# I think of them as 'psycho killers', or 'religious nuts', or 'nut jobs' (mass shooting perps) **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [November 7, 2017, 6:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-think-of-them-as-psycho-killers-or-religious-nuts-or-nut-jobs-mass-shooting-perps/800952 "2017-11-07T06:38:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 16\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Try2B\_Comprehensive](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/try2b_comprehensive/32/65_2.png) [@Try2B\_Comprehensive](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Try2B_Comprehensive)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2017, 6:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-think-of-them-as-psycho-killers-or-religious-nuts-or-nut-jobs-mass-shooting-perps/800952/1 "2017-11-07T06:38:14Z")
Sure, it seems obvious that a guy without a gun can’t gun people down. But I am frankly not very focused on that aspect of the whole phenomenon. I would say I am not at a point of having reached a conclusion of “what to do”, so I can’t be a strong advocate for any policy response right now. With that ‘disclaimer’ out of the way, I want to sort of confess that I view the perpetrators of mass shootings as crazy people. I think they are off their rockers, in one way or another. Some are just plain nut jobs- Laughner? I think it was who shot Giffords came across in his writing samples as disconnected from reality in a schizo kind of way. His motives didn’t make sense for any value of ‘sense’ I could figure. Just plain crazy! But more common are the religious nuts. Even the Hindus get carried away with their religion and resort to violence as a result. Think of the Muslims that get killed, not because of suspicions of being a terrorist or conspiring to enact Sharia Law, but for [eating beef](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/05/muslim-man-dies-in-india-after-attack-by-hindu-cow-protectors). On the one hand, one can connect the dots in this situation- “Hindus believe eating cows is wrong. They witness people with different beliefs eating cows publicly, become enraged, and lash out.” Ok. Meet the guys in person, they may seem totally hip and with it. But on the other hand it is hard not to think, “This reminds me of God telling Abraham to slaughter his son Isaac, only this time God is telling you to kill that stranger over there, because he is eating a hamburger.” Doesn’t it seem like a person should be able to filter a thought like that before it rises to the level of action? Can you blame me for thinking that the person who can’t do that is a “religious nut”? And, ‘psycho killers’. You get your serial killers with some weird murder fetish, ambushing victims and doing terrible things to them. No names, you know it happens though. They don’t seem to care how terrible and evil they are, therefore, they must be ‘psycho killers’. Point is, I don’t feel like my thoughts on the subject are particularly sophisticated. My explanation is basically Trump’s (from [here](http://www.cnn.com/2017/11/06/health/guns-mental-health-texas-trump/index.html)): > [@](#): > > We have a lot of mental health problems in our country, as do other countries, but this isn’t a guns situation > [@](#): > > This is a mental health problem at the highest level Troubling. But the article goes on to cogently discuss the mental health aspect of the issue. A few points: > [@](#): > > Yet various epidemiological studies over the past two decades show that the vast majority of people with severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or severe depression, are no more likely to be violent than anyone else. > Rather, people with severe mental illnesses are more than 10 times more likely to be victims of violent crime than the general population. And, only about 3% to 5% of violent acts can be attributed to individuals living with a serious mental illness, according to the US Department of Health and Human Services. > [@](#): > > Gun violence and mental illness are public health problems “that intersect at the edges” but have very little overlap, Swanson told CNN last year. > There’s no doubt that America’s systems of care for mental health are overburdened, expensive and inaccessible for many who need them, he said. But when it comes to gun violence among this community, suicide tends to occur at higher rates than homicides, he said. > “If we back up and think about firearm-related injuries and mortality as a public health problem, it turns out there is a mental health-related story, and it’s suicide,” he said. “If we had better mental health care and could get people better access and break down barriers to care, then yes, we might reduce gun violence by a lot but it would be from reducing suicides.” > [@](#): > > Instead of policies that restrict gun access based solely on mental illness diagnoses or because a person has made contact with the judicial system or health care agencies due to mental illness, the American Psychological Association, the National Alliance on Mental Illness and other advocacy groups have called for gun access criteria based on more subtle indicators of potentially dangerous behavior. > Those indicators – such as having past or pending violent misdemeanor convictions or charges, domestic violence restraining orders or multiple DUI convictions – have been largely informed by the work of Swanson and others. > Swanson supports intervention at the point of purchase through comprehensive background checks – but to make background checks work, criteria for inclusion on the database should be based on other indicators of risk besides mental health history, such as those indicators of aggressive, impulsive or risky behavior. > > “A history of violent behavior is a far better predictor of future violence than mental illness,” he said. > [@](#): > > Calling gun violence a mental health issue is to scapegoat and stigmatize people with mental illness, he said. > [@](#): > > “It’s kind of a canard, a convenient explanation that exploits the tremendous fear