Mental Health Is the Assault Weapon Plaguing America
While we focus on guns, the proximal cause of mass shootings is definitively mental health
The Maine shooter’s (we will not use his name for reasons explained below) family was concerned about his mental health and his access to firearms. The local police were called, the Army Reserves were heavily involved (the shooter was a Reservist) and both did little to avert the disaster. Three months before the shooting, the shooter was so deranged that the Reserves involuntarily committed him to a mental institution for two weeks. After which, the Army “directed that while on duty, he shouldn’t be allowed to have a weapon, handle ammunition or participate in live-fire activity. It also declared him to be non-deployable.” The shooter filled out a form at a gunstore to purchase a silencer, but was denied the sale because he truthfully answered he had been committed for mental health reasons. The police were asked to do a wellness check (by the Army Reserves) because a fellow Reservist said he feared, “[the shooter] was going to snap and commit a mass shooting.” Sheriff’s deputies visited the shooter’s home twice, issued an alert but did not enter the shooter’s home even though there was evidence he was there - because no one answered the door to his trailer. The Reserves have a letter from an unnamed fellow Reservist that states the shooter told him that he planned to shoot up places. A week before the shooting that killed 18, the local Sheriff’s office canceled the statewide alert for the shooter.
The Parkland shooter was known to have mental health issues since he was in pre-K, and there were reports he made threats to other students. Psychiatrists recommended he be involuntarily committed to a mental institution, and school officials were so concerned he would bring a gun or other weapon to school he was disallowed from carrying a backpack on campus. The Department of Children and Families in Florida investigated him for social media posts in which he cut himself and threatened to buy a gun; he was recommended for involuntary evaluation under the Baker Act. The since-fired Sheriff of Broward Country reported that the police were called to the Parkland shooter’s home 23 times in the year leading up to the shooting, but a CNN investigation found the actual number was 45. The school shooter posted on YouTube that he was, “going to be a professional school shooter.” Two months before the shooter killed 17 at Parkland High School, the FBI was contacted by someone close to the shooter. The FBI stated after the shooting, “the caller provided information about Cruz's gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting." The FBI admitted they never followed up on the tip.
We could go on and on. If you think these are outliers, consider the following data from Statista: of 89 mass shootings between 1982 and October 2023, in which one can definitively determine, 72 of the mass shootings included prior signs of mental health issues with the shooter. The number may be higher, as the 72 figure does not include undiagnosed mental issues discovered after the fact. Nonetheless, the number is an overwhelming 80%:
Mass shootings in the United States between 1982 and October 2023, by presence of prior signs of shooter's mental health issues
These stories are chilling. Not only because these shooters are so plagued by mental illness that they determine they must destroy the world they know as best they can, but also because of how deeply and fully the institutions that are meant to assist people in crisis and maintain law and order fail these disturbed individuals and society so consistently.
I’ve found no better explanation concerning this need of murderous destruction than that by Dr. Jordan Peterson, a highly-cited Clinical Psychologist. Here he discussed the Columbine shooters, the first to shoot up a school in America:
This line from Dr. Peterson strikes to the heart of our situation: “We are left with the responsibility for the most terrible aspects of ourselves, and in that way perhaps stop those terrible things from happening again.”
Likewise, two criminologists, Jillian Peterson and James Densley in their book, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic have identified what they believe to be the profile of a mass shooter:
Their findings…reveal striking commonalities among the perpetrators of mass shootings and suggest a data-backed, mental health-based approach could identify and address the next mass shooter before he pulls the trigger…
[What’s the profile of a mass shooter?]: There’s this really consistent pathway. Early childhood trauma seems to be the foundation, whether violence in the home, sexual assault, parental suicides, extreme bullying. Then you see the build toward hopelessness, despair, isolation, self-loathing, oftentimes rejection from peers. That turns into a really identifiable crisis point where they’re acting differently. Sometimes they have previous suicide attempts.
What’s different from traditional suicide is that the self-hate turns against a group. They start asking themselves, “Whose fault is this?” Is it a racial group or women or a religious group, or is it my classmates? The hate turns outward. There’s also this quest for fame and notoriety.
Indeed, mental health is the number one issue for mass shooting violence.
As an aside, it is easy to blame guns, the tools of our destruction. And the truth is that we should all be supportive of a red flag law that, while following due process and the protections of the Constitution, denies the right of seriously mentally ill person from owning or having access to firearms. This is an easy win backed by Republicans and Democrats alike, but it will not solve the problem at its fundamental level.
Consider this - gun ownership has existed in America since before there was an America. High school shooting teams (clay or target) used to be ubiquitous, especially across the South and Midwest. Over the past hundred years, a myriad of laws and regulations have been put in place to control guns and gun ownership in ways never contemplated by the Founders. Yet gun violence of the mass shooting variety is a new phenomenon that perhaps started in 1982, according to Time, but certainly entered the zeitgeist with Columbine in 1999 - just 24 years ago - and has rapidly escalated since.
Considering that mass shootings have no corollary to American gun ownership nor the US gun control regime, the questions raised by Dr. Peterson become more profound. What is it in the American psyche that has precipitated the crisis? Certainly, we have lost our way as a society - we don’t take care of our most vulnerable people and we seek cheap, easy answers that cost us little to resolve these fundamental shortcomings. We use jargon like evil, monster, domestic terrorist, and hate crime to explain away our serious health crisis. Again from our criminologists Peterson and Densley:
If we explain this problem as pure evil or other labels like terrorist attack or hate crime, we feel better because it makes it seem like we’ve found the motive and solved the puzzle. But we haven’t solved anything. We’ve just explained the problem away. What this really problematic terminology does is prevent us from recognizing that mass shooters are us. This is hard for people to relate to because these individuals have done horrific, monstrous things. But three days earlier, that school shooter was somebody’s son, grandson, neighbor, colleague or classmate. We have to recognize them as the troubled human being earlier if we want to intervene before they become the monster.
In truth, in 1955 there were over 500,000 people in the US held in mental asylums, in a population of about 161 million - a rate of approximately 1 in every 322 Americans. While these asylums were awful places and most were closed due to their neglect, perhaps we threw out the baby with the bath water. State and mental health facilities still exist today, but according to a survey in 2020 by SAMHSA (the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration) there were approximately 77,000 inpatient residents of mental health facilities, or 1 in 4,300 (of a population approximately 332 million). It is likely the vast majority were seeking treatment for drug abuse, not mental illness though they are obviously related. We’ve clearly abandoned the practice of providing and/or forcing mental health inpatient care for the most vulnerably disturbed in our society.
We can not continue to ignore America’s major health crisis. We can not continue to hand seriously mentally disturbed people a bottle of pills and hope they take them. 1 in 5 adults in America experienced mental illness in 2021. We must begin to address the influx of psychological disease across the broad spectrum of America, before it is too late. Mass shootings are a symptom of a society that is crumbling before our eyes. Americans, take warning. Mass shooters are us.