on recent discussions

[the_siobhan]

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".

Comments

[greylock]

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?

Of the people who were killed? I doubt it, they were kids.

gun-control argument
I guess, in Canada, you cannot have a sensible argument.

I guess, are there signs? Probably?
Is this a public health issue?
No, Crazy violent people are going to be crazy, violent.

You need to look at rates of crime in sensible areas, like here, to unpack the statistics.
When crazy violent people go crazy, when they have access to automatic weapons, there will be mass murder,
When crazy violent people go crazy, when they have not access to automatic weapons, there will probably not be mass murder.

It isn't an issue of crazy.

[lil_m_moses]

I suspect it's a little of both. It's true that all of the state hospitals have been shut down for decades and long-term mental health care is now prohibitively expensive and requires significant self-reliance for a large segment of the US, but I think there's definitely also an assumption that sane people just don't do that. It seems to me that the few that haven't committed suicide (by self or cop) have seemed (and probably been deemed) certifiable.

In light of this question, I kind of want to go back and watch Bowling for Columbine again. It didn't really answer things, but presented a lot of food for thought, and particularly on the difference in gun violence rates between the US and Canada.