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Mental illness account for a very small proportion of mass shootings in the US
(www.columbiapsychiatry.org)
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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2024
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I hope no one takes this to mean that I am trying to stigmatize mental illness or people with mental illnesses, but it seems to me that if there are people who want to be famous or notorious so badly that they kill large numbers of people, that doesn't seem to be the result of a healthy or well ordered mind. Am I misunderstanding how the phrase "mental illness" is being used here? I recognize that the headline is referring specifically to disorders involving psychosis, but they even state that only 25% of mass shooters are associated with non-psychotic mental illnesses. Are emotional/behavioral disorders not being considered here? Or is the mass shooting database they are using one of those that includes any shooting with more than a certain number of people involved, even if that includes events that the typical person would not consider part of the phenomenon of the types of shootings that most people are thinking of when they talk about mass shootings?
Seriously, I hope I am not stepping on anyone's toes or saying something that will be taken as hurtful, because that's genuinely not how I mean it. But I really feel like if someone is in a state that they decide the best course of action for them is to kill a bunch of people they don't know, how could that be the result of a healthy mental and emotional state?
They call it out a little further down.
So they are not necessarily in a good emotional state, but they do not have a mental illness.
Thanks, I definitely skimmed the article, so missing that is on me.
It's interesting that the profile they mention doesn't really fit what I have in my mind for mass shooters, which would be younger men, not middle-aged. I guess the ones that really stick out to me, like the Columbine, Christchurch, and Uvalde shooters all fit this stereotype that I have, but apparently that doesn't map to reality.
There are several different subtypes of mass shootings, and school shooters and planned hate-crime shootings each have their own distinct characteristics. They get the most media coverage, for sure, and tend to trend younger than other types, but they're the least common type of mass shooting.
The mass shootings the article is talking about, which are the most common, are often workplace or family shootings, and are usually by middle aged men.
The definition of mass shooting used most commonly now is any shooting with 4 or more casualties, which includes a lot of shootings that most people wouldn't really think of as mass shootings, which are generally thought of as being like the ones like you named.
Right, and I was already aware of several lists of mass shooting using that or similar criteria to determine what fits. It's just a little strange to me to group so many disparate types of events into a list, and then do a study to say "most of these things don't involve mental illness" when most of those events are wildly different from each other.
Definitely agree with you there. The FBI had traditionally treated different types of shootings as each being unrelated. It was US media that pushed the term mass shooting in its current definition (so they could run big-number stories), and the consolidation of very different profiles under one label has done more harm than good, imo.
If you actually break them apart into distinct groups, there is a much stronger correlation with mental illness among especially e.g. school shooters.
I think people don't realize how many mass shootings happen in the US. Mostly because they don't typically make the news outside the place they occur.
CW: List of mass shootings in the US for 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2024
TL;DR: There have been 372 this year alone. That is 372 in 218 days, so more than one a day on average
Yeah, I addressed that briefly in my first comment. This definition of "mass shooting" is much, much broader and very different from what most people are thinking of when people talk about mass shootings. Like, I'm fully aware of how serious the gun violence problem in the US is, but I'm not thinking of a domestic violence situation where multiple people got injured, or a gang related shooting at a club where some bystanders are killed when I hear the term "mass shooting". Don't get me wrong, those situations are tragic, and the availability of guns in the US makes them so much worse, but I understand the psychology of them pretty well, I think. It's not a mystery to me why they are happening. But the kind of situation where a person goes to a place and just starts indiscriminately shooting people is what I don't understand, and it's what I tend to think of when people talk about "mass shootings". Maybe this is just me being wrong, or maybe it's a problem of imprecise terminology.
Oh totally. The definition is strictly numbers based. I don't think that is useful when you are trying to dig deep into the cause.