Are All School Shooters Mentally Ill?

OK, on this topic, I will get on my soapbox. NO. The answer is NO. Here is where assumptions and presumptions come up fantastically short. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss – and apparently, there’s a lot of bliss, as there’s a lot of ignorance when it comes to mental illness.

My soapbox – here goes: people with mental illness are far MORE likely to be victims of violent crime than they are to COMMIT a violent crime. You know all those homeless people you see on the street? Far less dangerous than you might think and far more likely to be victims of those violent crimes you fear they may perpetuate.

Why, you ask? Well, way back when, there was a movement to close most of the state mental hospitals. This was predicated on the establishment of community mental health centers. Sounds great, right? After all, the idea was to release long-term patients and to base their care in the communities they came from – sounds like a solid plan, no?

Well, here’s where the best-laid plans went awry. Have you ever heard of NIMBY? (It stands for “Not In My Back Yard.”) Basically, what happened was a giant timing error. The state hospitals shuttered before the community mental health centers were established. And, in most places, the NIMBY phenomenon meant that those community mental health centers never got off the ground.

Thousands of psych patients around the country were released with ZERO aftercare. Many of these individuals had lived in state hospitals for years – decades, even. Some had spent the vast majority of their lives in the safety of the hospital walls. While state mental hospitals desperately needed to be overhauled, and to stop being warehouses, eliminating the vast majority of them and throwing their inhabitants onto the streets with no follow-up, medications, or oversight – if there was a crime, that was it.

So, you ask, what does it matter whether or not school shooters are diagnosed with mental illness? It matters because there is a difference between someone who acts out of mental illness – and someone who is, simply put, a malevolent person. Apologies if this shocks you, but there are plenty of bad people in this world of ours – and the vast majority of them do not have a mental illness.

And where there is a school shooter who clearly has a mental illness, as in the case of the Oxford High School shooter (in my home state of Michigan), it is not atypical that there were obvious signs that things were wrong from very early on. And the shooter’s parents not only apparently did not seek help for their clearly troubled child, they actually armed him when he was obviously beyond unstable.

So, what’s my point? We need to do better. We need to provide better, more comprehensive mental health care. We needed it when the problems with NIMBY arose, and we still need it today to keep individuals like the Oxford school shooter from falling through the cracks.

Hopefully, that will catch bad people before they can act – as well as help those with a valid diagnosis of a mental illness. Which begs the question: how do we deal with people who don’t have a mental illness – that are clearly just bad people? I would argue that the same screening rules apply as with mental illness. Maybe, just maybe, we could catch school shooters before they are able to act on their fantasies. It would at least be worth a try.