I AM NOT ADVOCATING VIOLENCE NOR JUSTIFYING IT.
In the wake of the Onion’s routine release of their “No Way To Prevent This” article, people like to blame the perpetrator’s action on mental illness. That is, some sort of mental instability was the primary cause of a mass shooting. Logically, if that is true, then without that mental instability, the mass shooting wouldn’t have happened, the person would have…done something else.
But this is bullshit.
There is a science behind why people commit violence. Why We Snap points out several “triggers”:
- Life-or Limb
- Insult
- Family
- Environment
- Mate
- Order in society
- Resources
- Tribe
- Stopped
It’s completely reasonable to kill a person in self-defense. Almost no one denies this. That is the primary justification for the proliferation of guns in American society. This is not a mental illness.
At home, 72% of all murder-suicides involve an intimate partner; 94% of the victims of these murder suicides are female. There are a lot of reasons why men hurt and murder women, but fragile male egos that treat women as inferior and interpret their actions as insulting and as challenging to a man’s masculinity is an entire trope. And yet, the gender essentialism of traditional masculinity isn’t treated as mentally ill (or even just plain wrong).
Tucker Carlson was renowned for his supposed truth-telling about how the order of American society is being threatened by an invasion of immigrants. Trump did the same thing. A reasonable conclusion, then, is that the El Paso mass shooter was merely defending his beloved nation against this invasion of immigrants, whom he just so happens to hate because they threaten the order of society.
Similarly, the Nashville Christian academy shooter was trans. For many of us, transgenderism isn’t a mental illness, and thus not a cause of excessive violence in and of itself. However, coupled with the antagonistic relationship between traditional Christianity and transgenderism, several of the triggers that don’t assume mental illness make sense.
And, of course, tribe…oh boy! As American polarization increases among the electorate, the salience of tribes increases. Only like a week ago, GOP lawmakers that didn’t support Jim Jordan’s nomination for House Speaker were sent death threats over the phone. If you don’t vote for their guy, they’ll fuck you up! (But non-violently…listen to the clip). Being protective and supportive of people like you isn’t considered a mental illlness.
Again, I don’t believe any of this violence is justified, nor am I advocating for it. (I cannot stress that enough). My argument is that there are seemingly rational reasons to engage in violence in the moment. So, rather than scapegoating the mentally ill, maybe, just maybe, we should look to why it seemed like a rational decision for a mass shooter to kill a bunch of people. What was their motivation? What problem were they trying to solve? And why did excessive violence seem like a good way to solve the problem?
I believe this is a much better approach to any shooting or violence in general than the allowing an immediate pivot to mental illness as the causal factor.
This is completely incorrect. By any definition and certainly by all standards of humanity, a desire to kill people IS indicative of mental illness. It is actually one of the few red flags that can get you instantly sent to a psychiatric facility for lock up if you mention it in a counseling session. For good reason. NO well adjusted and healthy individual wants to see other people get killed, or worse, facilitate their murder. That you can’t see that truly scares me, because I see a lot of this inability to understand what is right from wrong in so many young people’s beliefs these days, and it’s truly disturbing. Hate is something we all encounter - but that doesn’t mean we accept it or promote it. If you feel like hurting others, you NEED to treat it as you would any other illness! Your mind, like your body, deserves to be healed and get treatment where it can get it. And I have to agree with the other respondent here, every person who picks up a machine gun and goes out to kill people, ABSOLUTELY IS MENTALLY ILL. Because murder is ALWAYS an act of mental illness, no matter the motivation. It’s normal to have hateful feelings and anger, but it’s abnormal to do nothing about that and just let it keep festering. Please stop promoting the idea that murder is in any way an OKAY mind set. It is not.
I disagree with the notion that moral wrongness makes a behaviour a mental illness. Well adjusted people are still capable of violence. Do you believe every soldier or police officer is mentally ill? I think calling it all mental illness is a cop out for people who want to pretend humans have no bad side. Remember the Milgram experiment? I guess they were all mentally ill too.
It isn’t moral “wrongness” that makes something a mental illness, but it is totally immoral to refuse to see the things that do make something a mental illness, and saying that well adjusted people inflict violence for fun is incorrect, it’s untrue. Yes cops do respond violently to violent situations. Have you been a cop? I’ve worked with them. I see the kinds of horrific insanity and violence they themselves are confronted with daily. As for soldiers, I DO question their mentality, because it does take a suppression of the horror of violence to want to be a soldier. Some soldiers have told me, they were either going to have to join the military or end up in jail. I’m not saying they’re all mentally ill - many of them have no desire to kill another human being. Those that do - are mentally ill in my book and always will be. And there’s no argument about it with me. You cannot justify any desire to kill another human. And if you think you can - don’t reply to me because I have no time for dealing with imbecility.
You seem to be implying people murder because they desire to. There’s definitely some people who do and perhaps that should qualify*. But a lot of people kill who don’t want to kill and sometimes intentionally do so anyways and that’s what OP seems to be talking about.
Take people working at slaughterhouses, for example, who kill regularly for pay. I don’t think it takes mental illness to do such a thing. People regularly drive cars, for example, despite how many people they kill, most of which are caused indirectly via things like pollution. It doesn’t mean someone is mentally ill for driving a car to the store. Of course most people don’t think about the impact of their actions on the lives and health of others, so its not intentional killing. But are you suggesting someone who in conscientious of the impacts of their actions is mentally ill for driving anyways? Given the outcome is the same, I don’t see why thinking “I know this is killing others, but my convenience is worth their sacrifice” to drive a car wouldn’t be mentally ill while using a gun to kill someone who you don’t want to kill in order to defend yourself or your loved ones would be consider mentally ill.
Illness shouldn’t be conflated with immorality. Nothing in OP’s comment suggests they don’t think murder isn’t wrong.
*Personally, I think illnesses in general should be based on how they affect the person with it, not others around them so I’d still disagree that a desire to murder would be indicative of illness, but that’s a semantics thing that puts me at odds with the common usages, colloquially and medically. Someone carrying a bacteria but having no ill effects does not have an illness, even if they can spread it to others and those people do get ill as a result. Not sure why we treat mental illnesses differently. Socially unfit behaviors/desires should be classified differently and conflating the two leads to additional stigma for those who have illnesses. Not really relevant to this discussion though.
That the practice of mental health identifies the desire to kill people as being indicative of mental illness is a good argument. I’m just going to concede that point.
There’s still the problem of one person not having the desire to kill someone to them…well, desiring to kill others. Being mental ill doesn’t explain anything. In other words, even if we define a deeply humiliated person as being mentally for wanting acting to take lethal revenge, for example, characterizing them as mentally ill fails to explain the relationship between their humiliation and their will to murder.
It’s at this point that I’ve realized the title of my post is wrong, and I’m actually arguing that mental illness doesn’t explain excessive violence. So…uhh…yeah. We’ll argue another day!