It seems a matter of common sense to think that a mass shooter must have “something wrong” with them. Well-adjusted, moral people do not engage in mass murder. But are mass shooters mentally ill? Mental illness is a medical matter, not a matter for common sense pop psychology to resolve.
Looked at in strict medical terms, mentally ill people do not make up the majority of mass shooters and about 3% of violent criminals are mentally ill. The mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violence rather than perpetrators. Violence on the part of the mentally ill tends to be self-directed rather than directed at others.
Self-injury is certainly a matter of concern, but mass shootings and gun violence are not, if one looks at the data, primarily a mental health issue. While the mentally ill commit some gun violence, focusing on mental illness as a primary means to reduce gun violence would be an error—except to address cases of self-harm.
It could be objected that the definition of mental illness used above is too narrow—engaging in a mass shooting is clear evidence of mental illness since a sane person would not do this. While this does have some appeal, expanding the scope of mental illness to automatically include those who engage in mass shootings as mentally ill would be problematic.
One obvious concern is that soldiers and police who have engaged in shootings with multiple casualties would thus be classified as mentally ill. In war, soldiers regularly kill large numbers of people, including the innocent and unarmed. Yet they are not classified as mentally ill simply because they use violence as a tool to achieve their ends (or the ends of others).
It could be countered that soldiers and the police (usually) use violence legally and rationally while mass shooters and people engaging in other gun violence do not. While it is true that mass shootings and gun violence are illegal, mass shooters do often act from grievances and ideology—just as soldiers are sent to kill to address grievances and in accord with an ideology. As such, killing people for these reasons does not make someone mentally ill, unless we want to classify combat veterans as mentally ill. As far as the legal aspect is concerned, breaking the law hardly seems to show someone is mentally ill, otherwise all criminals would be insane and thus would always succeed in the insanity defense.
A second concern is that assuming mass shooters are mentally ill would seem to eliminate the notion of evil. If people do bad things because of mental illness, then they are not evil in a morally meaningful sense. While this could be true, such an approach to evil would need to be applied consistently and not just to mass shootings. So, for example, when terrorists crash planes into buildings or blow up a wedding, they are just suffering from mental illness and are not evil. One could attempt to work out accounts of ethics and mental illness that put the blame for gun violence on mental illness while putting the blame for terrorism on evil, but this would certainly be challenging. After all, if a white supremacist kills people with guns because he is mentally ill, then the same would apply to a member of ISIS who kills people with guns or bombs. Interesting enough, while Republicans and the NRA rush to blame mass shootings on mental illness, they do not do the same for terrorism or other crimes—it is interesting to compare the rhetoric used by the same person to describe these situations. This is not to say that a case cannot be made for eliminating the concept of evil in favor of the concept of mental illness—but this must be done in a principled manner and applied consistently.
In light of the above discussion, the mental illness explanation for mass shootings (and gun violence) does not provide an adequate account. While seriously addressing mental illness would be laudable, it would not eliminate mass shootings and would have an insignificant impact on violence (other than self-inflicted violence). This is not to say that mental illness should not be addressed—it should! But to give speeches about mental illness to explain gun violence is an error and a distraction from addressing the significant causes of gun violence.
Lots to unpack here. I actually agree with Mike to some extent in that I don’t believe many mass shooters meet the legal definition of being insane. That, of course, is not to say they are not mentally ill. They clearly are mentally ill, but so are about 100 million other people in the U.S. and the vast majority of those pose no danger to anyone. So focusing on mental illness is rather pointless.
So the question becomes how do we identify those people who are likely to commit a mass shooting? I think ideology is a good starting point. With Islam, we know that a certain fraction of Muslims adhere to a fundamentalist interpretation of their religion that sanctions violence against unbelievers. This is well documented, and moreover, these Muslims themselves explain in great detail the religious justifications for their actions.
With white supremacy, we are on much shakier ground. What is the ideology of white supremacy? In what circumstances does it justify terrorism? How does someone transition from being a racist to a white supremacist? How many white supremacists are there, anyway?