people have with these horrifying mass shootings,” he said. “If people fear those with mental illness they’re going to treat them with scorn and support public policies that restrict their liberties.” > [@](#): > > In 2015, there were an estimated 43.4 million adults in the United States with some form of mental illness within the past year, which represented 17.9% of adults nationwide, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. > The American Psychological Association recommends prohibiting firearms for high-risk groups, such as domestic violence offenders or persons convicted of violent misdemeanor crimes. > “Reducing the incidence of gun violence will require interventions through multiple systems, including legal, public health, public safety, community, and health. Increasing the availability of data and funding will help inform and evaluate policies designed to reduce gun violence,” according to the association’s website. That’s a lot of quoting, but it is quite the article. You should read it. I felt like they understood the issue better than I did. I basically think crazy people amass an arsenal of guns and plan on killing a bunch of strangers. Or everybody their mother-in-law knows. Or what-have-you, but it is crazy people doing it. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2017, 11:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-think-of-them-as-psycho-killers-or-religious-nuts-or-nut-jobs-mass-shooting-perps/800952/2 "2017-11-07T11:18:06Z")
To an extent, defenders of the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms bring up “mental health” in these situations because it’s a way of changing the subject from gun control. In your case, you aren’t promoting any particular solution (although you’re quoting Trump, and I think he’s doing this). I don’t like “mental health” as a term in discussions of this sort, because doing so makes an assertion I don’t accept: that all, or most, or a goodly many, of the people whose behaviors strike us as fucking NUTS are people who did what they did because of a malfunction of their brains. (And therefore, gee, if we only had more people drugged up with psychiatric drugs, less of this would happen!) But, again, you aren’t promoting any particular solution, so I don’t mean to imply that you have any such agenda. But let’s just call these folks nutcases and not use clinical language that implies that we know _why_ they’re nuts. It’s worth tossing out to this conversation that psychiatrists are not able to predict dangerousness with any respectable degree of reliability. And noting that most efforts to “do something” to stop crazy nutcases from shooting people revolve around identifying the dangerous ones and immobilizing them somehow before they’ve actually done anything. And noting that locking up any citizen on the basis of what someone thinks they _might_ do is a notion that should scare the shit out of anyone who gives a rat’s ass about their civil rights. You are sort of pointing the finger at religion in your post. Religion is an attempt to answer certain profound questions. Institutionalized religion is mostly an attempt to market the idea that “hey, we have those answers right here, you don’t need to concern yourselves with those pesky questions any further, just believe!”. The more orthodox and fundamentalist the religion — i.e., the more it claims that it possesses absolute certainty and demands of its followers their unquestioning belief — the more readily it can feed into a mindset in which a person locks their mind away from any consideration of the possibility that they might be wrong. People who are absolutely certain are far more willing to kill other people because a) If absolute certainty is available to _them_, others could have it, so there’s no excuse for running around being wrong, doing wrong, believing wrong. And b) Having identified wrongthinking wrongdoing people, the person knows with absolute certainty that they have made no mistake in that identification, so this is an absolute good versus evil question. ---
**Author:** ![Try2B\_Comprehensive](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/try2b_comprehensive/32/65_2.png) [@Try2B\_Comprehensive](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Try2B_Comprehensive)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2017, 5:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-think-of-them-as-psycho-killers-or-religious-nuts-or-nut-jobs-mass-shooting-perps/800952/3 "2017-11-08T05:33:14Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > To an extent, defenders of the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms bring up “mental health” in these situations because it’s a way of changing the subject from gun control. I get that feeling too. There are enormous barriers to gun control in the US. OTOH, it is an easy appeal to make, since I don’t think I am the only one who naturally categorizes mass shooters as nut jobs. > [@](#): > > In your case, you aren’t promoting any particular solution (although you’re quoting Trump, and I think he’s doing this). Yes, I think he is being obviously political in diverting attention away from gun control and towards mental health. Me, I seem susceptible to this gambit since I don’t have much argument that these guys are nutjobs. I really have not made a close examination of the gun/mass murder issue. To promote gun control seems like a quixotic source of headaches, and so I have had the wisdom to this point to know on which issue I can’t make much difference. But now, I am more curious. > [@](#): > > I don’t like “mental health” as a term in discussions of this sort, because doing so makes an assertion I don’t accept: that all, or most, or a goodly many, of the people whose behaviors strike us as fucking NUTS are people who did what they did because of a malfunction of their brains. (And therefore, gee, if we only had more people drugged up with psychiatric drugs, less of this would happen!) But, again, you aren’t promoting any particular solution, so I don’t mean to imply that you have any such agenda. But let’s