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.
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!
That IS true, your point about the problem of mental illness not necessarily accounting for everything. I wouldn’t say it accounts for nothing, because in many such cases it DOES play a role. Look at this situation, we’re finding out the shooter did have mental health struggles, and WAS in psychiatric facility for a few weeks. True that doesn’t necessarily mean, he’s going to go kill people, nor am I saying that having mental struggles means you’re going to go kill people.
But the revenge notion is perhaps the most chilling justification I can think of for wanting to murder another human. No matter the humiliation or depravity you’ve endured - you don’t balance any “scales of justice” by going out and committing revenge.
In fact all you do is make twice the misery and twice the horror that already existed. And you’ve literally become the monster that you were hunting down, or worse. Which is why I never could agree that there is any “moral” lesson in Dexter or in Tales from the Crypt episodes.
But I do agree with you totally that mental illness does not always explain excessive violence. I appreciate your feedback on this!!