My gut feeling is that the number of actual white supremacists is incredibly small, but I am open to having my mind changed.
I do believe, however, that there is a lot of resentment among white people because they are not allowed to celebrate their heritage without being accused of racism.
Amuses me how hard you try to find something to agree on when the bulk of this is simply just another polemic which, much like the last one, makes virtually no effort to be a serious discussion on the matter. Really didn’t have much to add here except that I ran across this in reference to a WSJ article on student loan debt and am curious as to your (or CT’s or DH’s…but especially your) thoughts on the matter.
https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/339658/
The student loan program isn’t a subsidy for students. It’s a subsidy for a vital Democrat-supporting industry. Understand that and a lot of other things make sense.
There is likely some truth to this, but I think the picture is complex.
At some point during the last 40 years we decided, as a society, that everyone needed to go to college. So now, even jobs like being a secretary or working in a day care center require college degrees. As college has become the ticket to nearly any form of employment, we needed to make college available to everyone and we did that with student loans.
So why did this happen? I think one of the biggest drivers was the demise of employer based testing. Years ago a company could offer a test, and if you did well on the test you could get a job. But so many companies got sued over these tests due to disparate impact claims, they just gave up and started requiring college degrees for everyone.
As for me agreeing with Mike, it was probably accidental. Stopped clock, etc.
The student loan program isn’t a subsidy for students. It’s a subsidy for a vital Democrat-supporting industry. Understand that and a lot of other things make sense.
The tax and subsidy decisions of any government, any party, any country, are largely driven by industry support. In very broad terms, Democratic policy has been driven by unions, while Republican policy has been driven by business, though that seems to be becoming more diffuse. Cabinet members and senior department officials are effectively representatives of the organisations that primarily support them.
It would be surprising if the student loan program actually was for the benefit of students, or education policy was either. Those will be for the benefit of the financial and administration industries, and the teachers’ unions.
Yes, of course “mental health” is just a minor factor in “gun violence”. The major factors are the easy availability of guns, and local culture,
Talking about “mental health” is just a transparent deflection, that has a limited effect only because the people who want gun control are very unwilling to talk about actual “gun violence”; instead they attempt to focus on the very rare but high-profile “mass shootings”.
If the people who wanted gun control actually wanted to talk about violence using guns, they wouldn’t have to wait for these rare events. Their hypocricy limits them.
I have always objected to the term “gun-violence”. Violent acts are committed for a ton of reasons, reasons that combine in a variety of ways.
Banning guns will not eliminate domestic violence, it will not eliminate gangs, it will not stop political extremism, it will not alleviate depression, alienation, paranoia.
To classify all of these crimes as “gun-violence” not only serves a political purpose, but also is a distraction to finding out the reason(s) for the acts in the first place. In other words, it is a deterrent, rather than a solution, to a wide variety of violent incidents, ranging from suicide to domestic violence to drug-related gang-wars and acts of terrorism – and everything else in between.
This reminds me of a riddle that I’m sure I’ve posted here before – having to do with steel helmets that were issued to soldiers beginning in WWI. While the expectation was that head injury statistics would decrease, the result was the opposite – head injuries actually went up – seemingly as a direct result of the helmets. “Why?” is the riddle.
The answer, of course, is one of classification. Head injuries increased because, before the helmets, those soldiers would have been in a different classification – KIA.
There is little doubt that banning guns will result in a reduction in gun violence. It’s almost a tautology. But “gun violence” does not exist in a vacuum, and for those motivated people with a need to kill, they will find another way. Is there a mechanism to track increases in stabbings, bludgeonings, bombings and other acts of murder?
Politically, I would say that the left is far from interested in tracking that kind of statistic. If they are able to ban guns and gun violence goes down – well, problem solved, right? “Vote for me!”