just call these folks nutcases and not use clinical language that implies that we know _why_ they’re nuts. Yeah, I am not promoting more psychiatric drugs (yet). I am ok with your conclusion. I think the religious nuts are an especially interesting case in this context, since they can be extremely sober and lucid, pretty much the opposite of ‘mentally ill’. But you have to be some kind of nut to blow yourself up in a crowded Sbarro. Doncha think? > [@](#): > > It’s worth tossing out to this conversation that psychiatrists are not able to predict dangerousness with any respectable degree of reliability. And noting that most efforts to “do something” to stop crazy nutcases from shooting people revolve around identifying the dangerous ones and immobilizing them somehow before they’ve actually done anything. And noting that locking up any citizen on the basis of what someone thinks they _might_ do is a notion that should scare the shit out of anyone who gives a rat’s ass about their civil rights. Well, one of the gems of the article that I cited is that “history of violence” is a much better predictor of a murderous future than “history of mental illness”. So sure, maybe psychiatrists still can’t predict dangerousness very well, but some variables are still much better indicators than others. As far as “doing something” goes, what if we used gun ownership as leverage against domestic abuse? It has been pounded into the culture by the NRA and others- why not take advantage of this cultural capital for positive ends? Let’s not “immobilize” people, but how about we take guns away from domestic abusers? Beat your wife? Fine, but you cough up your guns. You can’t buy more. Break your kids’ bones? Domestic abuser, no guns for you. And so on for violent offenders. If you are a violent person, you are a threat to society in its current context and cannot be trusted with guns. Everybody else can pay cash to some skeever in an alley for a gun, no prob. > [@](#): > > You are sort of pointing the finger at religion in your post. Religion is an attempt to answer certain profound questions. Institutionalized religion is mostly an attempt to market the idea that “hey, we have those answers right here, you don’t need to concern yourselves with those pesky questions any further, just believe!”. The more orthodox and fundamentalist the religion — i.e., the more it claims that it possesses absolute certainty and demands of its followers their unquestioning belief — the more readily it can feed into a mindset in which a person locks their mind away from any consideration of the possibility that they might be wrong. People who are absolutely certain are far more willing to kill other people because > > a) If absolute certainty is available to _them_, others could have it, so there’s no excuse for running around being wrong, doing wrong, believing wrong. And > > b) Having identified wrongthinking wrongdoing people, the person knows with absolute certainty that they have made no mistake in that identification, so this is an absolute good versus evil question. I only meant religion to be one of the flavors of violent nuts. I have been rather critical of religion on this board, sure, but I am not the harshest critic I don’t think. I can see positive aspects as well. Your point about ‘certainty’ is well taken. Nice job. In my query into the issue, I came across [this article](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shootings-us-international.html). > [@](#): > > But there is one quirk that consistently puzzles America’s fans and critics alike. Why, they ask, does it experience so many mass shootings? > [@](#): > > The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns. > [@](#): > > Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world’s guns. From 1966 to 2012, 31 percent of the gunmen in mass shootings worldwide were American > [@](#): > > Adjusted for population, only Yemen has a higher rate of mass shootings among countries with more than 10 million people… Yemen has the world’s second-highest rate of gun ownership after the United States. > [@](#): > > a country’s rate of gun ownership correlated with the odds it would experience a mass shooting. This relationship held even when he excluded the United States, indicating that it could not be explained by some other factor particular to his home country. And it held when he controlled for homicide rates, suggesting that mass shootings were better explained by a society’s access to guns than by its baseline level of violence. > [@](#): > > If mental health made the difference, then data would show that Americans have more mental health problems than do people in other countries with fewer mass shootings. But the mental health care spending rate in the United States, the number of mental health professionals per capita and the rate of severe mental disorders are all in line with those of other wealthy countries. > [@](#): > > A 2015 study estimated that only 4 percent of American gun deaths could be attributed to mental health issues… countries with high suicide rates tended to have low rates of mass shootings — the opposite of what you would expect if mental health problems correlated with mass shootings. > [@](#): > > Whether a population plays more or fewer video games also appears to have no impact. Americans are no more likely to play video games than people in any other developed country. > [@](#): > > Racial diversity or other factors associated with social cohesion also show little correlation with gun deaths. Among European countries, there is little association between immigration or other diversity metrics and the rates of gun murders or mass shootings. > [@](#): > > America’s gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. In Canada and Britain, it was 5 per million and 0.7 per million, respectively, which also corresponds with differences in gun ownership. > [@](#): > > the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries > [@](#): > > American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process. > [@](#): > > the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to