Stop Trying to Convince Us Mental Illness Not Behind Mass Murders

Mass murders, such as the shooting in a Manhattan office building recently, are terrible things. When they happen, we immediately start looking for answers. We might look in different places, but most people really are trying to find answers. Some opportunistic jackwagons might try to take advantage of the situation, admittedly, but that’s not most folks.

Oftentimes, mental illness is cited as a potential cause. After all, many killers have some kind of mental health issues in their background.

But we’re also repeatedly told that mental illness isn’t the problem, such as this piece I came across earlier today.

Following a string of tragic incidents in the United States, experts note that among attackers mental health issues are often present, but they are not the main reason for mass and other violent acts. Prior offenses and particular life circumstances may be indicators, yet they do not explain the nature of the attacks themselves.

After a random shooting in Austin, Texas, Police Chief Lisa Davis said the suspect had prior criminal violations and “serious problems.” The 32-year-old suspect was arrested after police found him naked, with a Bible in his hands, and he claimed to be Jesus.

A few days earlier, a 30-year-old man opened fire hundreds of rounds at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, killing a police officer. The shooter, who killed himself, had previously talked about suicide and allegedly sought mental health help before the attack.

Even earlier, another shooter with a history of mental health problems shot four people in a Manhattan high-rise, then killed himself.

Suspects in several recent high-profile attacks were described as people with mental disorders, but experts say this does not mean that mental health problems themselves caused the violence.

No mental health system is designed to detect such rare and deadly crimes, experts say. However, a potential solution – restricting access to firearms – is something many politicians do not want to consider.

Here’s the issue, though; if you restrict guns in any way, you can and will put innocent lives at risk because firearms are used defensively far more often than offensively.

As for the claim that mental health problems didn’t cause the violence, though, I’m going to call BS.

Look, I’ve written a lot about destigmatizing mental illness, and for a good reason. People with depression, anxiety, and the like aren’t inherently violent and shouldn’t be treated as such. Many who try to leverage concerns about violent people with mental illness into restrictions on gun ownership, like requiring mental health screenings, fail to recognize this.

But sane people don’t want to slaughter as many people as humanly possible. I’m sorry, but that’s just not how it works, and you’re never going to convince me that sane, rational people just have a bad day all of a sudden and start killing people.

Psychology doesn’t know everything about mental health. Conditions are being added and removed from the various editions of the DSM on a regular basis. Sometimes, this is driven by politics, but it’s also sometimes driven by a better understanding of the human mind.

The fact that these killers aren’t diagnosed with some profound mental health disorder that explains the violent behavior doesn’t mean there’s no condition there. It just means no one has identified a condition.

And I honestly think that there is one.

Unfortunately, far too many psychological researchers are way too invested in gun control as some kind of solution rather than in actually looking for the root causes of whatever is wrong that’s making people lose their ever-loving minds and trying to massacre people who have never done them any wrong.

Please stop telling me these people aren’t mentally ill enough to kill, that their mental health isn’t a factor. No one actually buys that.

Editor’s Note: The radical left, such as the psychology establishment, will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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