“It’s Not About Mental Illness”: The Big Lie That Always Follows Mass Shootings By White Males
I get really really tired of hearing the phrase “mental illness” thrown around as a way to avoid saying other terms like “toxic masculinity,” “white supremacy,” “misogyny” or “racism.”
We barely know anything about the suspect in the Charleston, South Carolina, atrocity. We certainly don’t have testimony from a mental health professional responsible for his care that he suffered from any specific mental illness, or that he suffered from a mental illness at all.
We do have statistics showing that the vast majority of people who commit acts of violence do not have a diagnosis of mental illness and, conversely, people who have mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.
We know that the stigma of people who suffer from mental illness as scary, dangerous potential murderers hurts people every single day — it costs people relationships and jobs, it scares people away from seeking help who need it, it brings shame and fear down on the heads of people who already have it bad enough.
But the media insists on trotting out “mental illness” and blaring out that phrase nonstop in the wake of any mass killing. I had to grit my teeth every time I personally debated someone defaulting to the mindless mantra of “The real issue is mental illness” over the Isla Vista shootings.
“The real issue is mental illness” is a goddamn cop-out. I almost never hear it from actual mental health professionals, or advocates working in the mental health sphere, or anyone who actually has any kind of informed opinion on mental health or serious policy proposals for how to improve our treatment of the mentally ill in this country.
What I hear from people who bleat on about “The real issue is mental illness,” when pressed for specific suggestions on how to deal with said “real issue,” is terrifying nonsense designed to throw the mentally ill under the bus. Elliot Rodger’s parents should’ve been able to force risperidone down his throat. Seung-Hui Cho should’ve been forcibly institutionalized. Anyone with a mental illness diagnosis should surrender all of their constitutional rights, right now, rather than at all compromise the right to bear arms of self-declared sane people.
What’s interesting is to watch who the mentally ill people are being thrown under the bus to defend. In the wake of Sandy Hook, the NRA tells us that creating a national registry of firearms owners would be giving the government dangerously unchecked tyrannical power, but a national registry of the mentally ill would not — even though a “sane” person holding a gun is intrinsically more dangerous than a “crazy” person, no matter how crazy, without a gun.
We’ve successfully created a world so topsy-turvy that seeking medical help for depression or anxiety is apparently stronger evidence of violent tendencies than going out and purchasing a weapon whose only purpose is committing acts of violence. We’ve got a narrative going where doing the former is something we’re OK with stigmatizing but not the latter. God bless America.
What’s also interesting is the way “The real issue is mental illness” is deployed against mass murderers the way it’s deployed in general — as a way to discredit their own words. When you call someone “mentally ill” in this culture it’s a way to admonish people not to listen to them, to ignore anything they say about their own actions and motivations, to give yourself the authority to say you know them better than they know themselves.
This is cruel, ignorant bullshit when it’s used to discredit people who are the victims of crimes. It is, in fact, one major factor behind the fact that the mentally ill are far more likely to be the targets of violence than the perpetrators–every predator loves a victim who won’t be allowed to speak in their own defense.
But it’s also bullshit when used to discredit the perpetrators of crimes. Mass murderers frequently aren’t particularly shy about the motives behind what they do — the nature of the crime they commit is attention-seeking, is an attempt to get news coverage for their cause, to use one local atrocity to create fear within an entire population. (According to the dictionary, by the way, this is called “terrorism,” but we only ever seem to use that word for the actions of a certain kind — by which I mean a certain color — of mass killer.)
Elliot Rodger told us why he did what he did, at great length, in detail and with citations to the “redpill” websites from which he got his deranged ideology. It isn’t, at the end of the day, rocket science — he killed women because he resented them for not sleeping with him, and he killed men because he resented them for having the success he felt he was denied.
Yes, whatever mental illness he may have had contributed to the way his beliefs were at odds with reality. But it didn’t cause his beliefs to spring like magic from inside his brain with no connection to the outside world.
That’s as deliberately obtuse as reading the Facebook rants of a man who rambled on at great length about how much he hated religion and in particular hated Islam and deciding that the explanation for his murdering a Muslim family is that he must’ve just “gone crazy” over a parking dispute.
