Mass shootings

[Bengalzona]

(03-22-2018, 05:58 PM)PhilHos Wrote: Not all people with mental illnesses were born with them. Many (most?) are the result of various events happening in one's lives like a trauma or a set of circumstances.

I get the rest of your post and I don't necessarily disagree when it comes to linking mental illnesses with gun control legislation. But, I have a hard time thinking anyone who commits or wants to commit mass murder is of sound mind.

(03-22-2018, 05:59 PM)Dill Wrote: Well said. The cocktail metaphor is right.  Social factors, like alienation, exposure to the right ideology during the right life crisis, and more, can I think be better predictors, to the degree that prediction, or identification of propensities and likelihoods, is possible.  

It is wrong to suppose we can eventually produce a list of factors to check off, because societies and ideologies change, and when they do so do the triggers.  

There are a couple of other factors that I feel don't get much attention: emotional wellness and moral wellness.

Men, in general, don't like to think about or discuss emotions outside of happy or mad. They exist anyway. Emotional wellness is not so much a matter of expressing them (or over expressing as the case may be). Rather, it is a matter of recognizing them and accepting them. Not doing so causes a backlash which can impact the psyche. Most of us here don't have a problem with this. But there are some, especially younger men, who do have a problem with this. Humans generally aren't designed to be antisocial. Trying to make yourself into a sociopath can actually create something far worse, as most actual sociopaths actually don't have a problem living by society's rules and interacting in society. I always think of this when I see some fool with a "no fear" sticker plastered on his car.

Moral wellness may even have a bigger impact on potential shooters. We don't discuss moral wellness much in this society, outside of the religious Far Right which (unfortunately) uses as a hammer to bang people over the head with. But moral wellness isn't necessarily about Christianity. It isn't even necessarily about organized religion. It is about what your personal ethos is and how much you adhere to it. That ethos may have been based upon an organized religion. But it doesn't have to be. Most people I have met in churches have portions of their personal ethos which are from outside that church's established doctrine. And almost all of the agnostics and atheists I know (yes, I still insist on seeing and calling them as different entities despite neo-atheist recruitment language) have their own personal ethos. And most adhere to that religiously (no pun intended).

Ethos is from the Greek word for 'character'. It is a combination of what you believe and how you act in relation to that. Most of us here have well-developed ethos. This is why we come to P&R and argue based upon our personal beliefs. Others do not have a well-developed ethos. Or they have an ethos that is based upon something not well-established or fantastical (bear in mind that I'm talking personal ethos here and not religious beliefs). Consider someone who draws their ethos from a movie character.