UCSD expert says don't assume mass shooters like the one in Highland Park are mentally ill

A guessing game is going on in the wake of a mass shooting Monday in Highland Park, Ill., that left seven people dead and more than two dozen injured.

Is the shooter mentally ill? Or did something else lead him to attack people who had gathered for a Fourth of July parade?

Tage Rai, a psychologist at UC San Diego's Rady School of Management and an expert on violence and conflict resolution, says the answer is not immediately apparent and that authorities need to take enough time to get to the truth.

A 21-year-old man has been charged in the shootings and allegedly confessed, although police said they have not been able to determine a motive.

Raj, co-author of the book, "Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships," discussed the matter Wednesday with the Union-Tribune.

Q:Not long after the shooting ended in Highland Park, cable news outlets began discussing whether the shooter was possibly mentally ill. That happens a lot with these type of shootings. Is mental illness usually a main factor in incidents like this?

A: I think the better way to think about that question is whether diagnosable mental illness is a main factor. The research is pretty clear that it's not. A small percentage of people will be diagnosed as mentally ill, and a very small percentage diagnosed as mentally ill will become violent, and an even smaller percentage of those will be involved in a mass shooting.

Even if you think that no one could possibly do this unless there was something wrong with them, the key question is, 'Can we identify them (before a violent act is committed)'? And we can't. Trying to identify mentally ill shooters through health screening is like looking for a needle in a haystack. And there are always going to be needles that get through.

The only way it's going to work is preventing those 'needles' from getting AR-15s.

Q:But mass shootings are no longer seen as a rare event, right?

A:They're a relatively rare event compared to just the world of violence at large. What's interesting about the Highland Park incident is there were other mass shootings in Chicago last weekend. But they didn't get as much coverage.

Part of the reason that Highland Park got more coverage is because a lot of people responded afterward by saying things like, "But wait, this is a rich neighborhood." This is a White neighborhood. This is a North Chicago neighborhood. This isn't supposed to happen here. But it does because it happens everywhere in America.

Q:If a shooting like this doesn't involve mental illness, then what is it? What do we call it? When a person takes an assault rife and randomly begins to kill and maim people I don't think of that as a sane act.

A: They are not necessarily going to be diagnosed as mentally ill. Nor is the diagnosis going to be especially predictive.

There's a broader question that you're getting at, which is how we think about violence.

I think people have a kind of implicit belief — and I think a lot of academics do, too — that a sane, rational, mentally healthy person would not hurt another human being.

If they're harming someone, killing someone, it must be because something has gone wrong in their psychology.

A lot of my research argues that this belief is just not true. Most of the time when people hurt other people it's because they feel that they're doing it for the right reasons. They think that a person deserves it — that they have a moral obligation to hurt those people. What's really driving this is not mental illness — at least not in the diagnosable sense.

But what we can find are moralistic, ideological reasons. The shooters, especially in the American context, are often misogynistic, White supremacists. They are often young men searching for meaning through violence. Those things are coming together, and these shooters feel that they're defending something greater than themselves when they attack people.

Q: But isn't it still some kind of illness when a person cannot distinguish between right and wrong?

A: I think what you mean is that they don't share the same ideas about right and wrong as you and I do. That's a very different thing. What matters here is that these shooters do believe what they're doing is right — even if we think that you'd have to be crazy to believe that.

This story originally appeared in San Diego Union-Tribune.

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