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Originally Posted by morgin
Wait for the investigation to conclude. This is all still assumption. For all anyone knows, he could be a case like Charles Whitman where it's now fairly widely accepted a brain tumour had a significant role in his shooting. It's premature to conclude anything.
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There's no evidence that Paddock was mentally ill. And no reason to believe he was, aside from the desire to believe sane people can't do awful things. And the theory that Whitman's rampage was caused by a tumour is not 'widely accepted.' It's largely discredited speculation.
Why Better Mental-Health Care Won't Stop Mass Shootings
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While improving access to mental-health care might help lots of suffering Americans, researchers who study mass shootings doubt it would do much to curb tragedies like these. According to their work, the sorts of individuals who commit mass murder often are either not mentally ill or do not recognize themselves as such. Because they blame the outside world for their problems, mass murderers would likely resist therapies that ask them to look inside themselves or to change their behavior...
...As Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox has written, in a database of indiscriminate mass shootings—defined as those with four or more victims—compiled by the Stanford Geospatial Center, just 15 percent of the assailants had a psychotic disorder, and 11 percent had paranoid schizophrenia.
- the Atlantic
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It's difficult to accept, but sane people can deliberately do horrendous things.