Mass shootings aren't about mental health.

At least not in the way you think.

As many folks know, my initial entrance into the world of political advocacy was brought about by the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012. Like the twenty students who died that day, my middle child was a first grader. They will graduate this year.

But even more than being motivated by having a child who was the same age as those killed that day, I was motivated by the way the conversation about the shooter evolved in the days after as we all groped for answers to an unimaginable tragedy.

• He had ADHD (a mental illness)

• He was Autistic (a mental illness)

• He took "psychotropic" medication (which gave him mental illness)

• He played video games (which gave him a mental illness)

• He was bullied (which gave him mental illness)

Those were things that described the gunman. Those were also things that described my son. In the discourse around the causes of the shooting, the media and our culture settled on a nice, tidy explanation for his atrocious acts. It could all be comprehended based on a diagnosis, a profile, and a set of hobbies.

It only took a few months for my son to be called a "school shooter" by his peers for his love of Minecraft, his social awkwardness, his need for special ed services and his limited friend group. It broke me.

My motivating fear was not just to protect my children from falling victim to a school shooting but also to keep my son from becoming the victim of rash and ill-informed policy-making; gross stigma bourne of ignorance and a desire for simple answers; and mistreatment and shaming from his classmates, school staff and the wider community. I even had to point out to a family member who wished to pin the shooting on “autism and force-feeding these kids drugs that make them loopy” that people with cognitive differences are actually 80 percent more likely to be victims of violence than their peers without diagnoses.

Over the next ten years as a volunteer and chapter leader with Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, I became closely acquainted with the wide-ranging scope of gun violence in our country, the part that mass shootings play in that bigger picture and the real-life aftermath that gun violence of all kinds has on individuals, families and communities.

I have sat with survivors of mass shootings and intimate partner violence as they have shared their stories with presidential candidates. I have held sobbing LGBTQ members of our community, dressed out for a Pride parade as they grieved those murdered in the Pulse nightclub shooting. I have held space for gutted mothers whose sons have been killed in bar brawls and fights over girlfriends. I have broken bread with people whose lives have been broken by an unintended firearm discharge or a loved one's suicide.

And in the midst of all of it, I have yet to make any "sense" of it. Every situation, every story, every shooter, every survivor is different. Frustratingly so. Because if we could point to one single definitive cause, we could maybe fix it. Or prevent it. Or most importantly, we believe, we could keep it from happening to us or our loved ones.

Mass shootings in particular defy nearly all our attempts to explain, predict or prevent them. As time has gone on, as mass shootings have become more common and as the demographic and sociographic profile of shooters has become more diverse and complex, we have moved away from old answers like Autism, ADHD and medication and on to others tied to our current culture wars but not necessarily any more legitimate:

• Bullying which lead to mental illness

• Being LGBTQ (specifically trans) which led to bullying which led to mental illness

• Social Media and a desire for fame which led to mental illness

• Evil, godlessness, and the “breakdown of the family” which led to mental illness

Are you beginning to see the through-line here? Reductive, thought-terminating cliches that all lead back to the same stigmatizing answer: “mental illness.”

We are missing the point when we try to reduce a complex tragedy to a singular amorphous, ill-defined cause. When we focus on simple explanations, we overlook the crucial warning signs that we could use to prevent violence in the first place.

The real problem, those experts say, is that mental illness is not a useful means to predict violence. About half of all Americans will experience mental health issues at some point in their lives, and the vast majority of people with mental illness do not kill. (emphasis added)

“Do you or do you not have a mental health diagnosis?” said Jillian Peterson, a co-founder of the Violence Project, a research center that has compiled a database of mass shootings from 1966 on and studied perpetrators in depth. “In many cases, it doesn’t really matter. It’s not the main driver.”

What Are the Real Warning Signs of a Mass Shooting? by Shaila Dewan, New York Times, Published Aug. 22, 2022, Updated June 21, 2023 (gift article)

Mass shootings like the one that occurred just 30 minutes from my home, in Perry, Iowa yesterday are irrational acts carried out by irrational individuals in irrational states of mind, that is certain. But rather than focusing on searching for a pathology we can put our finger on (or worse, pathologizing people who are different from the norm like those with disabilities or who are LGBTQ), we would be better served to examine the behavior that led up to the tragedy and search for ways we could have intervened to prevent this from happening:

• Access to firearms is a greater predictor of violence than a diagnosed mental illness. Schools can speak to parents about locking up their firearms at home. States need to pass safe storage and red flag laws. Adults must be held responsible when a gun falls into the hands of a child or a person with a history of violence. Currently, 54 percent of gun owners do not lock up their guns.