guns. > [@](#): > > More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: among developed countries, among American states, among American towns and cities and when controlling for crime rates. And gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent analysis of 130 studies from 10 countries. > > This suggests that the guns themselves cause the violence. > [@](#): > > In 2013, American gun-related deaths included 21,175 suicides, 11,208 homicides and 505 deaths caused by an accidental discharge. That same year in Japan, a country with one-third America’s population, guns were involved in only 13 deaths. > > This means an American is about 300 times more likely to die by gun homicide or accident than a Japanese person. America’s gun ownership rate is 150 times as high as Japan’s. That gap between 150 and 300 shows that gun ownership statistics alone do not explain what makes America different. > [@](#): > > The United States also has some of the weakest controls over who may buy a gun and what sorts of guns may be owned. > > Switzerland has the second-highest gun ownership rate of any developed country, about half that of the United States. Its gun homicide rate in 2004 was 7.7 per million people — unusually high, in keeping with the relationship between gun ownership and murders, but still a fraction of the rate in the United States. > [@](#): > > Swiss gun laws are more stringent, setting a higher bar for securing and keeping a license, for selling guns and for the types of guns that can be owned. Such laws reflect more than just tighter restrictions. They imply a different way of thinking about guns, as something that citizens must affirmatively earn the right to own. > [@](#): > > The United States is one of only three countries, along with Mexico and Guatemala, that begin with the opposite assumption: that people have an inherent right to own guns. > [@](#): > > After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 shooting. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society. > > That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what most sets the United States apart. So, looks like on the macro level, it comes down to guns, and also the high value Americans put on gun ownership. If you are the kind of person who enjoys banging their head against a wall until they black out, gun control may be the cause for you. ---
**Author:** ![PlaceboTarget](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/placebotarget/32/1073_2.png) [@PlaceboTarget](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PlaceboTarget)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2017, 6:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-think-of-them-as-psycho-killers-or-religious-nuts-or-nut-jobs-mass-shooting-perps/800952/4 "2017-11-08T06:29:34Z")
> [@Try2B\_Comprehensive](#): > > I basically think crazy people amass an arsenal of guns and plan on killing a bunch of strangers. Or everybody their mother-in-law knows. Or what-have-you, but it is crazy people doing it. I’m always skeptical when laymen invoke somebody’s mental problems because it is either a trope or an attempt to avoid discussing accountability or responsibility. ---
**Author:** ![Leaper](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/4bbf92/32.png) [@Leaper](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Leaper)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2017, 7:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-think-of-them-as-psycho-killers-or-religious-nuts-or-nut-jobs-mass-shooting-perps/800952/5 "2017-11-08T07:09:30Z")
Not to mention people with actual mental illness tend to get upset that people are stereotyping them as inherently irrational and violent. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2017, 1:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-think-of-them-as-psycho-killers-or-religious-nuts-or-nut-jobs-mass-shooting-perps/800952/6 "2017-11-08T13:53:07Z")
> [@Leaper](#): > > Not to mention people with actual mental illness tend to get upset that people are stereotyping them as inherently irrational and violent. You hardly ever pick up the local newspaper and read a profile about the amazing success of the town supervisor in reversing the downward financial trend, and then in paragraph 3 get to a mention of how the town supervisor is a schizophrenic. Ever notice that? Ever wonder why? No, it’s actually _not_ because schizophrenics don’t become town supervisors. It’s because newspapers don’t print that kind of information about people when they’re profiling success stories. It magically becomes newsworthy if the town supervisor shoots up the city council after a prolonged budget dispute. Yes, it’s a double standard. ---
**Author:** ![Try2B\_Comprehensive](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/try2b_comprehensive/32/65_2.png) [@Try2B\_Comprehensive](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Try2B_Comprehensive)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2017, 2:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-think-of-them-as-psycho-killers-or-religious-nuts-or-nut-jobs-mass-shooting-perps/800952/7 "2017-11-08T14:34:28Z")
> [@PlaceboTarget](#): > > I’m always skeptical when laymen invoke somebody’s mental problems because it is either a trope or an attempt to avoid discussing accountability or responsibility. I can accept that. Part of the point of this thread is to challenge my own ideas. Frankly I am not very sharp on this question. Also interesting that Trump says it is a mental health issue, not guns, when a look at research suggests it is mostly guns, mostly not mental health. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2017, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-think-of-them-as-psycho-killers-or-religious-nuts-or-nut-jobs-mass-shooting-perps/800952/8 "2017-11-08T16:11:21Z")
