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Perhaps some of those jailed are innocent?

Idk why this is surprising? Did ppl rlly assume only psychopaths kill others?

Edit: in my opinion this line of thinking shows a huge lack of understanding of the human nature and just what humans are in general. Not something you’d expect from psychologists.

So.. big reveal.. people commit murder for different reasons?

Or some people murder for reasons other than having poor emotional control and a lack of empathy.

Here’s a big surprise, people kill people for reasons other than emotional detachment!

Psychopathy involves a lot more than just emotional detachment. Psychopaths display novelty seeking, deceptiveness, callousness, narcissism, Machiavellianism, promiscuity, glibness, remorselessness and impulsivity. It's a very common constellation of traits.

I mean, the main thing about it has always been lack of empathy right? Being impulsive does not make one a psychopath. I am sure a lot of the inmates are impulsive. Regardless, what this shows in my opinion is that most people seem to think of murder as something absolutely alien nowadays but it really isn’t. It can happen for several different reasons and it used to be extremely common. To assume that inmates who are locked for murder would be mostly psychopaths is extremely gullible. In my opinion it even shows a huge lack of understanding of the human nature and the human condition, not exactly a characteristic you’d expect to find in psychologists.

Recently in the whole second amendment debate it has been suggested quite frequently that the high murder rate of the USA is mostly due to mental illness and not so much due to lots of guns being available to the public.

Idk if it is the guns, but humans kill other humans. They have been doing it since the beginning of time. The US has weird stats for developed nations in general, definitely not just mental illness. So in ur opinion that narrative has indeed affected the general population perception of crime? Like people seem to think it is tied to mental illness often? I would say it is likely tied to income inequality and social problems, but I am no specialist though.

I don't know what might cause it, I'm just pointing out that it has been mentioned quite a lot that mental illness might be the driving factor, hence the usefulness of this research.

Hmm nice. Thanks for explaining it, I didn’t know of this new wave of explanation for crimes.

psychopathy is basically cold-bloodeness. everything else is bs.

Regular people can turn off their empathy if they make it a priority.

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Did they not take into account compliance bias?

I mean, the old adage is that “psychopaths know how to hide among society.” Did they not think there may be such heterogeneity because they were trying to answer a 20 question survey with answers the survey taker thought they were looking for?

Also assumes every convicted person is guilty, which statistically isn’t true

Exactly how would World War 2 have been possible then?

So there's more than one reason to kill? Shiiiiiiiiit

Not crime in general but it's how people specifically like to explain mass shootings.

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Anyone can kill, this just helps prove it.

Mass shootings account for only 1% of gun violence in the US.

So even if 'mental illness' is to blame for that 1% of gun violence in America, ammosexuals are just as apathetic about the other 99% of gun violence while they actively support policies that literally reduce the quality of, and access to healthcare in the US.

That's easily answered by looking to see if the US has rates of mental illness above other countries that at least correlate with the increased murder rate. They don't. Also, mental illness rarely causes violence. It's gun and the gun culture that make the US different.

Considering the mental health argument mostly comes from the NRA or NRA affiliated politicians I'm pretty sure why this argument is made. Still, its good to actually measure these things so that hopefully we can have a debate based on data. That is as long as we don't dismiss scientific data when it doesn't align with our opinion.

Income inequality and social problems in the community are HUGE risk factors for developing a mental illness

And not all psychopaths kill people... it's just a way to label people so we could think "this will never be me."

Ah yes, name-calling is part of a rigorous scientific methodology!

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There was decades of research after WWII trying to find out how Nazis could do what they did.

The summation of that research found that under, sometimes simple circumstances, completely normal people can do those horrible things.

I’m specifically talking about people who actively refuse changing a document that has already been changed more than two dozen times and is more than two centuries old.

People who specifically refuse to compromise in the leading cause of death of children in this country.

Is there a different moniker you would prefer?

Even the most "normal" person is not exactly a highly rational or compassionate creature all the time. Nobody has a perfect platonic human mind.

