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Glait t1_jdnj4vi wrote

Reply to comment by Morepastor in Police Report Active Shooter Situation At Hard Rock Casino Lake Tahoe by cajunsamurai

Science Vs did a great podcast episode on mass shootings . I don't know how much access to mental health resources and suicide prevention would help but it's one of those things were there is no downside to expanding access to mental healthcare. They talked to a researcher who studies mass shooters and when it came to the question of mental illness and they found

"roughly one in ten of these shooters is doing it because they’re psychotic. Other research finds similar numbers – sometimes a little higher. Generally speaking, though, the majority of shooters are doing it for some other reason besides psychosis.

The mental health issue that really stands out here is this: About 70% of the shooters were suicidal. In fact, the probability that a mass shooter dies by suicide after the crime is much higher than for other kinds of murderers."

When Jillian looked closely at the period leading up to these men’s crimes, she realized they had often reached some kind of crisis point.

Usually it was because they just had their wife leave them, or they just lost their job, or something dramatic happened in their family, or at school – where it was kind of the final thing that pushed them over the edge.

So these are… they’re angry suicides. What we see in these perpetrators, and there’s one sister of a perpetrator who put this particularly well for me, she said: My brother, he was saying, it was all about ‘What's wrong with me, what’s wrong with me? Why don't I fit in? Why don’t I have the things in life that I thought I would have? What is it about me?’

And then she said there was a switch. And it became not ‘What's wrong with me,’ but ‘What's wrong with everybody else, and whose fault is it? Who made this happen to me?’

And so in some cases it's women, or it’s a religious group, or it’s a racial group. They kind of choose a target that represents their grievance with the world–who is it that they blame."

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MeltBanana t1_jdo28gq wrote

And that is starting to touch on the underlying question to all of this, which is what is causing people to feel so unsatisfied and unfulfilled in the first place? Is it situation specific, such as domestic abuse and bullying, or is it a more general societal problem?

Personally I think it's the latter, and it's a massive beast of nuanced issues we don't have answers for or understand yet. It's everything from the hopelessness young people feel when looking at their career prospects in our current capitalism-fueled wealth divide, it's the modern media cycle constantly dividing us with fear, hate, and bias, it's social media warping our reality and pushing people down rabbit holes, it's the reality of being an average looking male with average intelligence and no support system settling into a life of an unfulfilling meaningless job at Walmart with low pay so he can afford a shitty overpriced apartment where he spends his free time smoking weed, playing video games, and browsing internet forums. It's only a matter of time before he has a crisis. That crisis might be getting the motivation to do something different, hitting the gym, going back to school, etc. Or it might be falling into the rabbit hole of the internet, warping his reality to blame someone else, and ultimately acting out his frustrations with the world through violence.

You take that same young man, put him in a cabin in the woods 600 years ago with an average wife, fill his days with gardening, chopping wood, raising chickens, and children, and I bet his chances of having some crisis and becoming a mass murderer drop to almost 0. There are major problems with our modern world that humans struggle to understand and aren't designed to handle. We are animals, our brains need positive feedback in the form of tangible reward from our own labors, and that is increasingly being removed from society.

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