To be honest I've always thought the mental illness exclusion to gunownership laws has always been a bit of a red herring.
Sure, truly crazy people are unpredictable and them having access to guns is terrifying. But is that really what we've been seeing these last years? People with documented histories of mental illness slipping or sliding through all the cracks in the system to end up owning guns and deciding to use them? I don't think so. We've been seeing people with political ideals who either already own a gun or stockpile guns as a hobby/political statement, who finally snap under the pressure of this shit we call American Politics and decide, fuck it, time to terrify the country and "wake people up to the violence seething beneath the surface."
You can characterize that as mentally unstable, and I don't think you'd get much disagreement. Committing mass murder without any direct provocation to you would be considered by most people as mental instability, and you don't have to be mentally ill to be, at a time and place in your life, mentally unstable. But when you talk about mentally ill people, the person sitting to their left or right is not what most Americans think of as mentally ill. We still think the crazy disheveled person talking to themselves, rumpled dirty clothes, the classic Hollywood crazy. The kind that draw attention to themselves by virtue of their disorder. That hasn't been many of the shootings we've experienced like this.
So I've never felt that the democratic insistence that mental health as a requirement for gun ownership will prevent days like this. It should have been there a long time ago and that probably would have saved the lives of tens of thousands of gun deaths that don't make the news. But it's never going to catch shit like this. Mass shooters have just been improving their game since Columbine, and that means not tipping your hand before it's too late. Social media has fucked that up for some because they're not in control enough to stop themselves. But the truly committed ones that have no tells and seem perfectly normal to the people around them....? How do you catch them, except by actually looking at their behavior in stockpiling weapons and ammo? We have the ATF but some dumbfuck decided they didn't need any money to do their jobs, compound by some other stupid shit that tarnished their image. We've sabotaged our own ability to prevent stuff like this through the metrics we have and know, and the political narrative around is so hysterical you can't even talk about it without triggering people on both sides.
What SHOULD catch stuff like this is, I dunno, a private citizen buying thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition, owning a small personal arsenal of weaponry. Gee, maybe that's worth at least a look? An inquiry, perhaps? Does he like to shoot guns on the weekend with his friends in a legally-approved setting? Cool, have fun. Has it just been growing and growing in their home, and gee, have they tried to buy ballistic body armor lately? Hrmmmmmmmmm.
I think that shows a level premeditation, which is generally not the preview of the mentally ill. It also makes me question the whole "they had no political leanings" being reported. Survivalist/conspiracy/militia types tend to go hand in hand with some kind of political belief. Even "it's all bullshit and we should burn it all down" is a political stance.
I dunno, maybe it will come out that he was a paranoid schizophrenic or something, that somewhere he was journaling what he actually thought and felt. People snap, it's true, and I guess in the end their motive isn't super relevant. But the whole "white guy loses his mind and starts shooting" always gets treated like a mental illness, or as a I said, a moment of mental instability. But to me it's becoming more likely in this day and age that people who fantasize about real life violence and have political pressure around them hyping them up....when a guy "just snaps" it's more like "a guy knew how to keep his head down and not tip his hand until he was ready to act." Does having a violent deathwish flavored with political beliefs make you mentally ill? I'm guess you'd be classified as such, in the end. I think the desire to murder as many people as possible before your dying yourself....ahem....in real life...is the hallmark of a psychopath. So is that what we've really been cultivating in America the last 20 odd years? A higher and more competent breed of psychopath and mass murderer, who can go through most of their life and wring from it what they want before they decide to check out, maybe while gripped by political belief, maybe not?
Theres more developments, turns out he had fertilizer based explosives in his car and they found several thousand more rounds of ammo and more explosives at one of his homes. It's obvious that he was planning on taking out as many people as possible.
One doesn't amass an arsenal like that without some kind of agenda and there are no hints that he was a collector or a survivalist nut or any other plausible reason for legally having such an arsenal. If it's even legal to have that arsenal in the first place.
edit: Ninja'd by folly's brevity.
Ayup. This ain't mental illness. "No signs he was going to do something" my ass. Maybe if someone had looked at his purchasing history.
I'm starting to suspect this might fall into the "enigma" category, where there's no apparent motive and we never discover one.
Some people are truly lone wolves when it comes to this stuff. But I'm guessing enough forensic work could be done to see who he's been talking to or what he's been interested in of late. The woman he's been living wife or his ex-wife might be able to shed some light on his private life. But yeah, if literally all he's been doing is looking up technical knowledge on how to accomplish his goals and there's no social or politically motivated evidence to inform his actions.....maybe we are dealing with the rare 1% functional psychotic.
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