2012-12-15

the_siobhan: (blowfish)
2012-12-15 02:19 pm

on recent discussions

Since this seems to be the topic on everybody's lips at the moment.

Of the people who have been arrested after a shooting spree, have any of them been diagnosed with a mental illness?

Of the people who were killed while on a shooting spree, is there any prior evidence that they were in fact suffering from a mental illness? (Let's assume just for the sake of this discussion that shooting a bunch of people does not in itself count as evidence.)

I see a lot of people on both sides of the gun-control argument saying that lack of access to mental health services is a causative factor in these shootings. So are people making that argument because the shooters are being diagosed after the fact, or is everybody accepting it as a given because "nobody sane would do that".