• Watch for sudden changes in behavior in our kids and our students. Acting out, violent threats, fights at school, self-isolation, changes to bathing, sleeping or eating patterns, drug or alcohol abuse, self-harm, spending more time alone and online all can be warning signs that a child or teen is struggling. But noticing is not enough. We have to develop better strategies for caring for these kids that don’t involve punitive measures like expulsion, incarceration, commitment and isolation - tactics that can drive a struggling kid further toward destructive actions. And maybe it is not grandiose and complicated strategies and tactics but loving and simple actions like offering to watch a movie together and share a pizza.

• We do need to invest more in mental health care. We also need to invest more in regular health care. And schools. And food security. And childcare. And higher education. And job training. And disability services. And elder care. Mental health struggles do not pop up from thin air but are symptoms of the larger challenges of American life that leave so many families and so many young people by the wayside with no hope. “The greatest population-based impact

  for improving mental health and reducing risk of mental illnesses and substance use disorders will be achieved by optimizing public policies to make them more health-promoting, and by altering social norms so that the health of all members of society is a priority.” The Social Determinants of Mental Health by Michael T. Compton, M.D., M.P.H., and Ruth S. Shim, M.D., M.P.H.

Unlike mass shootings of the past which have taken place in other cities and other states, with this tragedy hitting so close to home, I have thought more about the shooter and his family, about their place in the Perry community and the connections they did or did not have. I’ve thought about the people who knew them and the people we probably knew in common. I’ve thought about the heartsickness of scoutmasters and soccer coaches and youth pastors and teachers and friends who perhaps saw his descent into a terrible place and didn’t know what to do or how seriously to take things.

Dr. Peterson of the Violence Project has framed perpetrators not as monstrous outsiders but members — and products — of their communities who are often signaling that they need help. She and other experts say that interventions should emphasize respect, dignity and inclusion. Punitive, exclusionary responses like expulsion from school are likely to increase the risk of violence.

Four out of five of the perpetrators in the project’s database, Dr. Peterson said, showed signs of crisis — defined as a period when one’s circumstances overwhelm one’s coping mechanisms, shortly before carrying out their crimes. (emphasis added)

Crisis can be triggered or exacerbated by mental illness, but also by loss of a job, a breakup, divorce, death or other events. The mother of the Parkland gunman died three months before he carried out his attack at the high school, from which he had been expelled.

What Are the Real Warning Signs of a Mass Shooting? by Shaila Dewan, New York Times, Published Aug. 22, 2022, Updated June 21, 2023 (gift article)

The challenge with these approaches is that they require the investment of the community. They require the attention of parents and teachers, already exhausted and overwhelmed. They require the public will to pass legislation and to change our culture from one that seeks simple answers that lead nowhere to one that recognizes the potential for tragedies of this kind to happen in every community, given the necessary set of circumstances.

They also require vulnerability and compassion on our part. They defy our impulse to categorize people as one-dimensional monsters. They call us to offer hospitality and kindness to people who are inhospitable and unkind for reasons we can’t even begin to comprehend. They ask us to interrogate the systems that inflict the twin tragedies of exclusion and neglect and then act boldly to reshape them. They ask us to put away easy answers and trite sayings and reach out to one another.

We need to give love to the ones we feel deserve it the least because they need it the most. … we need to help the kid in the dark see that he is wrong when he thinks he can't be helped. …the best way to reach people in pain is to see them AS PEOPLE.

— “I Was Almost a School Shooter” by Aaron Stark, TEDxBoulder, via YouTube

Amber Gustafson is a mom of three from Ankeny, Iowa. She grew up on a farm in the southwest corner of the state and has a B.A. from Iowa State University and a MAC from Drake University. She is a member of Kappa Tau Alpha Journalism Honor Society and Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). For more than a decade she has been a public advocate for the lives, health and safety of Iowans, running for Iowa Senate in 2018. You can read more of her work at Bleeding Heartland and The Des Moines Register and read more about her in The Washington Post. For interview and speaking requests, please email ambergus.iowa(at)gmail.com.