Now we’ve got a man who wore symbols of solidarity with apartheid regimes, a man who lived in a culture surrounded by deadly weapons who, like many others, received a gift of a deadly weapon as a rite of passage into manhood.
He straight-up told his victims, before shooting them, that he was doing it to defend “our country” from black people “taking over.” He told a woman that he was intentionally sparing her life so she could tell people what he did.
There is no reasonable interpretation of his actions that don’t make this a textbook act of terrorism against black Americans as a community.
And yet almost immediately we’ve heard the same, tired refrain of “The real issue is mental illness.”
Well, “mental illness” never created any idea, motivation or belief system. “Mental illness” refers to the way our minds can distort the ideas we get from the world, but the ideas still come from somewhere.
One of the highest-profile cases of full-blown schizophrenia in history is that of John Nash, who, unlike the vast, vast majority of mentally ill people, really did develop a whole system of delusions entirely separate from reality. And yet even then the movie A Beautiful Mind whitewashes what those beliefs actually were–when he came up with an all-powerful conspiracy that was monitoring his every move, that conspiracy by sheer coincidence was a conspiracy of the world’s Jews.
Was it just sheer bad luck for Jewish people that a random genius’ random fertile imagination made them into demonic villains? Or did he get that idea from somewhere?
Misogynistic rants that exactly match Elliot Rodger’s are just a Google search away, if you have a strong stomach. So are racist threats that exactly match Dylann Roof’s. Are all those people “mentally ill”? And if so is there some pill you could distribute to cure it?
Dylann Roof is a fanboy of the South African and Rhodesian governments. As horrific as Roof’s crime was, the crimes that occurred over decades of apartheid rule were far, far worse, and committed by thousands of statesmen, bureaucrats and law enforcement officials. Were all of them also “mentally ill”? At the risk of Godwinning myself, John Nash wasn’t the only person to think the Jews were a global demonic conspiracy out to get him–at one point in history a large portion of the Western world bought into that and killed six million people because of it. Were they all “mentally ill”?
Even when violence stems purely from delusion in the mind of someone who’s genuinely totally detached from reality–which is extremely rare–that violence seems to have a way of finding its way to culturally approved targets. Yeah, most white supremacists aren’t “crazy” enough to go on a shooting spree, most misogynists aren’t “crazy” enough to murder women who turn them down, most anti-government zealots aren’t “crazy” enough to shoot up or blow up government buildings.
But the “crazy” ones always seem to have a respectable counterpart who makes a respectable living pumping out the rhetoric that ends up in the “crazy” one’s manifesto–drawing crosshairs on liberals and calling abortion doctors mass murderers–who, once an atrocity happens, then immediately throws the “crazy” person under the bus for taking their words too seriously, too literally.
And the big splashy headliner atrocities tend to distract us from the ones that don’t make headline news. People are willing to call one white man emptying five magazines and murdering nine black people in a church and openly saying it was because of race a hate crime, even if they have to then cover it up with the fig leaf of individual “mental illness”–but a white man wearing a uniform who fires two magazines at two people in a car in a “bad neighborhood” in Cleveland? That just ends up a statistic in a DoJ report on systemic bias.
And hundreds of years of history in which an entire country’s economy was set up around chaining up millions of black people, forcing them to work and shooting them if they get out of line? That’s just history.
The reason a certain kind of person loves talking about “mental illness” is to draw attention to the big bold scary exceptional crimes and treat them as exceptions. It’s to distract from the fact that the worst crimes in history were committed by people just doing their jobs–cops enforcing the law, soldiers following orders, bureaucrats signing paperwork. That if we define “sanity” as going along to get along with what’s “normal” in the society around you, then for most of history the sane thing has been to aid and abet monstrous evil.
We love to talk about individuals’ mental illness so we can avoid talking about the biggest, scariest problem of all–societal illness. That the danger isn’t any one person’s madness, but that the world we live in is mad.
After all, there’s no pill for that.
By: Arthur Chu, Salon, June 18, 2015
“If Not Now, When?”: Charleston Church Massacre Is Yet Another Wake-Up Call For Gun Control
This will be short. I am tired of politicians and pundits telling us after horrible gun tragedies that now is not the time to confront our “gun problem.”
