Why does the public, including legislators, erroneously link mental illness with mass shootings and violence in general?

From Stop the Killing: How to End the Mass Shooting Crisis, Chapter 3: Who and Why?

“The relationship between mental health and violence is one of the most challenging to understand and explain.

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Prominent politicians and elected officials, even an uninformed former president, were quick to blame mental health and violent video games in public statements issued following four shootings in a week during the summer of 2019.

The nightmare started with three killed and fifteen injured by a nineteen-year-old at a Gilroy, California, food festival, followed by two killed by a former employee at a Walmart in Mississippi, then twenty more killed and twenty-six injured by a twenty-one-year-old at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and, finally, less than 24 hours later, nine killed and twenty-seven injured by a twenty-three-year-old shooting outside a popular bar in an often safe area in Dayton, Ohio.

Mentally deranged or mentally ill, the talking heads and politicians said all week.

Blaming mental instability for every shooting is an easy trap to fall into. I’ve had plenty of conversations that start with, “Hey how can they not be mentally deranged when they are doing that?” Next time you hear that, remember these details.

Mental health can be a potential factor, yes, but consistent research fails to correlate mental health issues and the likelihood of mass violence with any certitude.”

Read the Full Report by the National Council for Well-Being.

One of my favorite researchers in this area is Adam Lankford, a criminology professor at The University of Alabama. He conducts research on many types of social deviance and criminal behavior, including mass murder, mass shootings, and terrorism.

He recently released an intriguing look at mental health and mass shootings, looking for an explanation of why there are so few shooters diagnosed with mental illness, and yet mental health seems to be the first place people point to when looking for causation. He and his co-author R.G. Cowan closely analyzed public mass shooters who attacked in the United States from 1966 to 2019 and found that correlates of mental illness were approximately equally common among perpetrators, whether they had been coded as mentally ill or not.

They concluded that this is further evidence suggesting that almost all public mass shooters may have mental health problems, but that social stigmas, which reduce the likelihood that perpetrators will seek psychological treatment, may help explain popular underestimates.

To read more, go here: Has the role of mental health problems in mass shootings been significantly underestimated? which was published in the Journal of Threat Assessment and Management, 7(3-4), 135–156. (Lankford, A., & Cowan, R. G. (2020)).

This leads me to a question that you may be asking: if it's not mental illness, what motivates mass shooters? I’ll be covering this topic in an upcoming blog titled Who and Why.