Incidentally, the same kind of logical gymnastics are used in the “Tax The Rich” drive. The US tax code has always been about revenue, about the US economy, about paying for spending on “necessary” programs. It’s relatively easy to demonstrate how certain changes to the tax code can stimulate economic activity, increase spending, jump-start hiring or expansion – and even if you argue against those ideas and can present statistics that show the opposite – at least the focus is on the economy. “Tax The Rich” is outside of economic discussions. Republicans have wasted their breath for decades trying to argue on those terms – “If you imposed a 100% tax on everyone earning over $200,000, and confiscated all the wealth of all the biilionaires, it would not make a dent …” Blah, blah, blah. It’s not about the economy, it’s about “morality” and “fairness”. But the logic is irrefutable. If you tax the rich – mission accomplished! If the economy falters, well, that was never part of the deal in the first place, was it?
But I digress.
To attempt to assign one common denominator to such a wide range of violent acts is misguided. And that’s the issue that I have with this latest post. It attempts to make the case that mental illness is “not the cause of gun violence”, when no reasonable person is trying to make the case that it is. The argument is being redefined so that it can be refuted. I’m surprised at Michael for not seeing this.
The article linked in Mike’s post has the headline, “Is It Guns or Mental Illness? Will targeting mental illness stop mass shootings?”
This headline makes two major errors. One, it assumes that there is a single answer to stopping mass shootings. Two, it assumes that there is a single cause to mass shootings, and that cause is either guns or mental illness. And of course, an assumption like this leads to a narrow, “clinical definition” of mental illness – presumably to enable those who disagree to disparage this argument (but more important, to allow them to ignore it).
In the text of the linked article, in talking about the definition of mental illness, the author says,
“It depends on how you define it. Most people think of mental illness as a psychosis, such as schizophrenia, in which the person is out of touch with reality and has hallucinations and/or delusions.
Studies show that about 20-25% of mass shooters (defined as killing three or more in one incident) suffered from this type of mental illness. “About one in five are likely psychotic or delusional, according to Dr. Michael Stone, a forensic psychiatrist at Columbia University who maintains a database of 350 mass killers going back more than a century…. “
But for those who prefer to just read headlines, they might just say,
“Well-adjusted, moral people do not engage in mass murder. But are mass shooters mentally ill? Mental illness is a medical matter, not a matter for common sense pop psychology to resolve.”
A 20% correlation is not insignificant. It’s not the single cause, of course, but neither is it trivial. The article, and the argument, continue to state the obvious – that the proliferation and access to guns is responsible for more gun crimes. Well, duh!.
Imagine a town that has a problem with graffiti. And most of the graffiti involves red spray paint – and is thus labeled “red-paint graffiti”. So the town bans red spray paint, and voila! No more red-paint graffiti! Is there an increase in blue-paint graffiti? “Not my problem! I got rid of the red-paint guys! I kept my promise! Vote for me!”
Both this post and the linked article fall into another bit of nonsense. By insisting that guns are the single cause of violence, the accepted truth becomes that there really is a single cause – so if not guns, what? From here, it’s just a matter of making the obvious (but completely false) claims that,
1. Mental illness alone is a predictor of violent behavior, or,
2. All mass-shooters are mentally ill.
And from here, it’s easy to disparage the arguments, reductio ad absurdum. Of course those assumptions are ridiculous! (but no one has been making them).
But the point has never been about reducing crime, reducing death, fighting domestic or foreign terrorism, or actually dealing with violence in all its forms. If it were, all possible correlative factors would be considered, But they’re not – in fact, they are ridiculed. Ridiculed by credentialed people who put their politics and tribal adherence to their group above their commitment to truth and logic.
No, it’s about winning.
I don’t really think the proponents of a gun ban or gun confiscation or the repeal of the second amendment really care about violence. I don’t think they necessarily believe that a gun ban will do anything to alleviate the problem. I don’t trust that they even believe in the constitutionality of their movement. And none of that is of concern to them.
They care about winning. If you can isolate “gun-violence” as a separate entity from any and all of the other violence that happens, then it’s almost a foregone conclusion that eliminating guns will reduce gun-violence. We win.