Many of us remember when John F. Kennedy was murdered with a mail-order rifle; Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by an easily-bought Remington .30-06 rifle; and Robert F. Kennedy was killed with a cheap handgun. That was a half century ago.
We have watched as gun violence has continued to consume us as a nation. And yet, our leaders do not act; our culture does not change. The National Rifle Association and other groups, pardon the expression, have a gun to our heads.
When threats to our society confront us we act: Trans fats are banned because they have harmful health effects; smoking is prohibited on planes, in restaurants and in public places; air bags and seat belts are mandated because they save lives; billions are appropriated to combat terrorism, which is deemed a threat to our nation.
But where is the courage to embrace control of guns? Where are the common sense solutions that nearly every other civilized, developed nation has put in place? Why have we not responded to this threat, to this reality? If not now, when?
We can grieve and act at the same time. We can mourn and call for solutions to our gun problem, to our racial problem, all at the same time.
In 2013, the Congressional Research Service determined that there were 78 incidents of mass shootings over the past thirty years killing 547 people – incidents such as occurred at Columbine, Aurora, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech and now in Charleston.
That same year, Pew Research Center reported that 37 percent of American households have guns, and that there were between 270 and 310 million guns in the United States, nearly one for every man, woman and child.
We acted in 1968 to pass gun control legislation. We acted under President Bill Clinton. But not nearly enough time, effort or courage has been exhibited by our leaders or our citizens to confront this problem.
We are terrorized by our own love affair with guns. It is long past time to get over it. It is time to recognize that acts like the Charleston massacre should change attitudes and change laws. The longer we wait, the more people will die.
By: Peter Fenn, Political Strategist and Head of Fenn Communications; U. S. News and World Report, June 19, 2015
“The Continued Tragedy Of Gun-Free Zones”: Clearly, This “Christianity” Stuff Is A Threat To The Second Amendment
You knew this argument would emerge the moment the news broke of a terrorist gun massacre in Charleston. Wonkette is all over it:
That was fast! It only took a few hours for Fox to toss up an editorial explaining that the best explanation of why six women and three men were shot to death in their church Wednesday night is that nobody in the church was packing heat like they should have been.
Professional gunhumper and FoxNews.com columnist John R. Lott explains:
The horrible tragedy last night that left nine people dead at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., probably could have been avoided. Like so many other attacks, the massacre took place in a gun-free zone, a place where the general public was banned from having guns. The gun-free zone obviously didn’t stop the killer from bringing a gun into the church.
It has the look of a ready-made editorial that, like a prewritten obituary for an aging celebrity, was just waiting for the next mass shooting — because in U.S. America, there’s always a “next mass shooting” on the way. The Charleston massacre is mentioned only in the first and last paragraphs, and the rest is boilerplate about how Bad Guys always choose “soft targets” where they know no one will be shooting back at them. There’s not a single word about the fact that it was allegedly a white racist murdering people in a black church. If the shooting had taken place at a school or a mall, everything else in the editorial would be identical, explaining that until it’s legal for everyone to carry a gun everywhere, we can look forward to more mass killings, and also the liberal media never covers the brave heroes with concealed weapons who do stop mass shootings all the time. (Since he could only find a few examples, he had to link to the same incident in at least two different spots in the editorial.)
Now the idea that we need to encourage people to bring instruments of deadly force into churches consecrated to the worship of the Prince of Peace, who taught loving one’s enemies and turning the other cheek to the hateful, is one that used to be considered a mite strange. Not any more. Next door to South Carolina, in Georgia, a law was recently passed that our friends in the gun lobby considered a bit of an impure compromise, stipulating that churches and bars could choose to permit concealed weapons on their properties. The gun lobby has been thwarted, even in Georgia, in extending this “right” to schools. But I’m reasonably sure if Republican rule in the South continues, eventually a ban on “gun-free zones” will be made universal. Because guns don’t kill, it’s their absence that is lethal. And clearly, any lilly-livered Christian minister who doesn’t keep a roscoe close at hand during services needs to be discharged. After all, you never know when some Christian-hater like Dylann Roof will show up seeking to deny worshipers their religious liberty.
