like they often start with domestic violence or hit women.
The DSM can record whatever the community wants as an illness.
https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/disabilityandhealth/disability.ht...
>A disability is any condition of the body or mind (impairment) that makes it more difficult for the person with the condition to do certain activities (activity limitation) and interact with the world around them (participation restrictions).
Why would commission of a violent crime, which could lead to life imprisonment or the death penalty, be less of a mental health issue than sex or gambling addiction, alcoholism, etc which generally have less of an impact on one's life?
Perhaps the wrongness is that the murderer is simply evil. I don't have a framework for helping evil people nor positively identifying them before they commit evil acts. If someone does evil, they can be punished to dissuade further evil acts, caged to protect others from them, or killed. It is an injustice to do any of those things to a person before they commit an evil act.
If, however the wrongness is an illness, it might be possible to diagnose them before they do great harm to others and provide treatment. Of course there's a dangerous slippery slope possible here in which anyone who's at all atypical is given involuntary "corrective" treatment.
Even if they do it because they'll die of starvation otherwise?
This seems like wishful thinking - You are making some assumptions about the nature of human kind (that murderous behaviors are not part of it) and then you work backward to classify someone who has commited murder as not healthy.
The safer assumption would be to give some credit to social norms, and be grateful that murdering each other is mostly out of fashion (when did we last witnessed real duel to death?)
The media's position is untenable. If your definition of mental illness doesn't include adolescents who want to murder their peers, then it's defective by design.
Your first link doesn't address mass shooters.
The second one (written by an "enterprise reporter" and quoting from forensic psychiatrists) draws an astonishing distinction between "mental illness" and "sociopathy or antisocial disorders" (!), and defines most mass shooters as sociopathic and therefore not mentally ill. I don't know how anyone could read that article and be convinced by it. I should note that forensic psychiatrists are by far the most conservative (not in the political sense) practiciners in their field, a shocking number of them are quacks, they often have little experience treating patients, and they tend to believe in more black-and-white/"predictive" (and excessively confident) theories, suitable to their role in courtrooms.
Under the old-school DSM mindset, if you're not diagnosed with anything, you are defined as healthy. That type of thinking will never allow us to truly address society's emotional health. Emotional health is a spectrum; we're all at varying degrees of emotional health, and the average (i.e. "normal") person is significantly emotionally unhealthy.
Any reform that aims to genuinely improve society's emotional health has to move beyond the old model; and in any model of emotional health (where low self-esteem, social anxiety, low emotional self-awareness, attachment disorders become part of the picture), any shooter would be defined as severely emotionally ill; moreover, any reform that aims to detect attachment issues, low self-esteem and more, early on in life, in a systematic way, would prevent most (if not all) of these shootings from happening.
Media reports often assume a binary distinction between mild and severe mental illness, and connect the latter form to unpredictability and lack of self-control. However, this distinction, too, is called into question by mental health research. To be sure, a number of the most common psychiatric diagnoses, including depressive, anxiety, and attention-deficit disorders, have no correlation with violence whatsoever.18 Community studies find that serious mental illness without substance abuse is also “statistically unrelated” to community violence.40 At the aggregate level, the vast majority of people diagnosed with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts—only about 4% of violence in the United States can be attributed to people diagnosed with mental illness.41,42
A lot of gun deaths are suicides. Those are mental illness.
But there are categories that are just idiots with guns, like people who get into fights outside bars.
There are also a surprising number of men who murder a woman who is pregnant with their child because they don't want the baby to be born.
Sometimes murder is just murder and there is no diagnosis. Not all aberrations in society are mental illness.
Like in the way someone might “take a mental health day” off of work. Someone doesn’t have to be diagnosable to be in an unhealthy mindset.
"These massacres are not natural disasters, acts of God, or random. They are totally predictable, direct consequences of the choices made by Greg Abbott and the majority of those in the Texas legislature," O'Rourke wrote to supporters in a Wednesday email.
Texas had a plan in to spruce up school safety, they just didn't go forward with it, its pretty sad. I read through it, it looked like it would be very effective.
Luckily first responders neutralized the shooter otherwise more kids would've died.
The first responders called for help, and a Border Patrol agent came to the scene, ran in alone and killed the shooter.
Note that Border Patrol Tactical Unit (Bortac) agents were the ones who confronted and shot the shooter. They aren’t your run of the mill agents and they also ignored the others waiting for backup and went in before backup arrived.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they were former military with downrange exposure. Lots of people criticize police in these situations waiting for backup, but the reality is a real firefight your first time is fucking terrifying, even when you outnumber the shooter. Paralysis in these situations that are more similar to urban combat than daily police work is expected.
I think we need something other than “sprucing up” school safety. Only trying to stop the shooters at the point of attack is pathetically ineffective. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
This psycho kid had red flags everywhere and there was no real mechanism in place to close the loop.
There are over 350 million legal gun owners in the US, we're statistically safer than any other country.
You're using the fact that the Constitution defines a right to keep and bear arms for all Americans to imply that all Americans are legal gun owners, which is incorrect. It's actually impossible to know how many legal gun owners there are in the US, because collecting that data is prohibited by federal law, but it's certainly not every American.
However, the polls that I've seen estimate gun ownership at between 30% to 45%.
And no, US gun owners are not statistically safer than any other country. Other countries with high per capita gun ownership also statistically have a far lower percentage of gun violence than the US.
I don't understand blaming Texas laws, California has much stricter laws and has technically more mass shootings per capita than Texas[0]. To me these are all such low numbers that it is hard to draw any conclusions based on policy, let alone specific legislation from a specific Governor. I'm all for practical solutions (hell I'd have them throw the second amendment out if it were even possible) but I don't know that there are many easy answers to the problem.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/811541/mass-shootings-in...
Don't get me wrong, I think there is a case to be made that they might be, but good luck being a conservative politician who says all veterans are mentally ill.
Then that's not a gun crime and definitely outside the realm of the 1 sentence context. This is why these discussions seem to go back and forth. Wild swings of intentional ignorance, as to what the discussion is about, after having already made up their minds.