I'm curious why you think he was clearly suffering from mental illness.
Did he leave a long broken worded diatribe full of references to imaginary voices and animals? Did he have a recorded history of increasingly frequent or intense mental breakdowns?
Certainly just because someone commits mass murder does not mean they are 'insane'. They can merely be evil.
> I'm curious why you think he was clearly suffering from mental illness.
Because psychopathic behavior is classified in our society as a personality disorder?
> Did he leave a long broken worded diatribe full of references to imaginary voices and animals? Did he have a recorded history of increasingly frequent or intense mental breakdowns?
No, but he did write a > 2,500 word manifesto (I'm not linking sources, this is all on Wikipedia) justifying his actions and stating that he knew what he was planning to do was morally and socially wrong and that the people he intended to hurt were innocent. He confided in friends, over a full week before he carried out his plans, what his plans were. That seems to me a cry for help by any standard.
> Certainly just because someone commits mass murder does not mean they are 'insane'. They can merely be evil.
And that certainly stops the conversation and limits us from beginning to understand what is going on that is causing psychopathic behaviors to manifest. Calling it "merely evil" is dismissive. I'm much more interested in trying to understand what the hell is happening in our society by exploring the mental illness angle since it is grounded in medical science and not some nebulous "evil" or "insane."
edit/ I'd also like to say, I don't think it is minimizing mental illness to call mass murderers mentally ill. My own brother is diagnosed schizoaffective and I don't consider him a potential or future mass murderer just because of his health issues. That would be ridiculous.
I think defining it as "evil" or "mental illness" is really just semantics. The fact is, someone murdered innocent people in cold blood. You're minimizing the issue by shrugging it off as "some people are just evil".
And you're minimizing it by claiming the targeted killing of these people is the result of mental illness. I'm sure it's very comforting to try and say "This guy must have been mentally ill", but that defense seems to be uniquely brought up when a mass murder is committed by someone white. School shootings, church firebombings, church shootings - these are all the acts of the "mentally ill", and not "terrorist attacks".
Aside from the fact that it mischaracterizes mental illness, it serves no purpose other than to throw an entire portion of the US population who lives with some form of mental illness into the camp of mass-murderers, and gives those who have not yet committed a mass murder (but otherwise share the same extreme beliefs) an easy way to distance themselves from a heinous act.
Congrats - you've made sure we continue to think of those with mental illness as crazy murderers, rather that this individual was a product of a culture that dehumanized those different from himself.
Maybe it minimizes mental illness, but at least it's more of an attempt at a response than "he was just evil". What do you propose we do with the purely evil people? How can we detect them early?
Also I think it's kind of a stretch to say calling this mental illness is propagating a poor image for all mental illness any more than calling cancer deadly makes ALL ILLNESSES sound deadly.