One of the underrated and more nuanced examinations of the “gun violence in America” issue is Michael Moore’s _Bowling for Columbine_. I think that a lot of people assume, automatically, that since it’s a movie produced by lefty liberal Moore it’s going to blame the lack of gun control for America’s gun violence problem. They would be wrong. Moore specifically brings up the fact that Canadians have lots of guns and they’re readiy available up there, and yet… no corresponding gun violence. And he interviews gun owners respectfully, although he does bait and mock some gun shop and gun show folks. [Watch this clip and try to argue that it’s pro-guncontrol propaganda](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-niYj0u_Q8). It’s still a pretty provocative piece and it will make you think. ---
**Author:** ![Try2B\_Comprehensive](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/try2b_comprehensive/32/65_2.png) [@Try2B\_Comprehensive](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Try2B_Comprehensive)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2017, 6:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-think-of-them-as-psycho-killers-or-religious-nuts-or-nut-jobs-mass-shooting-perps/800952/9 "2017-11-09T06:00:33Z")
Nice clip. Though it pointed out that Canada owns ~.7 guns per family, while in the US I think there are more guns than people. I am not attached to the conclusion that “it’s the guns!” Even if it turns out I am convinced that is true, I doubt I will take up the cause of gun control. It seems there are better things to do with my time, and I am contradicting my own ‘if’ here, but I suspect there is something deeper than the guns at play. Something that accounts for the fetishization of guns and the high rate of ownership? ---
**Author:** ![Whatever4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/f04885/32.png) [@Whatever4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Whatever4)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2017, 7:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-think-of-them-as-psycho-killers-or-religious-nuts-or-nut-jobs-mass-shooting-perps/800952/10 "2017-11-09T07:32:35Z")
> [@Leaper](#): > > Not to mention people with actual mental illness tend to get upset that people are stereotyping them as inherently irrational and violent. This. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [November 9, 2017, 8:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-think-of-them-as-psycho-killers-or-religious-nuts-or-nut-jobs-mass-shooting-perps/800952/11 "2017-11-09T08:58:09Z")
1. The ban on gun ownership for mental health issues is limited to people who have been deemed by a court of law as being violent to themselves or others due to their illness. It is not a blanket, “Have you ever seen a therapist?” 2. The number of people killed by a spree killer is not statistically significant. While their acts are horrifying and horrible, you would save thousands of times more lives each year by putting out an advertising campaign to convince teens to smoke pot instead of get drunk. If you wanted to reduce intentional homicide rates, adding lithium to the water would do more good than banning guns. Banning guns just moves killers to using bombs, u-haul trucks, poison, etc. ---
**Author:** ![Grestarian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/grestarian/32/3227_2.png) [@Grestarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grestarian)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2017, 5:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-think-of-them-as-psycho-killers-or-religious-nuts-or-nut-jobs-mass-shooting-perps/800952/12 "2017-11-16T05:15:19Z")
{Warning: Grestarian is going to ramble…} > [@Try2B\_Comprehensive](#): > > I get that feeling too. There are enormous barriers to gun control in the US. OTOH, it is an easy appeal to make, since I don’t think I am the only one who naturally categorizes mass shooters as nut jobs. The problem is that the people we’re calling (amongst other things) Mass Shooters are being categorized as Nut Jobs after the fact and very much as a contextual matter. When we send an 18-year-old kid to a foreign land, have him shoot up as many strangers as possible, and award him medals for the deeds, we call that person a war hero. I don’t know how old you are, but I do remember we had a lot of people coming back from Viet Nam whose minds were pretty messed up by the cognitive disonance between their intense training and deeds in foreign lands and the stresses of relearning how to operate amongst their fellow citizens afterward. Tales of Vietnam Vets shooting up neighborhoods were rare, but newsworthy enough to get nationwide coverage – and this was decades before The Internet made coast-to-coast news easy to get. By the mid-1970’s we had given a name to the mental disorder: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder but Cecil has already explained that the problem had already been around for centuries – shell shock, trench fatigue, battle sickness, whatever names they gave it… There were a couple episodes of TV shows that included plot lines dealing with the matter and even the first RAMBO movie started to explore that issue – but the message got lost in the violence that audiences found cool, and the sequels headed in a different direction. > [@Try2B\_Comprehensive](#): > > Yes, I think he is being obviously political in diverting attention away from gun control and towards mental health. This is rather ironic to me because he (and many other politicians) are doing this to cater to the lobbyists and donators padding their wallets while at the same time seeing no discord between “Oh, aren’t the mentally ill just too horrible to have mixed in with decent citizens!” and The Gipper’s “Well…as long as they aren’t an immediate danger to themselves or others, why do we have to keep them institutionalized?” One is the tired old Christian call for separating out the bad seeds and purifying [del] the race[/del] society a la Joseph Kellogg and Alexander Graham Bell\* and the other was a simply an error# of argumentative logic, used to justify abandoning rather than caring for mentally ill people.