Guns, human rights, mental health, and behavior, Part II

Let's continue the conversation on why mental illness does not cause gun violence.  B. F. Skinner, perhaps the most prominent and influential (and infamous) psychologist of the past century, mirrors my thoughts more eruditely in his collection of personal notes, Notebooks (1980). The following example recounts Skinner's thoughts in the wake of the 1966 massacre at the University of Texas - Austin, where Charles Whitman killed more than a dozen people before being shot by police. I have emphasized a few important portions that will sound very familiar, despite the example being nearly 50 years old.

Fictions in the News
A student at the University in Austin took a rifle into a tower and fired at people in the streets. He killed 13 and wounded 30. There have been a rash of explanations. The boy's father spoke of tensions and "snapping." The "breaking point" had been reached. The university psychiatrist spoke of frustrated achievements and aspirations. Doctors found a small tumor near the brainstem.

The boy's father unwittingly got closer to real causes. He described himself as a gun addict - always hunting - brought up his boys to shoot. The boy was in the Marines - taught to shoot again. Killing from a tower reminds one of the assassination of President Kennedy, also in Texas.

But the environmental history gets little notice. The mental and the physiological fictions prevail. Whatever effect, if any, the tumor had, it did not cause the behavior of taking an arsenal of guns and ammunition to a tower, barricading the doors, and shooting innocent people. It could not even have interfered with "cortical inhibition normally suppressing such behavior," or if it did, we still have to explain the behavior.

If we want to reduce gun violence, it will do little good to quibble about imaginary causes, about mental states and so-called unstable people. We have to look to our environments, to our culture, and to change them to prevent further needless deaths.

Mental illness does not cause this.