Is mental health the real problem when it comes to mass shootings?

Great Debates
101

It certainly is a major factor. Sane people don’t shoot up schools.

The real question is, is what is to be done about it? Our most recent incident of mass school shootings was with a kid that had been tipped of to LEO and the FBI, but, as he hadn’t actually done anything, and only posted inciting comments, not necessarily calls to violent action, there were no laws that he had broken, no reason to take his guns away, or even prevent him from buying more.

If the FBI had taken his guns at that point, the 2A’ers would have been up in arms about the violation of this kid’s rights.

OTOH, kinda locally, we had a 14-year old kid post

which is not actually breaking any laws. Poor taste, and probably should have someone talk to him, but he was arrested and is being detained until a hearing on Thursday. This is not helping the situation. If he felt alienated and persecuted, he certainly is now.

On my way in to work this morning, I heard an NPR story (here’s a CNN version) of a woman who read her 18 year old grandson’s diary, where he talked about the mistakes other school shooters made, and made his own plans for an attack. No one else saw any signs that he was troubled, he had friends and got decent grades and had no discipline issues at all. I have no reason to believe that it wasn’t just a fantasy (not a good fantasy, of course) that he had no intention of ever carrying out. Yet he is now in jail for attempted murder charges, on a $5million bond.

His lawyer:

is correct in that he had broken no laws that should have him charged with attempted murder. The problem is that there really is very little in between. No, “We’re not going to charge you with attempted murder for owning a gun and writing about fantasies in your diary, but since we don’t want to charge you for murder later, we’re going to take away your gun for a little bit until we’re all sure that you are responsible and stable enough to have one.”

It’s either charge you with crimes that you haven’t committed, or simply leave you to your own devices. As long as the gun advocates demand not only that we can have no discussion about limiting guns, but continue to fight to make guns more available and easy to get, there can be no inbetween. The only way to treat a troubled youth is to charge him with attempted murder, since there is no other way to remove the guns from his possesion.

102

Teenagers often think of themselves as immortal (I sure did, taking stupid chances), but I can’t see a bunch of teenagers (or 1st graders, a la Sandy Hook) rushing into a hail of bullets. But I could be wrong.

In my American Graffiti days, when my friends and I cruised the local teen hangout and talked to girls, we managed to piss one guy off enough where he just showed us a gun.

We burned rubber to get away from him.

103

Despite my experiences, I agree with you completely. My post was really directed at all the people claiming that “all the warning signs were there and someone ought to have DONE something”. There are a LOT of mentally disturbed people with violent tendencies out there. It is easy to point out the warning signs after the fact -
My former foster son is still out there somewhere. He gets a job every couple of weeks, then his employers get scared by his behavior and they fire him. He has been moved around the NYC homeless shelter system for what I suspect are the same reasons. He has access to all the mental health help that he wants, he just doesn’t want it. All the warning signs are there. Everyone knows it - the police, the court system, the social services system. And although he is mentally ill, he’s not batshit crazy and he knows how to play the system.

I’m still very concerned and I hope and pray that he doesn’t hurt himself or anyone else.

104

Let’s point wildly at other problems and say that we can’t look at this problem until we solve all those other problems.

105

With all the info the FBI had on this guy, what could they legally do?

106

Although madsircool obviously thought this was some kind of argument-ending “gotcha”, I don’t think it’s a distraction from the issue at hand. It could in fact be a first step on the path to looking at the possibility of gun control rationally. The analogy is fine. It just happens to be one freedom where most societies have decided that the benefit of the freedom to drink alcohol outweighs the damage it does to society as a whole. Although, of course we do regulate and restrict alchohol quite severely. In much of the U.S. you can act in a porn movie or buy a firearm at a younger age than you can legally buy alcohol.

The point is that all freedoms are weighed against the impact on society. And the U.S. is a bizarre outlier in thinking that the freedom to be armed is so important that it outweighs the carnage.

107

I dunno, but can you imagine how many “guys” there must be like that? They probably get hundreds of tips a day. Maybe thousands. Logistically even if they had the legal power to just lock up anyone they wanted, forever, without evidence or trial, what would happen is they would start doing this and then more people would start getting reported for ever slighter violations. It would become like 1984, where making a face in private that is not in accordance with how you are supposed to be feeling at that moment is deviant behavior.

108

In criminal and mental health law, sanity is a legal term denoting that an individual is of sound mind and therefore can bear legal responsibility for their actions.

If this claim was true we couldn’t ever convict a person who committed one of these crimes.

Sanity != Mental illness and a mental illness is not required to commit mass murder.

109

Yes, and one might think that (whatever the motivation) directing more resources to mental health care would be a good thing. But if the funds are oriented toward some spurious goal of spotting mass murderers early, I think it could easily do more harm than good.

110

And it is also a term for those who are not thinking in a normal or rational manner.

Yes, there is a term of art of legal insanity, but that was not what I was talking about here.

People thinking in a normal and rational manner do not shoot up schools.

111

If mental health is the issue, why aren’t half the shooters women?

You can probably find a stronger correlation with a Y chromosome than mental health.

112

A Cite for my last post.

https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/appi.books.9781615371099

Lets look at common traits factors from that cite.

