As Devan Stahl has shown, associating mass shooting with mental illness stigmatizes people living with mental health conditions, who already face significant stigma. For another, it does a grave disservice to people who have a mental illness. For one thing, it does not really fit the facts: the relationship between mental illness and mass shootings is murky at best. But there are many reasons to reject the narrative of the mentally ill mass shooter. It’s true that some of the people who have become mass shooters have been diagnosed with a serious mental illness. We can’t imagine what it would be like to be someone who is capable of meticulously planning and carrying out a mass killing like the one in Charleston, or Parkland, or Sandy Hook, or Pittsburgh, or Las Vegas, or so very many other places in the United States. In a way, this is understandable: we cannot help but feel that anyone who could do such a thing is not mentally well. It’s common, after such a shooting occurs, to speculate about the mental health of the shooter. Most recently, the FBI has arrested a man in Las Vegas who had been planning a shooting spree. Over the past month, mass shootings have occurred in Gilroy, CA, in Chicago, in El Paso, and in Dayton. This post is a part of our Bioethics in the News series
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