$ > [@Try2B\_Comprehensive](#): > > Yeah, I am not promoting more psychiatric drugs (yet). I am ok with your conclusion. I think the religious nuts are an especially interesting case in this context, since they can be extremely sober and lucid, pretty much the opposite of ‘mentally ill’. I and many others have been arguing for years that people who sincerely see divine signs and portents in leaf patterns or act upon discussions held with the ghost of a two-thousand-year dead carpenter (or prince, or librarian) must have some mental illness problems. But I’m not a member of the widely popular cult, so what do I know? > [@Try2B\_Comprehensive](#): > > But you have to be some kind of nut to blow yourself up in a crowded Sbarro. Doncha think? Not an extreme nut; just extremely devout. > [@Try2B\_Comprehensive](#): > > Well, one of the gems of the article that I cited is that “history of violence” is a much better predictor of a murderous future than “history of mental illness”. So sure, maybe psychiatrists still can’t predict dangerousness very well, but some variables are still much better indicators than others. > > As far as “doing something” goes, what if we used gun ownership as leverage against domestic abuse? It has been pounded into the culture by the NRA and others- why not take advantage of this cultural capital for positive ends? Let’s not “immobilize” people, but how about we take guns away from domestic abusers? > > Beat your wife? Fine, but you cough up your guns. You can’t buy more. Uh? Wait a minute! That’s not fine, either! > [@Try2B\_Comprehensive](#): > > Break your kids’ bones? Domestic abuser, no guns for you. > > And so on for violent offenders. If you are a violent person, you are a threat to society in its current context and cannot be trusted with guns. There was some progress on this in the early 1990’s: Police departments and even legislators were actually reading the sociological literature linking animal abuse and domestic abuse. So they were asking municipal (and county) animal control departments to share their information on calls about pets being injured/abused and keeping informal tabs on the accused abusers. There was even some attempts to legislate official databases and watch programs so abusers could be tracked. There was speculation that, if such efforts succeeded,further steps would be to classify animal/domestic abusers as violence-prone people and start talking about the access that violence-prone people had to guns. I don’t know what happened to those efforts; I suspect they died when public attention shifted away from alcohol abuse and domestic violence issues to other critical matters like steroid abuse amongst baseball players, that kind of thing. > [@Try2B\_Comprehensive](#): > > Everybody else can pay cash to some skeever in an alley for a gun, no prob. Umm…well, I’d prefer that not be considered acceptable, either. Not only would it result in an increased availability of crappy guns (dragging the entire industry’s quality down), but those people who got categorized as violence-prone would be circumventing their restrictions by purchasing from those back-alley skeevers, as well. [Really, though, I’m assuming we’re both being rather sarcastic here.] > [@Try2B\_Comprehensive](#): > > So, looks like on the macro level, it comes down to guns, and also the high value Americans put on gun ownership. And the weird thing is that, even if you assume the arm-baring crowd is inflating their numbers, it’s still tough to believe everyone out there with a gun is a paranoid soldier-of-fortune or a beer-chugging idiot who drawls and drools in the same breath. The problem is with the real and imagined culture surrounding guns. Particularly in the United States, guns are considered the tool that “settled the West” and “Made men more equal” and “Protected our families as we expanded the country.” But even going back to the smoothbored muskets and their ancestors, there’s undeniable evidence and a lot of research that explains how and why firearms changed the act of killing: The simple fact is that even muskets were so much easier to learn to use that they were game-changers in Europe and Asia. The whole point is that any idiot could quickly learn to load, aim, and shoot a gun – and Sam Colt made it even easier. Heads of state and military leaders could like that because it meant a lot less time and training would be required to get a half-way effective population onto a battlefield; yer avridge Joe likes it because it means the elite, who could take time away from survival efforts like ranching and farming and other businesses in order to train with swords, bows, and pole-arms didn’t have a huge tactical advantage over a goofball with a gun. I submit to you that the time and effort spent training to use more complex weapons is also time and effort in which the trainee is learning to consider the gravity and consequences of homicide. I jokingly phrase this as, “Killing is a serious matter when you have to watch the life fading from your opponent’s eyes. The greater the distance that you can kill from, the less you have to involve your conscience.” Meanwhile, people of the United States are gun-crazy because our culture and literature encourages it. But the tales in United States’ culture are generally bullshit. The problem is that those tales sell. The old dime novels about courageous pioneers having dangerous daily wilderness adventures; quick-draw cowboys conquering cattle rustlers; the suave sherrifs settling squabbles with a six-shooter – even the well-known account of the Earp brothers in Tombstone, Arizona – were over glorified and pumped up stories. They were popular escapes from the banality of Eastern city and MidWestern homestead lives. So much research and documentation has been done on the subject and a director even made a movie (which flopped) depicting real Western life – simple farming and ranching, tribal native Americans interacting and doing business peacefully with white settlers – that the romantic appeal of the Cowboy Western genre has largely been debunked. But that doesn’t make good entertainment. And, particularly when moving pictures started making big bucks, the special effects