Complicating matters further, associations between violence and psychiatric diagnosis shift over time. For instance, schizophrenia—far and away the most common diagnosis linked by the US media to mass shooters 69 —was considered an illness of docility for much of the first half of the 20th century. Serpasil advertisement. Only in the s and s did US society begin to link schizophrenia with violence and guns. Psychiatric journals suddenly described patients whose illness was marked by criminality and aggression.
Descriptors emphasized the generally calm nature of such persons in ways that encouraged associations with poets or middle-class housewives. A somewhat similar story can be told about posttraumatic stress disorder PTSD , another illness frequently associated with gun violence.
Evolutions such as these not only imbued the mentally ill with an imagined potential for violence, but also encouraged psychiatrists and the general public to define violent acts as symptomatic of mental illness. Mass shootings in the United States are often framed as the work of loners—unstable, angry White men who never should have had access to firearms.
Lanza, Rodger, and other recent shooters undoubtedly led troubled solitary lives—lives marked by psychological symptoms, anomie, and despair. Critics hold that this framing plays off of rhetoric about hegemonic White male individualism and privilege that ultimately reinforce wider arguments for gun rights. In the s and s, by contrast, many of the men labeled as violent and mentally ill were also, it turned out, Black. Similar themes appeared in visual iconography. In 1 example, s- and s-era advertisements for the antipsychotic medication Haldol that appeared in the Archives of General Psychiatry showed the troubling, distorted image of an angry Black man in an urban scene Figure 2.
The man shakes a threatening, inverted Black Power fist. Haldol advertisement. A number of historical documents suggest that racialized and gendered overtones also shaped s-era associations between schizophrenia and gun violence in the United States. He has previously been diagnosed as schizophrenic and has advocated and threatened violence.
Malcolm X, Robert Williams, and other leaders of Black political groups were far from schizophrenic. But fears about their political sentiments, guns, and sanity mobilized substantial response. Recent history thus suggests that cultural politics underlie anxieties about whether guns and mental illness are understood to represent individual or communal etiologies.
In the s and s, widespread concerns about Black social and political violence fomented calls for widespread reforms in gun ownership. However, in the present day, the actions of lone White male shooters lead to calls to expand gun rights, focus on individual brains, or limit gun rights just for the severely mentally ill. Indeed it would seem political suicide for a legislator or doctor 99 to hint at restricting the gun rights for White Americans, private citizens, or men, even though these groups are frequently linked to high-profile mass shootings.
Meanwhile, members of political groups such as the Tea Party who advocate broadening gun rights to guard against government tyranny—indeed the same claims made by Black Panther leaders in the s—take seats in the US Congress rather than being subjected to psychiatric surveillance.
This contention generally assumes that, because none of the recent mass shooters in Tucson, Aurora, Newtown, or Isla Vista used weapons purchased through unregulated private sale or gun shows, gun control in itself would be ineffective at stopping gun crime, and that gun purchase restrictions or background checks are in any case rendered moot when shooters have mental illness.
No one wants another tragedy like Newtown—on this point all sides of the gun debate agree. Moreover, it is widely acknowledged by persons on all sides of that debate that there is no guarantee that the types of restrictions voted down by the US Senate in April , based largely on background checks, would prevent the next mass crime.
Moreover, the focus on individual crimes or the psychologies of individual shooters obfuscates attention to community-level everyday violence and the widespread symptoms produced by living in an environment engulfed by fear of guns and shootings.
Given this terrain, it is increasingly the case that, when violence-prevention experts talk about ebbing gun crime linked to mental illness, they do not mean that mental health practitioners will avert the next random act of violence such as Newtown, though of course stopping mass crime remains a vital goal.
Our brief review suggests that connections between mental illness and gun violence are less causal and more complex than current US public opinion and legislative action allow. A growing body of data reveals that US gun crime happens when guns and people come together in particular, destructive ways. To repeat, questioning the associations between guns and mental illness in no way detracts from the dire need to stem gun crime.
Yet as the fractious US debate about gun rights plays out—to uncertain endpoint—it seems incumbent to find common ground beyond assumptions about whether particular assailants meet criteria for specific illnesses, or whether mental health experts can predict violence before it occurs.
At the same time, our review suggests that focusing legislative policy and popular discourse so centrally on mental illness is rife with potential problems if, as seems increasingly the case, those policies are not embedded in larger societal strategies and structural-level interventions. Current literature also suggests that agendas that hold mental health workers accountable for identifying dangerous assailants puts these workers in potentially untenable positions because the legal duties they are asked to perform misalign with the predictive value of their expertise.
