without any kind of evidence.
"I want these people to die because I don't like them, and I'm willing to die because I'm unhappy, so I'm going to shoot up a school and then kill myself"
That kind of though process is indicative of mental illness. People have nutty/violent/immoral fantasies, sure, but to follow through with it is evidence of such a thing, no?
No. No it is not. I don't know why you would think that. People don't follow through with their fantasies because they either don't actually want them in real life (AKA "I'm into bondage but that doesn't mean I actually want to go to jail") or they're afraid of the consequences. Since these things are generally elaborate televised suicide attempts, consequences are irrelevant to the shooter in the personal sense.
Furthermore, you seem to be falling into the trap of talking about mental illness in generic terms. People are not insane, they are not nutty, they are not crazy. They have *specific* mental illnesses. There is actually a specific mental illness that does involve lack of guilt (what was formerly known as psychopathy, I can't remember the current name), but it also involves lack of restraint and reduced feelings of anxiety and fear, none of which really match the profile of the average school shooter. There are mental illnesses involving poor impulse control, but they're *immediate*. Its more "I was angry so I hit him" or "I can't help myself from fidgeting". You don't trip and fall and shoot up an entire school.
This same BS comes up every time, usually from the NRA. "Its not guns, its the mentally ill!" "we just need to keep guns out of the hands of mentally ill people". You know what? Mentally ill people are seen as dangerous but the truth is they're disproportionally victims rather than perpetrators. Its almost like having a disability makes you vulnerable or something!
Wait, what does that have to do with anything? Mental illness is an absurdly broad spectrum that manifests in any number of ways. Sometimes it's violence. Sometimes it's something else.
Its relevant because this line of thinking is prejudice, plain and simple. Its fear and misunderstanding of the mentally ill. I wasn't making an argument, I was explaining why I care.
Furthermore, again, no it is not. It does not manifest in "any number of ways". It manifests in a large number of SPECIFIC ways. I find it really telling that, in all of this, you've never attributed a specific mental illness to the shooter. You're just sure he's mentally ill. You don't know how, but surely its in there somewhere.
It requires a terrible value system, sure, but if you start with a rotten premise you can reach a rotten conclusion without using any faulty logic.
No, the logic isn't faulty per se, but how would a mentally healthy person justify gunning down a bunch of children and then themselves without some kind of extremely contrived circumstance?
Augh, I didn't want to go here, but... easily. How did Japanese soldiers justify impaling children and mothers on the same bayonet? How did the entire fucking south justify hanging people for looking at a white person funny? How do people justify all the various hate-killings, progroms, targeted harrassment, ect. all over the world (plenty of which go after teens, kids, and young adults)?
There, I went full broody and Alan Moore. This isn't even my final form and all that.
I'll close by saying that mentally ill people exist, they are on the internet, and they do not want to come here to post their sads and read people lumping them in with mass-shooters with no real evidence.
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Topic: Things that made you sad today thread. (Read 9704729 times)