Schizophrenia and Mass Shootings: Against Professor Dutton By Charles Taylor (Florida)
Professor Edward Dutton, human biodiversity expert, has given an interesting analysis of the US shooting phenomenon. The essence of his argument is that most of the shooters were schizophrenic. As this mental illness generally shows up by age 25, he suggests banning guns for ALL people under the age of 25, as well as having rigour mental health checks, so this will sort out possible shooters. This is something which sounds plausible at first but with reflection is not so plausible and is in fact a liberal-gun grabbing policy. I take it that he would ban all schizophrenics, however mild and medicated from firearms ownership? Clearly this would be struck down under the 14th amendment, end of story.
For a start, it would be impractical to test, if such tests exist, the entire youth population for schizophrenia, and I doubt whether such a vaguely defined mental illness has a simple test, like the RAT for Covid. If there is consultation and clinical work, it would be prohibitively expensive. Further, it is a vast infringement of liberties, and the thin edge of the wedge for Democrat gun banners. After schizophrenia, comes alcohol consumption, then ultimately being a conservative, and being male. From this logic there is a perfect correlation between being male, and being a mass shooter, so Dutton should be committed to banning all males from gun ownership by his argument.
Finally, it is not proven that ALL mass shooters and bombers are schizophrenic. Dutton has focussed upon a selective set of US school shootings, which may have been done by male youth with schizophrenia, but it could also be caused by the psychiatric meds they use. There are mass bombings and shootings by older males which do not fit this pattern at all. Mass shootings occur every week in Chicago and Baltimore, but as it is Black on Black gang shootings, it does not get attention. Mass shootings occur in Sweden all the time.
Dutton does good work, but this is not one of his better papers. How about better police protection, where the coppers actually do their job and go in after the bad guy, rather than taking an hour to east donuts, as the Texas cops did? Perhaps the good professor could turn his attention to that phenomenon, as bad security is even more common than schizophrenia.
“For us non-Americans (I live in Finland), the relative frequency of the school shooting phenomenon in the U.S (notwithstanding mass shootings in Hungerford, Dunblane and Tasmania) is something that we associate with America, like very loud customers or morbid obesity. As early as 2018, South Park made comedic hay with the predictability of American school shooting sprees.
The most recent American shooting was at an elementary school. The cowardly police did nothing to stop it, refusing to intervene themselves and even preventing parents from trying to save their own kids [Onlookers urged police to charge into Texas school, By Jake Bleiberg et al., AP News, May 27, 2022].
Notwithstanding this policing failure, this atrocity has led of course led to calls for stricter gun control, with President Biden questioning why anybody should need the kind of military-level gun which the shooter employed. As he visited the school to pay his respects, the crowd impotently chanted “Do Something!” [Crowd calls on Biden to ‘do something’ during visit to Uvalde, Texas, in wake of school shooting, By Associated Press, CBC News, May 29, 2022].
But what should Biden do? Fortunately, there is detailed research on this very subject. In fact, it is surprising that this research has not been mentioned in the Main Stream Media.
Only last year, Prof. Ira Glick, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University and his colleagues, published “Domestic Mass Shooters: The Association With Unmedicated and Untreated Psychiatric Illness” in the Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, Jul-Aug, 2021.
Their findings provide us with significant hints as to the “something” that should be done by President Biden.
The study aimed to diagnose what had been psychologically wrong with America’s many “Mass Shooters.” As many of these had killed themselves, the researchers had to devise a retrospective study which would allow them to understand the workings of these men’s minds. They limited their study to mass shooting which had occurred in the US between 1982 and 2012 where 4 or more people had been killed and between 2013 and 2019 where 3 or more people had been killed. They employed the Mother Jones database, a database of 115 people identified as having committed a mass shooting, based on these criteria, in the U.S. between January 1982 and September 2019. (The database can be seen here—Steve Sailer described it as a “carefully curated list of the most stereotypical mass shootings” meaning that it omits random black gunfire with low body counts. )
Here they hit their first problem.
- “In the vast majority of the incidents identified in the database, the perpetrator died either during or shortly after the crime, leaving little reliable information about their history-especially psychiatric history.”
