Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)

Re:Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of Ameri... by jonathanfoster on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @11:15PM (#31513995)

For those interested in learning more about this topic, I recommend checking out the Violence Project by Jillian Peterson and James Densley [1]. This book opened my eyes to how complicated and multivariate this problem really is. It's much more complicated than simply guns and mental illness.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56969516-the-violence-pr...

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Re:Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of Ameri... by dsizzle on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @11:23PM (#31514074)

What are some takeaways? Normally I can get a sense from reading summaries and reviews, but finding it hard in this case.

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Re:Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of Ameri... by jonathanfoster on Thursday May 26, 2022 @10:32AM (#31518786)

Here’s a larger list of the key takeaways, https://www.theviolenceproject.org/mass-shooter-database-3/k....

For me, the most surprising takeaway was how many shooters exhibit signs of trouble prior to the shooting and how difficult it is for teachers and law enforcement to do something about it.

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Re:Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of Ameri... by dsizzle on Thursday May 26, 2022 @12:27PM (#31520313)

There's likely a flip side to that -- how many people show similar signs of trouble and never end up as a shooter?

Clicking around one thing that stands out to me is a striking increase in assault rifle usage https://www.theviolenceproject.org/data-on-social-media/prev...

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Re:Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of Ameri... by jonathanfoster on Friday May 27, 2022 @06:01PM (#31535436)

There are certainly many people that show signs of trouble, but don’t become mass shooters. And yes, availability of firearms, specifically high capacity rifles, was found to be a significant factor to the rise in the number of victims.

The Violence Project makes the argument that it’s not just mental health and availability of firearms that causes mass shootings. It’s a confluence of many contributing factors that all need to be addressed.

This is why I found the book so enlightening given the typical mental health and gun control debate that is going on now. This is not a simple problem to solve in my opinion.

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