and stunts of an exciting Western were so easy to achieve on film that the genre exploded quickly. The problem, of course, is that people prefer their tales of heroic deeds and adventurous achievement over the boring mundanity of everyday life and would like to believe at least some portion of their world faces the scary challenges that require guns to overcome. Through those gun-toting heroes (real or imagined), people in the USA gain their vicarious thrills. And then some people take things a step further and say, “Hey, I gotta have my guns (all forty of them!) because it’s a dangerous world out there!” No. It’s a dangerous world because people who simultaneously are paranoid and have illusions of grandeur feel they ‘gotta’ have dozens of guns^. How many can you wield at one time, Josey Wales? And really, for that matter, we are seeing evidence that the world is becoming less and less dangerous every year. The bigger dangers are happening via Internet, and shooting your computer won’t help. –G - Thus are the seeds of the Eugenics movement, later adopted and adapted by the Third Reich… # If the omnisicent, omnipotent, and benevolent God loves you, he will keep you physically and mentally healthy. You are mentally ill so God must not love you. If God doesn’t love you, there’s no reason the US Federal government should help you out. $ This had the end result of emptying government-run mental institutions and reducing government expenses and taxes. And since, in monotheistic philosophies, a good end justifies the means to achieve it (regardless of the intrinsic value or morality of those means) the resulting savings and tax reductions and afluent prosperity were lauded as excellent policy decisions by everyone – well, everyone whose votes counted… ^Disclosure: I say this as a person who thoroughly enjoys training with a .45 caliber pistol at least once a month. It’s exciting, it’s rewarding (when I see my accuracy improving), it’s fun! But I’m under no illusions that I’m eager (or even willing) to take a life with the pistol, any other weapon, or my bare hands. ---
**Author:** ![Try2B\_Comprehensive](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/try2b_comprehensive/32/65_2.png) [@Try2B\_Comprehensive](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Try2B_Comprehensive)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2017, 5:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-think-of-them-as-psycho-killers-or-religious-nuts-or-nut-jobs-mass-shooting-perps/800952/13 "2017-11-16T05:52:12Z")
> [@Grestarian](#): > > I and many others have been arguing for years that people who sincerely see divine signs and portents in leaf patterns or act upon discussions held with the ghost of a two-thousand-year dead carpenter (or prince, or librarian) must have some mental illness problems. But I’m not a member of the widely popular cult, so what do I know? I don’t know. But, are events driven by magic? Yes or no first, then commentary. Please. ---
**Author:** ![Dinsdale](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/97f17d/32.png) [@Dinsdale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dinsdale)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2017, 1:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-think-of-them-as-psycho-killers-or-religious-nuts-or-nut-jobs-mass-shooting-perps/800952/14 "2017-11-16T13:19:28Z")
Was an interesting column in today’s chicago Trib by Rex hupke. He said, [paraphrased] “Okay, let’s accept that it is too soon to discuss gun control, and that it truly is a mental health problem. Then why aren’t we doing anything to address the mental health crisis which is killing our citizens? Instead, the gov’t is trying to further slash health care.” One of those headsmackingly obvious observations when you see it set out. ---
**Author:** ![Grestarian](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/grestarian/32/3227_2.png) [@Grestarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grestarian)\ **Post date:** [November 16, 2017, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-think-of-them-as-psycho-killers-or-religious-nuts-or-nut-jobs-mass-shooting-perps/800952/15 "2017-11-16T20:36:56Z")
> [@Dinsdale](#): > > Was an interesting column in today’s Chicago Trib by Rex hupke. He said, [paraphrased] “Okay, let’s accept that it is too soon to discuss gun control, and that it truly is a mental health problem. Then why aren’t we doing anything to address the mental health crisis which is killing our citizens? Instead, the gov’t is trying to further slash health care.” > > One of those headsmackingly obvious observations when you see it set out. Yep. And we’ve been seeing repeated complaints about the VA attacked and budget-slashed year after year after year. I’m no fan of War, but I do think the people who served and followed government orders should be especially well-cared-for by the government that gave those orders. Instead we seem to try to ignore and malign them. But maybe I’m just walking on a thin line and this should be in IMHO. Buried deep in part of my rambling post above, I noted that the GOP thought it was a great idea to empty the mental health facilities. Only now is the right shifting the blame from guns to the mentally ill and, still, anyone suggesting that was a bad policy would be committing blasphemy\* and could be excommunicated. —G! - Not against God, but against The Great Communicator – which is not quite the same thing. ---