Normal people can experience problematic mental states briefly, or under extreme stress.

Mental illness (seems to my uninformed opinion at least) to be more about those who get "stuck" in states for dangerously long periods of time (perhaps even their whole life).

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The question for the criminal justice system is, if you take away blaming individuals as bad/immoral/evil people, what are we left with?

Instead of a system based on punishment and violence, it would focus on protecting society as a whole as the primary objective. Remove those that are an immediate danger, rehabilitate those who can be, and seclude those who can't.

The punitive nature of deterrence has shown over and over to be ineffective at actually reducing crime meaningfully. In fact, it exacerbates crime and hurts everyone else too. But people want to harm bad people, so we continue in a self destructive cycle.

It's part mental illness, partly environment. Basically people are more isolated now than ever before so they have less people to regulate their own behavior and so they become more extreme untill something happens. You are a product of your environment.

Because they had to make the headline sound exciting somehow. It's hard to present obvious facts as something really engaging without sensationalizing it

Where's the data on that? People in the US are among the most unhealthy in the world, have some of the highest rates of anti anxiety, adderall and opioid prescriptions and very little community structure compared to European cultures. It's a breeding ground for extremism.

I don't have enough expertise to judge why the USA has such a high murder rate, i assume it's a bunch of factors. I'm sure environment plays a role, and ease of acquiring weapons that make killing relatively easy is also likely a part of it.

Don't try to deflect... that's not what you said. Name-calling is the primary weapon of bigots!

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https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/depression-rates-by-country

Just one example.

Where's the data that links prescriptions, addictions or lack of community to violence and/or extremism?

There's plenty of extremism in Europe, even Sweden have a right-wing, populist government now. Poland had "LGBT Free" areas. Yet the murder rate in the USA is what, 10 times the rate of most European countries?

This would seem to make a good bit of sense to anyone who doesn't think murder was invented in Western Europe in the 14th century. It's not like all the guns magically popped into existence in the last 20 years. Something else must necessarily be happening.

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Willing to bet the proportion of psychopathic CEOs is higher than the proportion of psychopathic death row inmates

And a large body of research counters that premise given the number of those mentally ill who never murder or shoot others which is most mentally ill people. For example if you analyzed the 'Community Mental Health Support' Waiver or your states equivalent from the federally funded Home and Community Based Services program through CMS, you would presume to see more shootings or violent acts from individuals on that waiver given its requirements but that is not something that is observed given you would have a solid control group.

There are more guns than people in the US (not evenly distributed though). That's the highest rate in the world, 4 times as many as Canada, 8 times Australia, and 24 times the United Kingdom.

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Makes sense. Many of them are not guilty or killed for understandable reasons

I’m not deflecting at all.

I’m explaining why I used the term ‘ammosexual’ to describe someone is so unreasonable about the right to bear arms, that they think the leading cause of children’s deaths in America is an acceptable price to pay for the unfettered access to guns…

…on a comment about gun violence in America…

…on a post about the surprising level of heterogeneity in psychopathy of among condemned capital murders.

And I am also pointing out that you’re not nearly outraged over the facts of gun violence as you are outraged over the slang ‘ammosexual’.

Gosh, it's like different people are . . . different . . . .

Should psychological evaluation determine who is put to death? The ones who aren’t psychopaths are perhaps capable of being rehabilitated. FWIW I personally don’t believe in capital punishment.

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Well obviously that's true because they used people convicted of murder in the US as the sample population. That will skew the numbers because an appreciable portion of those people are probably innocent.

This should be unsurprising. After WW2, it was opened up to the academic community to interview the people who ordered the Holocaust, from the leadership down to the death camp soldiers. Most psychologists declined the offer on the grounds that the results wouldn't be interesting. Those that did the interviews found that the mass murderers were almost all normal, well adjusted people responding to social forces beyond their control. People love to delude themselves into thinking broken, bad people do evil things, but in reality everyday people do evil things. Evil isn't a mustache twirling villain, it's banal.