Mental health workers are in these instances asked to provide clinical diagnoses to social and economic problems. Put another way, perhaps psychiatric expertise might be put to better use by enhancing US discourse about the complex anxieties, social and economic formations, and blind assumptions that make people fear each other in the first place.
Psychiatry could help society interrogate what guns mean to everyday people, and why people feel they need guns or reject guns out of hand. By addressing gun discord as symptomatic of deeper concerns, psychiatry could, ideally, promote more meaningful public conversations on the impact of guns on civic life. And it could join with public health researchers, community activists, law enforcement officers, or business leaders to identify and address the underlying structural and infrastructural issues that foster real or imagined notions of mortal fear.
Beneath seemingly straightforward questions of whether particular assailants meet criteria for particular mental illnesses lay ever-changing categories of race, gender, violence, and, indeed, of diagnosis itself. Finally, forging opinion and legislation so centrally on the psychopathologies of individual assailants makes it harder for the United States to address how mass shootings reflect group psychologies in addition to individual ones.
Yet this expansion has gone hand in hand with a narrowing of the rhetoric through which US culture talks about the role of guns and shootings. Meanwhile, a host of other narratives, such as displaced male anxiety about demographic change, the mass psychology of needing so many guns in the first place, or the symptoms created by being surrounded by them, remain unspoken.
Mass shootings represent national awakenings and moments when seeming political or social adversaries might come together to find common ground, whether guns are allowed, regulated, or banned. Doing so, however, means recognizing that gun crimes, mental illnesses, social networks, and gun access issues are complexly interrelated, and not reducible to simple cause and effect.
Ultimately, the ways our society frames these connections reveal as much about our particular cultural politics, biases, and blind spots as it does about the acts of lone, and obviously troubled, individuals. The authors wish to thank Hannah Florian, Nathan Pauley, Mark Wallace, and the Vanderbilt Brain Institute, and 4 outstanding anonymous reviewers for their assistance with developing this article.
This review article does not involve human participants. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U.
Am J Public Health. Published online February. Jonathan M. MacLeish , PhD. Author information Article notes Copyright and License information Disclaimer. Kenneth T. Corresponding author. Correspondence should be sent to Jonathan M. Contributors Both authors conceptualized and designed the analysis and wrote and edited the article.
Accepted August 9, This article has been cited by other articles in PMC. Open in a separate window.
Acknowledgments The authors wish to thank Hannah Florian, Nathan Pauley, Mark Wallace, and the Vanderbilt Brain Institute, and 4 outstanding anonymous reviewers for their assistance with developing this article. Human Participant Protection This review article does not involve human participants. References 1. Turndorf J.
Was Adam Lanza an undiagnosed schizophrenic? Psychol Today. December 20, Accessed July 23, Steinberg P. Our failed approach to schizophrenia. New York Times. December 25, Opinion. Coulter A. Kliff S. Thirty-eight states have that now. Washington Post. December 21, Accessed March 22, Kaplan T, Hakim D.
New York lawmakers reach deal on new gun curbs. Follman M. Mass shootings: maybe what we need is a better mental-health policy. Mother Jones. November 9, Lankford A. Mass shooters in the United States, — differences between attackers who live and die. Justice Q. Mental health and the Aurora shooting. The authors contend that addressing school safety in a comprehensive manner will help solve the current inconsistent implementation of school safety policies and procedures.
We also contend that the current Safe Schools Improvement Act, amended in and the amendment proposal, focusing only on bullying and harassment, is inadequate to address the myriad of safety issues that impact schools. Early Child Development and Care , American Journal of Criminal Justice , The results indicated that utilization of multiple security measures reduced the likelihood of exposure to property crime in high schools, but most other security utilization patterns were associated with poorer school safety outcomes.
Our findings provide guidance to policymakers in considering whether to use — or expand — visible school security measures in schools. However, in general, both groups of respondents do not believe armed administrators or armed teachers to be an effective school safety strategy. Journal of School Health , Four of the studies consisted of secondary analyses of national databases, with the other 3 utilizing local surveys.
Several studies suggested potential detrimental effects of metal detectors on student perceptions of safety. One study showed a significant beneficial effect, linking metal detector use to a decrease in the likelihood that students reported carrying a weapon while in school 7.
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What's this? The problem of school shootings in the US grew during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries:. Not all school shootings have the same consequences. Shooters have sometimes been intercepted quickly or failed to harm many people. On the other hand some school shootings have ended with many people dead or injured.
These are some of the worst school shootings, some of which took place outside of the US:. Experts have pointed at several different causes of school shootings. As Malcom Gladwell argues, the profile and motivation of school shooters varies widely. In order to stop shootings it is necessary to understand what are the main reasons underpining such cruel crimes and focus our policy efforts into tackling them.
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