Is Mental Illness Really A Major Issue In Mass Shootings?

Right now with the gun grabbers gleefully contemplating different ways to limit your right to self-defense, the focus has shifted to red flag laws and background checks that include health records; the idea being that the mentally ill are more likely to become mass shooters or something like that.

    But is it true?

    In the article, "Blaming mass shootings on the nation's mental health crisis is 'harmful', advocates say" it notes that "a 2018 report of the FBI on the characteristics of active shooters found that only 25% of shooters from 2000-2013 had confirmed mental illness." Also (brackets in original):

    According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, approximately 1 in 5 adults in the U.S. experience mental illness, defined as a condition that affects a person's thinking, feeling or mood, each year, approximately 52.9 million Americans. In 2020, 1 in 10 young adults, between the ages of 18 and 25, were found to experience serious mental illness.

    With millions of Americans grappling with mental health challenges, doctors and public health experts, interviewed by ABC News, questioned whether it would be feasible to rely on the nation's current mental health infrastructure to stop would-be shooters.

    “The notion of blaming this on the mentally ill is an intentionally disingenuous scapegoating of people who have enough problems already -- that they don't need to be insulted by politicians who were looking for a way to avoid a more complicated discussion,” Dvoskin said.

    Those who live with mental illness are 10 times more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators, he added.

    “Very few of these mass shooters have had a diagnosed mental disorder of any kind. That doesn't mean that they were doing fine. I think the better rhetoric to use [instead of] mentally ill is people who are in crisis. Anybody who's in a crisis of despair or rage… that doesn't mean they're going to shoot anybody but they ought to get help,” Dvoskin said.

Other sources indicate that 26% of adults suffer from a mental illness. In short, then, active shooters appear to have no higher an incidence of mental illness than the general populace. 

    In 2018, Active Self Protection published an article by Ron Borsch, a retired police officer and trainer, on "Profiling An Active Killer." He points out near the beginning of his article that it is hard to pin down the motivation for such shooters.

Their motives can be as complicated as they are. Some surviving active killers have described a real or imagined wrong done to them, have claimed they were bullied or picked on.  Others may have been bullies themselves. Typically, all were selfish and over-reactive. These actual and or self-perceived nobodies, desiring recognition for notoriety as a “somebody”, often default to Rapid Mass Murder© for a significant body-count eerily similar to playing violent types of video games, with special fascination for the Columbine video game.

Borsch delves into the video game angle much more, noting a Secret Service study of perpetrators of school shootings (a sub-set of mass shootings or killings) showing that only 12% were attracted to violent video games. Borsch didn't use "only" but I do because a 2008 report from Pew indicated that two-thirds of video gamer played video games with violence in them. Also:

More than 90 percent of games rated E10+, Teen, or Mature have some kind of violent imagery, and “that violence is often portrayed as justified, fun, and without negative consequences,” write researchers Douglas Gentile and Craig Anderson, of Iowa State University.

The study Borsch cites actually shows a stronger correlation with liking violent books and films, but that was still only 24% and 27% respectively. So, in reality, school shooters appear less interested in violent video games than youths in general.

    With that aside, Borsch then moves on to listing off a constellation of factors. As Borsch points out, it is a mistake to focus on just one factor, “… but the truth of the matter is that there is never one cause. There is a cocktail of multiple causes coming together… And so no matter what single thing we focus on… not one of them is sufficient to cause aggression. But when you start putting them together, aggression becomes pretty predictable”.  This is similar to a doctor diagnosing a disease. That is, if you were looking at a constellation of symptoms of a disease, for instance, a doctor would not diagnose you as having a particular disease if you only suffered one or even a few of the symptoms. Rather, you would need to show all or almost all of the symptoms. 

    The factors (symptoms) Borsch lists include: (i) numerous unstable or troubling symptoms, possibly a mental illness diagnosis; (ii) is an oddball and typically avoided by his peers; (iii) immature (i.e., under 25 years old); (iv) planner, preparer and researcher of prior mass shooting events; (iv) close in age to his victims; (v) suicidal; (vi) an interest in violent video games; (vii) white male; (viii) cowardly; (ix) access to weapons. 

    The white male factor is interesting. It's not that blacks don't commit mass shootings--they are overrepresented in fact--but they don't tend to shoot up schools. But I would point out that blacks on average test as having a much higher self-image and self-assurance than the average white person. It might help explain why young black males are more likely to be involved in violence but less likely to be involved in a school shooting.

    Going through this, though, we only see two factors directly linked to mental health: the unstable or troubling personality (including possible mental health diagnosis) and the suicidal ideations. That means that seven of the factors are unrelated to mental health issues. So Borsch's article would seem to indicate that mental health, alone, is a poor predictor of a mass shooter. 

    In what I believe is a more recent article from Active Response Training, Greg Ellifritz reviewed an FBI study on "Pre-Attack Behaviors of Active Shooters in the United States from 2000-2013". One of the points Ellifritz makes is:

Only 25% of killers had been previously diagnosed with a mental illness.  There may certainly be some un-diagnosed mental problems among the remaining killers, but this statistic really shoots down the idea that psychiatric drugs are causing all of these shootings.

As I noted above, that is the same incidence of mental illness as within the general population.

    In conclusion, given the research on this matter, I would be suspicious of anyone that emphasizes mental health as a sole trait or even one of the more important traits predictive of a mass shooter; and I would be especially suspicious of anyone claiming that a person's mental health status should be used to determine whether a person should be permitted to buy or own a firearm. The law currently requires that a person be adjudicated as a mental defective or committed to a mental institution and that is probably as far as we should go with trying to link mental health and gun ownership.