“Research has shown that individuals with psychopathic traits are overrepresented among offenders, particularly those who have committed violent or repeat offenses”

It appears they were continuing to test this theory. It looks like 15% showed no signs vs. the majority who did.

There are elevated risks of violence associated with some categories of mental illnesses but they can’t be lumped together.

Nope. That shows a misunderstanding of history… Humans are fucked up. They will kill others for the smallest of reasons. They will genocide others in the flick of an eye if left to their own devices. A teen would murder you as a rite of passage without even thinking about it if that is what his culture tells him to do. Respect for human lives in the level we have now is definitely a modern accomplishment.

I'm confused as to how anything you said disagrees with what I said. I think you may have misunderstood me. I'm saying that murder was not invented in 14th century Western Europe, which is obvious. And the troubles that the USA, in particular, has been facing are new. Therefore, the weapons that have been widely available for 600-700 years are likely not to blame and there is a deeper societal issue at play. I don't know why more and more kids are deciding to just start shooting people, but I do know that it isn't the gun's fault.

It seemed like you were arguing for the prevalence of mental illness in humans that kill other humans. I was trying to point out that a regular human killing other humans is not as alien as modern society would have u thinking it is. Maybe I have failed to understand ur comment.

Exactly! Ppl love looking at Germany in WW2 and think “wow that could never be me, I would definitely be one of the good guys fighting the regime” when in fact, unless they are very low on agreeableness and have a huge tendency to challenge authority, traits that are actually super uncommon in humans, they would put their head down and do exactly what they were told to do.

Well I'm not ready to completely discount mental illness, but I am definitely saying that people killing each other is not a new phenomenon and has been going on for at least as long as our species has been writing things down. If it weren't guns, it would be swords. If not swords, sharp rocks. If not rocks, sticks. We will always find a way to kill each other because we have always been killing each other.

Either you need to be mentally "compromised" to kill another human being or killing another human being compromises your mental health.

I think it's interesting that the US has a roughly 20% false conviction rate, but only 15% of those tested had a score lower than 10. That means that the entirety of those with low scores could be innocent.

People just think evil people are psychopaths so if someone's evil they must be a psychopath and if they are a psychopath they must be evil. There are plenty of nmgood psychopaths out there. The media just loves a villain. Also a lot of research into the subject is only done in prisons on CRIMINALS. It is going to skew the data.

Few haves, lots of have nots + lots of guns. WCGW

A graph of the trend in gun deaths before and after the Heller decision would be interesting

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You might not want to include narcissism and impulsivity. A narcissist is very worried by how they look and seem to others, psychopaths aren't worried at all. Impulsivity is more related to sociopathy or antisocial personality disorder.

So some psychopaths are just sane, evil people...?

Bigot:a person who is obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, especially one who is prejudiced against or antagonistic toward a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.

Straw Man

A straw man argument attacks a different subject rather than the topic being discussed — often a more extreme version of the counter argument. The purpose of this misdirection is to make one's position look stronger than it actually is.

It's not a surprise. It's a clickable headline from a secondary source. The original article title is "Psychopathy among condemned capital murderers."

Like refering to your personal hatred for firearms when the discussion is about psychopathy among prisoners.

I read that a lot of atrocities in the early parts of the war were possibly sparked due to german soldiers eating methamphetamine tablets for a solid week, getting paranoid and losing their brain function due to lack of sleep

Hitler himself was on enough stimulants to foam at the mouth for hours, to give meth flavored speeches that are full of delusions of grandeur

Come on. You’re better than this.

I went into detail explaining my positions on uncompromising gun zealots and the refusal to restrain access to firearms, but you know I didn’t say anything about ‘hating guns’

I own guns and I’m an avid sport/recreational shooter and your arguments are literally what I’m talking about.

Go back and read what you wrote and quit referring to people or groups with insults, you'll get along better in the world.