To use a medical paradigm, mass shootings are the symptom, not the disease and considerations of mental illness are largely diversionary, not diagnostic. Or to use a political economy paradigm: Among the basic functions of society are protecting the lives and security of its citizens and a foundational way to do this is to give the government monopoly control over violence.
Currently in the USA a political party seeking absolute power has used all kinds of strategies to acquire it, from fomenting racial animus, to distorted voting mechanisms, to promoting one religious point of view, to indulging fictional analyses of events and false science, to adopting a false but functional political philosophy of neoliberal, libertarian, originalist, nationalistic, conservativism.
If I use this "epidemiological" "epistemic" paradigm, the proximate cause of all these mass shootings is the US Supreme Court, which embodied this political philosophy to radically reinterpret the Second Amendment, damn the consequences in real life. Most discussion of mental illness is buying into their distortions and diversionary as mass shootings are part of an intentional destruction of our civic order to free corporatist power. P.S. The same dynamic shaped the tragic response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the PACEs context there is a little known important mental health aspect. THE VIOLENCE PROJECT (an excellent book and a website) has an online extensive, easily accessible database of all mass shootings. Of the about 200 incidents, childhood history is well known for 66 shooters, of whom 60 have a history of significant child abuse trauma. Here we have another tragic outcome from the epidemic of child maltreatment.
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