**Author:** ![Try2B\_Comprehensive](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/try2b_comprehensive/32/65_2.png) [@Try2B\_Comprehensive](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Try2B_Comprehensive)\ **Post date:** [November 17, 2017, 4:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-think-of-them-as-psycho-killers-or-religious-nuts-or-nut-jobs-mass-shooting-perps/800952/16 "2017-11-17T04:02:20Z")
I wonder if it ties in with the suppression of information on the issue. From [here](https://www.wired.com/story/mass-shootings-climate-discrimination-why-governments-fear-of-data-threatens-us-all/): > [@](#): > > In the aftermath of the massacre of 26 people in a small-town Texas church, you might have seen that the killer used a gun called an AR-15. It’s a popular weapon—relatively easy to use, endlessly customizable, military in appearance. How popular? It’s the same gun that a killer used in the massacre of 58 people at a Las Vegas concert last month, and by the killer who murdered 49 people in a nightclub in Orlando, and the one at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. And the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. And the party in San Bernardino, California. > > Oh, but wait: It’s also the gun, apparently, that someone in Texas used to shoot back at the killer at First Baptist Church, accurately enough to pinpoint places his tactical vest didn’t protect. “We keep hearing that AR’s are useless for self-defense, that they’re simply ‘weapons of war,’ useful only for mass killing. This is simply not true,” writes David French at The National Review. He didn’t save lives inside the church, French goes on to say, but this straight-from-the-gun-advocate-storybook good guy with a gun “did stop the shooter and prevented him from harming anyone else. He did so with exactly the kind of weapon that the gun control lobby would like to deny to law-abiding Americans.” > > Well, OK. Good question then. Is it possible that the AR-15 isn’t just an overpowered long gun beloved by the National Rifle Association but a necessary component of civilian defense in the absence of armed authorities? Somebody should figure this out, right? > [@](#): > > Except you can’t. The government doesn’t keep track of how many AR-15s are out there or who owns them. > [@](#): > > That data is either off-limits or simply doesn’t exist. “If we had easy access to the kind of data we have on motor vehicle crashes for firearm violence, we would be able to answer much more clearly a whole host of questions about gun policy—about which state laws are working, which storage practices work, which guns are riskier than others, what ammunition sizes and magazines matter. I could go on and on > [@](#): > > Washington Post politics reporter Philip Bump has been updating a list of things President Trump has undone in office, and an eye-popping number are numbers: oil and gas company payments to foreign governments, corporate salaries organized by race and gender, employer records of workplace injuries, government contractor labor law violations, health effects of mountaintop-removal mining, safety issues at chemical plants, visitors to the White House. Did you want to know any of those things? You cannot. > [@](#): > > Would you like detailed information about arrests, homicides, and gang murders in 2016? Well, the FBI isn’t giving it to you anymore. How about melting Arctic ice? Nope; Congress is dismantling a satellite that was supposed to update the aging monitor network. Climate change? Scott Pruitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, doesn’t think human beings cause it and, more importantly, doesn’t really think you can measure anything to find out. The weather? Forget it; the National Weather Service is coming apart at the seams. How many people live in the United States, data critical to determining political representation and funding priorities? Yeah, no—the 2020 Census is shaping up to be an epic disaster. > [@](#): > > David Roberts at Vox has written about what he calls an epistemic crisis in America, the idea that certain rulers and rich people hope to take away the basic idea of knowledge. If nobody can know anything, why bother to try to regulate anything? It’s government-by-ignorance—a shrugocracy. > [@](#): > > Throw in the way the automotive industry resisted safety regulations and the sugar industry in the 1960s shifted blame for health problems onto fats instead of sweets, ensorcelling nutrition research for half a century, and you have a pretty good accounting of the ways business interests have twisted, biased, and otherwise hammered science into behaving like a corporate drone instead of a defender of truth > [@](#): > > When it comes to guns, the data dearth goes back decades. In the mid-1990s, the National Rifle Association persuaded congress to prohibit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from funding firearm violence research. That chilled the entire federal science funding structure. The agency that regulates firearms now doesn’t even share with researchers all its data on what guns are traced to what crimes. “While there were interests that were committed to obfuscating the situation or making it more difficult to conduct the work, the magnitude of the effect probably is unique to firearm violence,” says Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis. “There’s no doubt in my mind that there are hundreds of thousands of dead people who would now be alive had the work been allowed to proceed.” > > Now, though, even more stands at risk. This isn’t just about undermining data anymore. It’s about abandoning its collection. “I’ve called it an undercurrent, and I’m not even sure it’s an undercurrent anymore. There’s clearly an assault on science that worries me quite a bit. It’s climate denialism when we’ve suffered three catastrophic hurricanes, one that put my city underwater. In my state of Texas, more than 50,000 kids are not getting vaccinated for totally phony reasons,” says Peter Hotez, Dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. “It’s starting to affect our quality of life, and important policy decisions that are being made that need to be made correctly.” So while the subject is not mundane, it does feel fairly pointless since it is impossible to make an informed decision without decent data. How is a guy supposed to be comprehensive in an environment like this? Maybe another motive for the suppression of data is to protect powerful egos, like The Memory of Reagan, and so the government winds up blocked from investigating certain very specific, pertinent questions. Instead, it only really investigates Hillary Clinton, emails and Benghazi. Doesn’t seem right.