But what about racism, and racially motivated violent crimes? What about hatred? Domestic violence? Depression? Poverty? Schizophrenia? Religious extremism? Political extremism? Retaliation for perceived offenses? Alienation?
Well, if eliminating guns can change the stats on gun violence, doesn’t that prove that all those other things were not factors, and the left was correct all along?
And while we’re at it, let’s ban steel helmets for soldiers.
Correction – in my third paragraph, I said,
“In other words, it is a deterrent, rather than a solution, to a wide variety of violent incidents…
That should read,
“In other words, it is a deterrent to finding a solution rather than actually finding one, to a wide variety of violent incidents…
It’s not about the economy, it’s about “morality” and “fairness”. But the logic is irrefutable. If you tax the rich – mission accomplished! If the economy falters, well, that was never part of the deal in the first place, was it?
This reminds me of a BBC show on Global Warming – I’m nearly sure the host was Anne Diamond – where the audience were asked “If you could wave your hand and make it so CO2 had no effect on climate, so we could emit as much CO2 as we want without any harm, would you do it?” And almost nobody in the audience did.
They wanted to “punish” the people who they think are emitting CO2 (hint: it’s mostly people just like them) more than they wanted to “save the planet”.
I truly find this scary. I’m no mental health expert, but I’d call it psychopathic.
I’ve met people whose mindsets in many areas were set to lose-lose. As long as they could take down other people, they were prepared to injure themselves in the process, and feel righteous doing it.
People who focus on “mass shootings” while glossing over regular homicides and other violence must also have succumbed to the same lose-lose mindset. As long as they can score points against the other side, they are prepared not to make any progress on public safety.
P.S. Afterthought: could that be a Democrat self-protection thing?
Since most of the homicides happen in cities run by the Democratic Party, do they avoid the subject because the weaknesses and failures of their own policies would immediately become the talking points of the Republicans? I don’t have a native’s sense to guide me here.
Most Democrats do talk about gun violence in general, but you are right to point out that there is far less interest in and coverage of “normal” homicides relative to mass shootings.
Indeed. And I’d like to understand why.
The most obvious candidate, of course, is the shock value of an unexpected, gory event, and the amplifying effect of media coverage – “If it bleeds, it leads” – which in turn is driven by our own choice to reward news companies for featuring these rare events. It’s easier to get people interested in events that occur a few times a year across the whole country than in regular murders that occur in every large city a couple of times a week.
But still, in the vast majority of cases, the guns used in violence are handguns, Rifles of any kind, much less “assault weapons”, are relatively rare, and account for about as many deaths as fists and feet.
For a rational person who is dedicated to reducing murders, are rifles even a worthwhile target? The numbers are so small, and if all rifles were banned, handguns would surely be substituted instead.
I’d go for CO2 having no effect; while there would still be reasons to address some of what produces CO2, that would be a huge (magical) solution.
What sort of set up was there for the question? That can make a huge difference in how people answer.
Good question. I can’t remember, and I can’t find a clip. Certainly, the framing of a question can affect the answer, and so can the selection of the audience being polled.
https://youtu.be/gJimLZRC9N8
When Trump brought the problems of the City of Baltimore out in the open, the only result was that he fueled the “racism” fire. It’s amazing how well that worked, actually, because many others (Democrats) have toured the city and made the same comments.
While that was definitely a defensive redirection on the part of Elijah Cummings, the glee over having more (dubious, at best) ammunition for the “Racist, White Supremacist” narrative shows where the focus really is.
If you look hard enough, you’ll find some stories that indicate that the mayor of Baltimore is engaged in conversations with the governor of Maryland to try to find some solutions to the crime problem there which is a good sign – but the headlines stay focused on the racism fight. That’s also pretty telling.
Winning. Forget the real problems – tax revenue, global warming, crime, violence, death, social issues. We have a platform, dammit, and we’re going to win on it – “fairness”, “racism”, and “guns”.