The Truth About Mass Shootings

Gun control isn’t the answer. So what is?

Reacting to the horrific mass shooting in Maine, the media is asking the usual question: how did the killer get his hands on an assault rifle?

Truth be told, it doesn’t matter. The National Shooting Sports Foundation estimates that American is home to more than 20 million examples of what it calls “modern sporting rifles” (MSR’s).

The shooter only needed one.

An “Assault Weapon” Ban is Window Dressing

If the federal government banned sales of semi-automatic rifles tomorrow, there’d be more than 20 million of them out there, somewhere.

If the feds made owning an MSR a crime and mandated their surrender, history and common sense tell us only a fraction of owners would comply. Again, leaving millions in the wild.

Which leaves us where? With dangerously mental ill people loose in a country awash in rifles, handguns, motor vehicles, explosives and other deadly weapons.

Mass Shooting and Mental Illness

Mentally ill people are far more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators.

In fact, the psychiatrists at columbiapsychiatry.org would have you believe mental illness isn’t a major factor in mass shootings.

They base their conclusion on a database with 1800 entries including “any mass shooting or murder reported between 1900 and 2019 worldwide that resulted in at least three deaths (not including the perpetrator).”

Terrorist attacks? Cartel killings? I can’t find the entry criteria. In any case, they conclude that…

Half of all mass shootings are associated with no red flags—no diagnosed mental illness, no substance use, no history of criminality, nothing.

I take that to mean that half of the mass shootings in their international mass shooting database did have red flags flying.

For Professor Ragy Girgis’ crew, it’s don’t pay too much attention to the crazy person behind the curtain.

The data suggest that while it is critical that we continue to identify those individuals with mental illness and substance use disorders at high risk for violence and prevent the perpetration of violence, other risk factors, such as a history of legal problems, challenges coping with severe and acute life stressors, and the epidemic of the combination of nihilism, emptiness, anger, and a desire for notoriety among young men, seem a more useful focus for prevention and policy than an emphasis on serious mental illness, which leads to public fear and stigmatization.

Red Flags Flying

Anecdotal evidence suggests otherwise. There are many examples of dangerously mentally ill mass shooters known to authorities before they committed their heinous crime.

Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza had crippling mental illness from the age of three. By the time he was a teenager, he’d been diagnosed with autism, sensory integration disorder, OCD, Asperger’s, anorexia nervosa and schizophrenia.

When he was removed from high school as a danger to other children, Lanza withdrew into a world of violent video games. Literally.

Lanza lived in his mother’s basement, windows blacked-out with garbage bags, walls adorned with newspaper clippings of mass murder. He didn’t open his door for meals.

No treatment. No supervision. Homicidal ideation. Lanza was a ticking time bomb. And murderous with it. He shot his mother, took her MSR and went on a rampage, killing 20 children..

Aurora movie killer James Holmes was obsessed with killing for over a decade before he committed mass murder. Both his social worker and a state-appointed psychiatric physician – one of three charged with his care – were well aware of his ideation.

University of Colorado campus police had Holmes on their radar, after Dr. Lynne Fenton told them he’d made “homicidal statements.”

Holmes was banned from all non-public areas of his alma mater after threatening a professor. He was running loose when he shot-up a movie theater, with an AR-15, killing twelve people.

Isla Vista killer Elliot Rodger had seen multiple therapists since he was eight years old. Alarmed by his behavior and YouTube videos, Rodger's parents contacted police. The interviewed Rodger’s but didn’t check their gun database (he had two handguns) or watch his videos.

Rodgers killed six people and injured fourteen others. The executive director of the Treatment Advocacy Center had this to say about that:

Once again, we are grieving over deaths and devastation caused by a young man who was sending up red flags for danger that failed to produce intervention in time to avert tragedy. In this case, the red flags were so big the killer's parents had called police ... and yet the system failed.

Our Mental Health Care System Doesn’t Protect the Public

Robert Card reported his mental illness to authorities, including hearing voices and a concrete plan to shoot-up a National Guard base.

Card was committed to a mental hospital – and released after two weeks. Two days ago, he murdered 18 people and wounded many more, two critically.

Clearly, in retrospect, Card should have remained incarcerated in a secure mental health facility.

Chances are some part of the decision to release him was driven by financial constraints.

In 2020, Maine closed more than twenty residential mental health care facilities, leaving only two state-run mental hospitals.

Like so many other states, Maine’s laws are heavily biased towards protecting the mentally ill, rather than the general public.

Mass Shootings Are and Are Not a Gun Problem

There’s only one way to prevent dangerous individuals capable of committing mass murder (whether mentally ill or not) from accessing firearms (or other dangerous weapons): remove them from society.

Easier said than done.

What is the exact criteria for commitment? How do you prevent authorities from abusing the process? How long do you keep potentially violent people incarcerated? And what of less obviously ill potential mass shooters?

No matter how tight the net – which should be tighter – mass shooters will slip through.

When that happens, stopping them at the point of attack is the only possible way to prevent or minimize harm. How that might be accomplished is self-evident, and Constitutionally protected.