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I assume a lot of factors join together to cause a person to go on a suicidal mass-murder mission:
-a violent or hateful ideology,
-resentments from an “unfair” life and feelings of isolation and failure to integrate,
-mental illness or instability,
-certain aspects of culture that glorify violent protest,
-easy access to highly lethal weapons,
-and who knows what else.
And it’s usually a confluence of those same factors no matter who the perpetrator is: a radical Islamist, a white supremacist, or some local Baloch militant who terrorizes for the sake of “their people”. In the paradigm case, the violent ideology feeds on the person’s grievances and allows the person to scapegoat their problems onto some enemy group out there, which the ideology usually identifies as the source of pretty much everything that’s wrong with pretty much everything. The mental illness then feeds on this situation and aggravates the person’s feelings of having been betrayed and deepens their struggle with self-esteem. Looking for a catharsis and at the same time an external source of self-value, the person turns to some glorified form of violence that’s common in their culture, and will probably use the most common weapons around them.
One of the side effects of ideological polarization is that which of the above factors a person finds to be “the cause” of the problem and therefore the factor to intervene on has become a political matter: if you are a Republican, you’re supposed to emphasize mental illness and cultural items that glorify violence if the suspect is white, and violent ideology if they’re Muslim. If you’re a Democrat, you’re supposed to highlight easy access to highly lethal weapons and violent ideology if the person is white, and feelings of isolation and failure to integrate if they’re Muslim. In all of this it’s often completely ignored what is meant by “the cause”. It’s good that people look at it differently — that way we learn about the different possible causes of the phenomenon — but it makes more sense to consider all factors in every case.
When people say “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, they seem to be downplaying the role of easy access to lethal weapons in favor of mental illness, as if the latter is the only thing that matters. Or in the case of “racism isn’t mental illness”, the implication seems to be that “the real cause” of the act is violent ideology, not mental illness. At least that’s the way I make sense of those sayings.
But I don’t know that one can determine what the dominant factor that caused the act was, or whether any of the factors were in fact dominant for that matter, without closely studying the subject. I could imagine a Muslim terrorist for whom the Islamism was just the last little push towards a decision that their mental illness had already mostly determined for them, or a person with an unstable mind who regardless of their mental illness really would have never committed the act if it weren’t for their easy access to guns. There is no global formula for this sort of thing.
freefloatingperspective 