I'd like to ask exactly HOW someone ISN'T mentally ill if they decide to shoot up a school??

People claim "there's no evidence for psychological or mental health issues affecting the shootings" but i don't know how rational of a conclusion that claim really is.

I mean, I'd really like to know what the other reasons are for why someone would do this. Excluding the terrorists known commonly as incels ("I'm going to shoot a school full of my classmates because a girl I liked didn't accept my advances"), there have been individuals that have literally shot up classrooms where only kindergarten kids were.

I don't agree that a shooting like the Sandy Hook shooting was on the same level as that of an incel killer. The man was a grown adult and his victims were all 5-6 year old children, and I'm really wondering how exactly someone didn't rule out mental health in that case. Because if you wake up in the morning and decide to shoot up a classroom filled with kindergarten kids, you are mentally unhealthy to some extent.

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Kwek00 · 41-45, M

Do you think all murderers should be classified as "mentally ill"?
Maybe you should try to read: "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil", by Hannah Arendt. Where she talks about Eichmans' days during the trial in Jerusalem for being one of the lead architects of the Holocaust.

She writes:

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”

This idea of the banality of evil, that the most mundane people might have a set of morals that aren't in touch with those that judge them and are able to do attrocities, is also played with in pop culture. In "The Peacemaker" (1997) a political terrorist tries to explode a nuclear weapon in New York. And he leaves a message that should be released after the attack saying:

"You will look at what I have done and say: "Of course - why not - they are all animals. They have slaughtered each other for centuries.". But the truth is, I'm not a monster. I'm a human man - I'm just like you, whether you like it or not. For years, we have tried to live together, until a war was waged on us, on all of us: a war waged by our own leaders. And who supplied the Serb cluster bombs, the Croatian tanks, the Muslim artillery shells that killed our sons and daughters? It was the governments of the West who drew the boundaries of our countries - sometimes in ink, sometimes in blood - the blood of our people. And now you dispatch your peacekeepers to write our destiny again. We can never accept this peace that leaves us with nothing but pain, pain the peacemakers must be made to feel. Their wives, their children, their houses and churches. So now you know, now you must understand. Leave us to find our own destiny. May God have mercy on us all."

People can just be really messed up sometimes, but still have their empathy for others and not be sociopaths or have other conditions that we might label to be "mentally ill". Other examples can be found in the Milgram experiments on authority. And look at how prison wardens behaved in certain prisons (Abu Ghraib). Look at what people do when they fall into certain terrorist groups. It's not mental illness, it's a complex number of things dependin on the case. Some people are just really angry.

ChipmunkErnie · 70-79, M

@Kwek00 It seems to be more an emotional reaction to what someone considers outside the norm -- "They MUST be mentally ill because they did something I don't believe I would ever do."

Kwek00 · 41-45, M

@ChipmunkErnie I agree. The fact that normal people can do stuff that the observer finds attrocious (espescially when (s)he considers him/herself normal) is just a frightening thing. So it's easier to classify the other as being "abnormal".

ChipmunkErnie · 70-79, M

@Kwek00 Then again, isn't "normal" very subjective, too? I mean, what was considered normal in one culture at one time might be considered totally aberrant in another culture and time.

Kwek00 · 41-45, M

@ChipmunkErnie Ofcourse, normal is only "normal" by those that set the norm.

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Kwek00 · 41-45, M

@MickRogers Why is that irrelevant? It just shows that people can have a believe system or a set of values that have no issues with actions, that people that don't have that believe system or value set doesn't share. If that set of morals makes a person believe that an other person doesn't have the right to live because of certain parameters (s)he attaches to it, then it's quite easy to take the next step. These processes often go together with dehumanisation, as in depriving the victim of his/her aspect of being human. The idea that people are vermin, parasites, ... and other things that need to be eliminated is fairly common and is also actively used as propaganda by those that want to incite these ideas.

Your Sandy Hook comparisson might be irrelevant, considering that the final report of the state's attorney does say that the person in question suffered from mental health issues. He just leaves open the idea that those mental issues had annything to do with the case, but since the people that were concerned with the process couldn't do it, neither can we:

It is known that the shooter had significant mental health issues that affected his ability to live a normal life and to interact with others, even those to whom he should have been close. As an adult he did not recognize or help himself deal with those issues. What contribution this made to the shootings, if any, is unknown as those mental health professionals who saw him did not see anything that would have predicted his future behavior. He had a familiarity with and access to firearms and ammunition and an obsession with mass murders, in particular the April 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado. Investigators however, have not discovered any evidence that the shooter voiced or gave any indication to others that he intended to commit such a crime himself.

SOURCE: https://web.archive.org/web/20131125212413/http://www.ct.gov/csao/lib/csao/Sandy_Hook_Final_Report.pdf