Accordingly, the researchers focused on the 35 mass shooters who survived and who were duly prosecuted, because with these people there was an abundance of reliable information, such as psychiatric reports.
For each of these 35 mass shootings, they interviewed the forensic psychiatrists and forensic psychologists who had examined the perpetrators after the crime or who had collected the testimony and reports by psychiatrists at trial or in any other legal proceedings.
In addition, they
…reviewed available information from the court proceedings, public records, a videotaped interview of assailant by law enforcement, social media postings of the assailant, and writings of the assailant.
With all of this information, they made formal diagnoses.
After this, 20 further cases where the assailant died at the scene were randomly selected to see whether there were differences in psychiatric diagnoses and treatment between such assailants and those who survived.
So what did they find?
- Of the 35 cases which met their criteria, they were able to make a clear diagnosis in 28 instances. Of these 28 cases, 18 were diagnosed with schizophrenia; that is 64% or two thirds.
So, it is only a slight exaggeration to say that the mass shooting problem is a schizophrenia problem.
Schizophrenia affects less than 1 percent of the US population, so, manifestly, the over-representation is enormous. It is characterised by psychosis (a loss of touch with reality and disturbed and disordered thoughts), persecutory and paranoid delusions, hallucinations, and specific negative symptoms such as “impaired emotional expression, decreased speech output, reduced desire to have social contact or to engage in daily activities, and decreased experience of pleasure” [What is Schizophrenia? American Psychiatric Association, 2022].
Of the remaining one third of cases, to give some examples, three had bipolar disorder. This can involve periods of intense negative feelings, which may be projected outwards. Two had delusional disorders, and one had Borderline Personality Disorder. (This is when, due to fear of abandonment, you lack a clear sense of self and you create unstable identity in order to cope).
When this sense of identity—Narcissism and the idea that you are perfect is an example—is challenged, then it induces intense fear and rage in you and you may try to find a way to reassert a sense of power and importance. (I have discussed this in more detail in my forthcoming book Spiteful Mutants: Evolution, Sexuality, Religion and Politics in the 21st Century).
Of the 20 spree killers who died at the scene, eight could be clearly diagnosed with schizophrenia, though, obviously, they had less information with which to make diagnoses. As the authors note, none the killers were taking any medication when they committed their acts.
So, in terms of the call to “Do Something” it would seem to follow that this should be assessing children, throughout their childhoods, for signs of schizophrenia.
We all sit on the schizotypy spectrum. A schizoid personality is marked a lack of interest in social relationships, a tendency toward a solitary lifestyle, secretiveness, emotional coldness, detachment, apathy, anhedonia and stilted speech. Schizotypal personality adds to this thought disorder, paranoia, social anxiety, and unconventional beliefs.
Schizophrenia and other mental disorders all seem to first manifest in late adolescence, with an average age of 19 [Age of Onset of Schizophrenia: Perspectives From Structural Neuroimaging Studies, by Nitin Gogtay et al., Schizophrenia Bulletin, 2011]. They are strongly genetic, but they are also elevated by stress [Schizophrenia in the Spectrum of Gene–Stress Interactions: The FKBP5 Example, by N. Daskalakis & E. Binder, Schizophrenia Bulletin, 2015].
Schizophrenia is elevated among immigrants, something which has been put down to elevated feelings of stress and exclusion [Stigma for common mental disorders in racial minorities and majorities a systematic review and meta-analysis, by O. Eylem et al., BMC Public Health, 2020]. VDARE.com’s Brenda Walker anticipated this in her pathbreaking coverage of what appears to be a unique VDARE.com interest, Immigrant Mass Murder Syndrome.
In light of this, I have a proposal for President Biden which permits Americans to own guns and schools to be schools rather than fortresses: Detailed mental health checks for potential gun owners and, further, that nobody under the age of 25 should be allowed to own gun.
If people are seriously mentally unstable, this will almost certainly have manifested by the age of 25.
In that you cannot purchase alcohol in America until you are 21, I cannot see how 25 is an unreasonable age for owning deadly weapons.”
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