“I shoot in Copenhagen, Denmark, where guns are BANNED?”
This is how Lavern Spicer, Republican candidate for Congress from Florida, explains it he wrote in a tweet which went viral the day after last Sunday’s deadly shooting at a shopping mall in Copenhagen.
He was one of several US politicians who used the incident to argue that stricter gun laws do not prevent mass shootings. The argument gun rights advocates repeat after almost every mass shooting is that mental disorders are to blame for violence, not guns.
The media tends to promote this oversimplified narrative, according to multiple studies, even though it doesn’t treat all perpetrators equally: Muslim mass shooters tend to be perceived as less mentally ill and more religiously motivated, a 2018 study found, while black and Latino men are seen as violently inclined, unlike white men, who are characterized as victims of their mental health conditions, another research shows.
But the link between mental health problems and committing acts of mass violence is more nuanced than many politicians and media commentators suggest.
Mental health is just one risk factor
“Mental illness is certainly a key risk factor,” Lisa Pescara-Kovach, professor of educational psychology and director of the Center for Education on Mass Violence and Suicide, told DW. “But that’s not the only factor, and we shouldn’t just focus on that.”
After the mass shooting at an Independence Day parade in Chicago on Monday, Pescara-Kovach began looking into the alleged perpetrator’s background. His profile has many similarities with many others who have committed the same type of violence, he noted.
The suspect was depressed, Pescara-Kovach said. He attempted suicide in 2019 and threatened to kill his family members several months later.
But depression doesn’t explain why he opened fire on people.
First, a proper risk assessment could have prevented the attack. “He had numerous troubling behaviors, but somehow it never came to a formal complaint,” he noted. On social media, he regularly posted extremely violent content, some of which was related to school shootings or murders.
“If someone had done a proper threat assessment, somewhere along the line, we could have gotten him some kind of case management,” Pescara-Kovach said.
More importantly, it was easy access to rifles that made these attacks possible. “No civilian should have” the high-powered weapons owned by the suspect, he said.
Weapons against mental illness
Identifying mental disorders as a primary cause of gun violence disrupts efforts to identify potential shooters and prevent their attacks from occurring. “The main problem is that it becomes a weapon against mental illness,” Pescara-Kovach said.
This narrative portrays perpetrators as victims rather than those who victimize others, he noted, adding that this rules out many other important factors such as social neglect.
The US National Threat Assessment Center has published a guide to preventing school shootings and updates it regularly. The document lists factors that school and health officials should watch for. It includes family and school dynamics, access to weapons and mental stressors.
What do the numbers say?
Accurate figures for the presence of mental illness in mass shootings are hard to come by. Only 25 percent of all mass shooters between 2000 and 2013 had been diagnosed with a mental illness before the attack, according to a research paper published in 2018 looking at incidents in that time period.
Several other studies focusing on different data sets also suggest that the perpetrators have suffered from serious mental illness in only a minority of incidents.
But to study published in 2020 shows that roughly two-thirds of American mass shooters who struck between 1966 and 2019 showed signs of mental illness.
However, several researchers say that mental illness, even in severe forms, is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for mass violence.
Former US President Donald Trump once stated: “Mental illness and hate pull the trigger”
Jennifer Skeem, a professor at the University of California, and her colleague studied serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depression, which are not the same as emotional distress due to life circumstances and problematic personality traits. “There is an association between serious mental illness and violence, but it is weaker than the public imagines or the media portrays, and it is rarely causal,” they found.
In their document, which was published in 2019they acknowledge that most mass shooters fall somewhere on the spectrum of mental illness, broadly defined, but “this is just a testament to how common mental illness is,” they wrote.
What makes a person a mass shooter?
“The problem is not a serious mental illness,” Pescara-Kovach explained. “The specific feelings these individuals experience are hopelessness, despair and suicidality.”
Identity problems and body image insecurityare sentiments shared by many shooters, an overwhelming majority of them they are young men. They they are also prone to espouse extremist views and share a fascination with Nazis and hypermasculinities imagery
Also common among mass shooters are the motives of seeking fame and attention.
“Often, the perpetrators … feel like their life is small and they want to be a part of something big and they want to be a part of history.” Pescara-Kovach said.
“The key to preventing these attacks is to reduce risk factors and increase access to mental health support,” he noted. However, we must not confuse psychological assessments with risk assessments of violence and threats, he warned.
Edited by: Rob Mudge