Clearly, this “Christianity” stuff is a threat to the Second Amendment.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 20, 2015
“Secularism Does Not Have A Lock On Globalization”: What Republicans Keep Getting Wrong About The Iraq War
The 2016 Republican hopefuls more or less agree: Knowing what we know now, they would not have invaded Iraq.
But there is a nagging sense that we weren’t just wrong about invading Iraq — we were missing the point. It’s easy to admit that the war was an error. But it’s more difficult to explain that we entirely misread what was happening in the Middle East.
Make no mistake, we’re still struggling with that very same challenge. We now largely agree that it’s not about remaking the world in our image — nor is it about turning terrorism into a mere nuisance. But we have mostly failed to acknowledge that our struggles in the Middle East stem from a fatal flaw in our view of human progress.
The lessons of Iraq are so hard to unpack because the circumstances surrounding the invasion were so unusual. There was no other regime in the world with such a strange combination of intransigence, opacity, strategic importance, and vulnerability. One big reason we invaded Iraq was how much easier it was to invade than the rest of the so-called Axis of Evil.
Most importantly, in 2003, Iraq wasn’t surrounded by countries in great disarray. It was superficially plausible that a free and whole Iraq might start a chain reaction of beneficent globalization throughout the region.
And even when those ambitions were sharply curtailed, Republicans still argued that the U.S. ought to lead the way in modernizing the Middle East. At a presidential debate in New Hampshire eight years ago this month, Mitt Romney called for us to “combine for an effort to help move Islam towards modernity. There is a war going on, and we need a broad response to make sure that these people have a different vision.”
Despite powerful pressure from the anti-war left, even leading Democrats, including Barack Obama, insisted that modernization and globalization, hand in hand, were essential to remaking the Middle East as a realm of peace and prosperity.
In his landmark Cairo address, President Obama explained that “human history has often been a record of nations and tribes subjugating one another to serve their own interests. Yet in this new age, such attitudes are self-defeating. Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. So whatever we think of the past, we must not be prisoners of it. Our problems must be dealt with through partnership; progress must be shared.”
Alas, the Arab world did not share that vision. But it was not because the Middle East’s Muslims wanted to lurch backward in time. Like George W. Bush, Obama was right to sense that the era of secular strongmen was ending in the region. And like Bush — and so many others — Obama failed to understand that globalization and modernization would exaggerate religious fervor and strengthen religious identity, rather than accelerate Western-style liberalization.
As the Islamic State has made obvious, some manifestations of this new religious movement clearly despise some values we associate closely with modernity. That has helped blind us to seeing the radical modernity of religious revival inside and outside the Muslim world.
Americans must be shown that secularism does not have a lock on globalization. “What all Islamist movements have in common is a categorical rejection of any secular realm,” as the philosopher John Gray has observed. “But the ongoing reversal in secularization is not a peculiarly Islamic phenomenon. The resurgence of religion is a worldwide development… For secular thinkers, the continuing vitality of religion calls into question the belief that history underpins their values.”
Republicans teaching the true lessons of Iraq must go even further. The religious resurgence, of which Islamism is only one part, hinges on a particularly modern phenomenon: the yearning for direct, transformative experience, whether in faith or other realms of life. In a bygone age, stable religious hierarchies arranged powerful, official intermediaries between individuals and God — so much so that individuals could hardly see themselves as such. Today, that framework is a shambles. Recall the horrific personal initiative and independence on display on 9/11. Rather than a throwback to a time of obedience to unquestioned creedal rulers, terrorism betokens a stunningly profound break in the vertical of authority that characterized organized religion for centuries.
There is more. Even Islamists’ view of the enemy as absolutely evil and beyond compromise is a modern take on an old idea — starkly contrasting the aristocratic, detached, and calculated view of the secular despot, always shifting sides and weighing advantages.
The true lesson of our Iraq misadventure, Republicans must explain, is that our enemies are more like us than we care to think: not in their values, of course, but in their patterns of thought. Ignore this uncanny fact, and the GOP is likely to lose much more than the presidential election.
