Mental Illness and Mass Shootings

In, “It’s not about mental illness: The big lie that always follows mass shootings by white males” by Arthur Chu it is mentioned how often we throw on the word mental illness every time a white man does a mass shooting.  As he writes, “ The real issue is mental illness” is a goddamn cop-out. I almost never hear it from actual mental health professionals, or advocates working in the mental health” (Chu).

            I agree , this excuse is just over used, we are not calling what these “ mentally ill” white men what they are terrorists. We are so quick to call any person of color who kills a lot of people a terrorist, as Chu him self points out:

              But it’s also bullshit when used to discredit the perpetrators of crimes. Mass murderers frequently aren’t particularly shy about the motives behind what they do — the nature of the crime they commit is attention-seeking, is an attempt to get news coverage for their cause, to use one local atrocity to create fear within an entire population. (According to the dictionary, by the way, this is called “terrorism,” but we only ever seem to use that word for the actions of a certain kind — by which I mean a certain color — of mass killer (Chu).

                        I also like the fact that he mentions that calling these terrorists mentally ill does disservice to the mentally ill community, painting them as dangerous bulbs ready to blow, as he points out it’s not considered ok to have the government have a national registry of all weapons because it impedes rights and gives to government tyrannical power, but having a national registry of mentally ill people isn’t a violation of those same rights.

                              I really like that this article pointed out how much the word mentally ill thrown around because we are just reluctant to call these mass shootings what they are, which is that they are acts of terrorism, because it means we have to deal with the fact, that terrorists aren’t just foreign men of color and the “other, but also exist in our normal society. 

                             

 works cited

Chu, Arthur. "It’s Not about Mental Illness: The Big Lie That Always Follows Mass Shootings by White Males." Salon com RSS. Nylon, n.d. Web. 06 May 2016.