[ul]
[li]The subjects had all been bullied or isolated during childhood and subsequently became loners who felt despair over their social alienation.[/li][li]They demonstrated paranoid traits such as suspiciousness and grudge holding. Their worldview suggested a paranoid mind-set; they believed others to be generally rejecting and uncaring.[/li][li]As a result, they spent a great deal of time feeling resentful and ruminating on past humiliations.[/li][li]The ruminations subsequently evolved into fantasies of violent revenge[/li][/ul]

While mental health services may help mitigate several of those issues, it is important to not confuse that with mental illness

It is a correlation vs causation differentiation that is complicated by overly generalized jargon.

113

I will be discounted as a SJW by bringing this up, but it is likely that Toxic Masculinity, and the lack of learned coping mechanisms plays a large part.

It is far more likely to be an artifact of our social rules than DNA.

114

Are there any societies (extant or historical) where the women are as likely as the men to commit murder?

115

Olympus.

116

Agreed. We have far too many broken boys - failed by their parents and grandparents.

117

“The real problem” is guys going on shooting rampages, full stop. There are a number of different issues that combine to create that problem. Mental health is one of them, the availability of guns is one of them, and the phenomenon of instant fame and media coverage is one of them.

The latter is most certainly the one of those three issues that is much more significant now than in previous decades. But the horse is truly out of the barn door with that one.

The other two, there is actually a chance in hell of influencing in the right direction. But it will require real political strategy and organization.

The only way that restrictions on guns can successfully be implemented, is by very carefully strategized legislation that is presented in a way that it can garner bipartisan support, not just from the legislators but from the voters. It has to start with proposals that are more realistic and achievable than just “ban all the guns.” Because let me tell you, if the Democrats adopt that as a campaign platform, it is a GUARANTEE that Donald Trump will be president for 7 more years. I’ve seen a flurry of posts from Democrats calling for Australia-style gun laws, often linking to articles featuring the infamous picture from Australia of a gigantic scrap heap of confiscated firearms. This only gives validity to the right-wing talking point that “they want to take away all our guns”? It allows the NRA and their supporters to say “here it is, straight from the horse’s mouth - that’s what we’re up against”? They will only dig in deeper and double down on the propaganda. The idea of a gun ban like they have in Australia being politically feasible in America is absurd, and pushing for it is the definition of counterproductive self-sabotage.

With mental health, it’s very important that whatever changes are proposed - such as a system for flagging people who have displayed warning signs, and “watch lists” for people who are determined to be a potential risk - not infringe upon civil liberties and free speech. Mental illness is very stigmatized in this country (presumably in every country) and it’s very important that whatever policies are put in place do not deter people from seeking help by appearing overly draconian.

Solving this problem is going to be a real uphill battle, that’s all I know for certain.

118

Why not advocate for Switzerland style gun laws? Then you can show them statistics that demonstrate that they have almost as high a gun ownership as we do.

119

I don’t believe that making comparisons to other countries, in any context, is useful for political arguments. “It works in [whatever other country] so it can work here” is counterproductive, in my opinion. America is sufficiently different from other countries that it’s never going to be truly analogous. The division into 50 states, the complicated state/federal governance, and the wildly varying demographic makeup mean that America is just too dissimilar to other countries for any comparisons of policies to be meaningful. This doesn’t just apply to guns, it applies to everything, as far as I’m concerned. People can believe whatever they want to believe, but political arguments that use other countries as examples will continue to fail.

120

This.

People keep beating the “mental illness” drum, like they know the Florida shooter was nuts…or any more nuts than any other orphaned socially awkward 19-year-old boy. We don’t know this. It might comfort people to think that of course he’s cray because only cray people do what he did. But we don’t jump to “he cray” explanation when it comes to other criminals. What makes this guy any different from the thuggish youth who do drive-by shootings in the inner city? Are they nuts too? Why does no one beat the mental illness drum for them?

Rather than thinking about this as a mental health problem, we need to think about the mental hygiene of our culture. It’s not just the guns. It’s not just that there are few resources to deal with troubled people. It’s not just the media…including social media and the internet. It’s not just violent video games. It’s not just economic anxiety and divisve politics and broken homes. It is ALL of it interacting with each other that is creating an unhygenic society. There shouldn’t be any mystery why almost everybody and their mama is on prescription meds for anxiety, depression, ADHD, or psychosis. This is a scary, stressful world we’re living in. Doesn’t matter if objectively the world is a better place than a generation ago. If it feels scary and stressful, you will get people acting like scared and stressed-out people always act.

I don’t know how you fix a culture from within. But it does seem to me that clutching the guns even harder when confronted with shit like this is exactly what we don’t need to do. When people develop a food allergy, they stop eating that thing. They can talk about how they used to eat that food with no negative effect as much as they want, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is a problem today. Mass shooters are an allergic reaction to our culture. Maybe in our glorious past, these guys were killed off in wars or they would take out their rages on their submissive wives and girlfriends. Maybe the glorious past wasn’t all that glorious anyway.

If people had to pass an interview and take an exam before buying a semi-automatic assault rifle, maybe Cruz wouldn’t have been able to obtain one and the death count wouldn’t have been so high. These creeps are all about beating the death count of the last guy. And assault rifles enable this. Does anyone think he would have hit so many people with a handgun?