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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ArishMell · 70-79, M

These multiple murders are appalling enough but knee-jerk reactions, mere vengeance or sterotyping people who might be mentally ill, or are single, cannot help anyone understand the crimes hence perhaps try to head off future such attacks.

Clearly too, if the shooter is killed or kills himself at the scene, obviously attempting to establish his motive may only become mere speculation. That is no good to the bereaved, and no good to trying to prevent any similar incidents.

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Excepting terrorism and insurgency, although school and work-place massacres have occurred outside of the USA they are extremely rare.

There was a somewhat similar massacre of a youth camp in Norway about 10 or 12 years ago - but the lone gun-man survived and his motive was viciously political.

My own country, the UK, has suffered more than its fair share of politically-motivated terrorist attacks but purely random, apparently motiveless shootings by individuals number about 4 over the last 40 or 50 years.

Of them, one, and only one, was in a school - Dunblane Primary School, in 1996. Sixteen children and a teacher died, fifteen others were injured; in an attack lasting less than four minutes. This remains Britain's deadliest mass-shooting.

Motive? Not clear because the perpetrator, Thomas Hamilton, who lived a few miles from the village, shot himself at the end of his attack.

We now know he had a murky past, with complaints about his behaviour with boys leading to losing his leadership posts with a youth club and the Scouts. So it's possible he was driven, not by warped sexuality, but by growing self-pitying bitterness - but neither is an automatic route to being a murderer. The sad truth is, we will never know his motive.

Hamilton had armed himself with multiple-shot hand-guns legal at the time, and several hundred rounds. He had also tried, fortunately unsuccessfully, to cut the school's telephone line.

In the wake of it, the gun laws were tightened, restricting hand-gun ownership to licenced single-shot weapons and antiques

[Source - Wikipedia]

Nor will we ever know any motive of a random murderer who dies with his victims, by his own gun or that of someone else - unless he has left a "confession" of intent, or at least sufficient clear background information for a reasonably intelligent, professional assessment.

[i]We all want an end to such crimes[/], but...

Blindly calling such people "mentally ill" or "terrorist incels" serves only vengeance, and worse, may even risk stereotyping any mental-illness or bachelordom as a potential danger to society.

[i]Do we really want that?[/]