We're all murderers

Mental Health.  I've written about it before, here and here, notably.  It's our go-to explanation any time someone goes on a murderous rampage like the one in San Bernardino yesterday (or the 354 before that this year).  When something horrible happens, we immediately seek answers, and more often than not, those answers are extremely complex.  We simplify them by wrapping them up in the banner of mental health, though that is horribly unjust, both to those who suffer from mental health issues (that is, all of us), and for those who seek to create public policy based on those issues.  If you take a complex problem and reduce it to a simple cause, then your policy answering it will be simple, too, and will only address a portion of the overall cause.

Granted, a portion would be at least a start.  We still have yet to take any kind of action to address mass shootings.

As I've noted before, we can and should address mental health issues on a national scale while we have the political will from both right and left to do so, and the only time we have it from the right is after a horrible shooting disaster, when the left starts screaming for gun control and the right frantically runs out and buys up more guns and more ammo in response.  Such an expansion would need to see mental health become the first of America's nationwide single-payer healthcare system, because mental health is already somewhat covered by the Affordable Care Act, and our number of mass shootings is increasing rather than decreasing, as we would expect.  If we stick to our guns (pun intended) and stick to the story that mental health is the cause of all shootings, then the answer must be that the ACA has not done anything to improve mental health access, which means that a single-payer system is the natural next step.

But that assumes that mental health is the culprit.  It's easy to say and to understand how a person might become deranged, might abandon hope, might learn to blame the world for his or her problems, and might lash out.  In my Hitting Where You Aim post, I talked about how we're each the hero of our own stories, even when we take bad actions.  Slotkin says it's still possible for a hero to be a hero, even when undertaking violent actions, so long as the perception is that the people acted against are still worse (and note: it's really only the person at the top who matters - anyone serving that person is cannon fodder in our movies and tv, stick figures with targets on their chests rather than human beings with a right to life.  You can see this especially in The Matrix, where the computer can take over any human host, so Neo is outright encouraged to kill everyone.  Thus, if the person at the top is worse than the hero, it doesn't matter who dies in the hero's pursuit of justice).

Thus, the only step between violent rampage and silently sulking about perceived injuries is one little mental health disorder.   On his blog, Dr. Paul Mattiuzzi provides a brief list of personality types that are likely to engage in murderous behavior.  Take a look at the list, and challenge yourself: can you find your own personality traits in that list. 

I can find several of my own, and I'm relatively certain you can, too.  The difference between a murderer and a non-murderer, then, is a trigger - a "straw that broke the camel's back" moment where all of those little annoyances and grievances and dark thoughts that have been building up for years finally pass the breaking point.  This is why, almost invariably, no one ever saw it coming.  Even those close to the murderer say they can't understand why he or she would do this. 

Certainly, mental health experts might be able to identify and diffuse such tension before it builds into a mass shooting, but only if they're able to get the patient to open up about these thoughts.  If the patient believes the expert to be "part of the system," or if the patient isn't comfortable talking about such issues with someone, or if the patient lacks the knowledge that he or she NEEDS to talk to someone, then mental health experts can do nothing.  No one can force a person to reveal his or her darkest thoughts.

But what we can do is prevent such a person from having access to guns.  Almost without exception, mass murders are committed with a gun in hand.  When someone has a trigger moment and slips from being normal and quietly dealing with his or her problems to murderous rampage, he or she can easily get a gun, no questions asked.

Simply limiting gun purchases when someone has mental health issues is not enough - because we all have mental health issues, and because those can only be diagnosed in willing patients.  To be effective, we need to limit all gun purchases, perhaps entirely (going gun-free), perhaps to those who have routine psychological exams (at least monthly) and for whom the doctor or therapist signs off that the person is safe to own and operate guns.  Yes, this takes away the perceived "2nd amendment rights," but perhaps it's time to admit that another person's right to continue living trumps your right to own a gun.

In the mean time, it doesn't matter who you are - everyone has things that they let build up inside of them.  Talk to a mental health expert, get some relief valves in place for those issues, learn tools for coping with your world that will make your life happier and healthier.