Mental Illness and Mass Shootings

We all want to know whether mass shooters suffer from more mental illness than the average citizen.  And we have been told that they do not. This factoid has been pounded into everyone’s mind so often that most people now accept it uncritically. It reminds us of the Big Lie… keep repeating it over and over again until everyone believes it. Naturally, the Big Lie is garnished with a few skewed facts, to make it appear to be an empirical fact.

And then, those who insist that mass shooters are not necessarily more mentally ill tell us that they want to protect psychotics from being stigmatized… as though that is their biggest problem.

Psychosis is an illness. It requires medical treatment. Among the problems that bedevil psychotics is that they often refuse treatment. Wanting to treat someone who suffers from an illness, probably a brain disease, is not the same as stigmatizing him.

Researchers Grant Duwe and Michael Rocque have crunched the numbers, analyzed the statistics. In a Los Angeles Times op-ed they explain that there is indeed a direct correlation between mass shooters and mental illness. (via Instapundit) To ignore it is to ignore the obvious.

At the broadest level, peer-reviewed research has shown that individuals with major mental disorders (those that substantially interfere with life activities) are more likely to commit violent acts, especially if they abuse drugs. When we focus more narrowly on mass public shootings — an extreme and, fortunately, rare form of violence — we see a relatively high rate of mental illness.

According to our research, at least 59% of the 185 public mass shootings that took place in the United States from 1900 through 2017 were carried out by people who had either been diagnosed with a mental disorder or demonstrated signs of serious mental illness prior to the attack. (We define a mass public shooting as any incident in which four or more victims are killed with a gun within a 24-hour period at a public location in the absence of military conflict, collective violence or other criminal activity, such as robberies, drug deals or gang turf wars.)

At times, it helps to read between the lines:

In a story that largely suggested mass murderers are not "insane," the New York Times cited research showing that, in fact, mass murderers are nearly 20 times more likely to have a "severe" mental illness than the general population.

According to our research, only one-third of the people who have committed mass shootings in the U.S. since 1900 had sought or received mental health care prior to their attacks, which suggests that most shooters did not seek or receive care they may have needed.

Thanks to the civil liberties lobby and the anti-psychiatry movement, America does not offer treatment to those who are suffering from severe mental illness. In that we are an outlier:

… the U.S. has higher rates of untreated serious mental illness than most other Western countries. Additional research shows that the gap is even larger for males, who have committed 99% of the country's mass public shootings.

But, at least they are not being stigmatized. When push comes to shove, we can blame it all on guns. We do not want to place any blame on the FBI or the Broward County sheriff. And we certainly do not want to hold the ACLU to account for the consequences of policies it has championed.