By: James Poulos, The Week, June 11, 2015
“From Unlikely To Long-Shot”: Rand Paul Just Sacrificed His Presidential Campaign For His Libertarian Principles
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) had what will probably be the defining moment of his presidential campaign on Sunday night. It could conceivably help him, but at a high political cost. It could also end his presidential hopes.
The junior senator from Kentucky infuriated his Republican colleagues by blocking a vote on the USA Freedom Act, a bill that would curtail a controversial National Security Agency bulk phone-data collection program and reauthorize three other surveillance programs that expired at midnight. The NSA had stopped collecting telephone metadata Sunday afternoon, when it became clear no deal would be finalized in time. It won’t be able to resume until the Senate acts, the House approves any changes, and President Obama signs the bill.
In Rand Paul’s telling, and that of the red-shirted “Stand With Rand” supporters who filled the Senate gallery on Sunday evening, Paul stuck a shiv in the government surveillance state, at least for a few days. “The Patriot Act will expire — it will expire tonight,” Paul said on his way out of the Senate chamber Sunday night. “The point I wanted to make is that we can still catch terrorists using the Constitution.”
Paul had some other help, if inadvertent. Senate Republicans, notably Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), had wanted to extend the USA Patriot Act as is. They fell short. Then, after a week’s recess, when it became clear the votes just weren’t there for the Patriot Act renewal, McConnell reluctantly agreed to put the “flawed” USA Freedom Act up for a last-minute vote on Sunday, and the Senate agreed, 77 to 17. The bill had passed the House on May 13, 338-88, and Obama supports it.
Senate GOP hawks say the Freedom Act puts too many constraints on the NSA; Paul and some other civil libertarians say it still goes too far. But his usual civil-liberty allies in the Senate signaled their comfort with the House bill, leaving Rand Paul the lone holdout. In the Senate, that’s often enough to delay a bill, and Paul did so on Sunday.
Whether or not it was his prime motivation, as Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) suggest, Paul will earn a lot of money for his presidential campaign. But his chances of becoming the 2016 Republican nominee just went from unlikely to long-shot.
Shutting down American espionage and surveillance capabilities, even for a few days, is too off-brand for the GOP — especially at the moment.
Paul is “a niche candidate of a shrinking niche, because events are not playing out the way he anticipated two years ago when he began running for president,” George Will said on Fox News Sunday. “The world looks much more dangerous than it did,” and “literally cashing in” on his “conscientiousness as a libertarian” really “muddies the waters” of his intentions.
In a crowded Republican presidential field, Rand Paul is betting he can monopolize the libertarian caucus. It’s a gamble. Forcing expiration of the NSA provisions for a couple of days was a small victory on its own. But “his larger political victory was that he took ownership of Patriot Act opposition,” said David Weigel at Bloomberg Politics, “angering Republican colleagues whom he is happy to anger.”
Weigel names McCain and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), but Paul also angered McConnell, who has endorsed him for president, and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who vowed on Sunday that “there won’t be any negotiations with Rand Paul from this point forward.” Paul didn’t attend the GOP caucus meeting before Sunday’s session, and Republicans walked out on him en masse when he started speaking.
The big question for Paul is whether there are enough civil libertarians in the Republican Party, and if so, whether they will vote in the primary. Plenty voted for his father, former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), but it wasn’t enough.
“People here in town think I’m making a huge mistake,” Rand Paul said Sunday evening. “Some of them I think secretly want there to be an attack on the United States so they can blame it on me.”
In other words, Rand Paul sounds like a lot of Democrats after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. That wasn’t a good place to be, politically.
Brit Hume at Fox News hammered the same point on Sunday. Paul “seems confused about which party he’s running in,” he said. “There’s a segment of the Republican electorate which shares his somewhat paranoid views of things, and he’ll have their support, but that’s not a nominating set.”
Rand Paul seems to know the risks, and he seems content to go down swinging. And if he does stake his political future on curtailing government spying and lose, unlike other GOP presidential contenders, he probably shouldn’t expect a soft landing at Fox News.
By: Peter Weber, The Week, June 1, 2015
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