If you missed last night’s Mental Health & Wellness call, you missed an excellent conversation about a hot topic in the United States right now.
Our topic was Mental Health and Mass Shootings: mentally ill or just bad people?
Just in the past couple of weeks, there have been some horrific tragedies in our country Starting with the eleven who died at the hands of a gunman at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Then there was a shooting of two African Americans at a Kroger grocery store in Kentucky that started as an attempt to get into an African American church to perpetrate a mass shooting and when the shooter couldn’t, he went to Kroger.
I’m also lumping the pipe bomber in with the tragedies of the past couple weeks because even though no gun was involved, the idea was to kill as many as possible.
As a group, we determined that the phrase, “bad people,” might not have been the best choice of words because although they may not be traditionally and clinically mentally ill, there was still something not right with the person.
While doing research for the call I found pieces written by or interviews with people involved in hate groups such as the KKK and others. Each and every one of these people said that what drives the hatred of those different than them is fear.
So the fear of others being different, in the case of Dylan Roof, the young man who shot up an African American church in South Carolina it was a hatred and fear of the African American community. For the person who shot eleven at the synagogue, it was a hatred and fear of Jewish people.
We also came to the conclusion that the ease with which we can get guns in this country is a huge problem and factors into this. Every mass shooting over the past two decades that I could gather information on pointed to one thing. The weapons were obtained legally.
Maybe the shooter didn’t purchase the gun themselves, but in the case of school shootings, kids stole legally purchased weapons from their family.
So what did we take away from this call?
That whether it’s a legitimate mental illness, there’s something not right in the brain of these mass shooters that makes them want to take action and make their point publically and with much bloodshed and loss.
The last thing we concluded was that it’s to easy for people to get their hands on the weapons needed to pull off these shootings, though we left the gun control issue for another group and another call.
Join us each Thursday at 9 pm Eastern/6 pm Pacific for a group call on rotating mental health topics. If you have a topic you would like to see discussed, please let me know and if you would like to be a guest to talk about a subject, I would love to have you!
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Photo credit: Photo courtesy Pixabay
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