Correlation Between Mental Health and Mass Shootings
Contrary to popular belief, any correlation between mass shootings and mental illness is tenuous. After reviewing numerous polls, The New York times estimates roughly half of the American people believe there is a link between the two. The misconception stems from a vicious cycle in the aftermath of mass shootings in which prominent political figures, like president Donald Trump or speaker of the House Paul Ryan, actively associate mental illness and even blame it for these massacres when in fact there is little evidence linking the two. A 2015 study conducted by Dr. Michel Stone, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University, found that of the 235 mass killings analyzed, 22 percent of them involved a mentally ill assailant. When asked about this tendency to blame mental health for these tragedies, renown author and professor of criminology at Northwestern University Dr. James Alan Fox, told NBC News “We like to think that these people are different from the rest of us. We want a simple explanation and if we just say they’re mentally ill, case closed. Because of how fearful, dangerous and deadly their actions are, we really want to distance ourselves from it and relegate it to illness.” Fox has also said that out of the 198,760 firearm related homicides from 1999 to 2015, only 1% correspond to mental illness. Although mass shootings and mental health are not mutually exclusive and there have been shooters committed and diagnosed like John Zawahri, the Santa Monica shooter, these men are still outliers and therefore the exception to this rule.
Links with Psychopathy, and Angry and Disgruntled Individuals
When classifying whether an individual is mentally ill or not, personality disorders and psychopathy do not fall under mental illness. Parkland shooter Nickolas Cruz had demonstrated to be angry, isolated, and antisocial with psychopathic tendencies but was not diagnosed mentally ill. In direct messages sent to a class mate, Cruz demonstrated his aggressive behavior, even sending pictures of firearms before eventually opening fire on his school. Nickolas Cruz fits professor Carmela Epright’s definition of a pseudocommando perfectly, a term that she defines as people who kill in public daylight and arm themselves with an arsenal of firearms and ammunition, as well as brag while attempting to kill the most people possible. Professor Epright thus blames anger and aggression for these incidents instead of mental illness. To solidify her claim she cites Dylan Klebold’s quote to a Columbine victim saying, “We’ve always wanted to do this. This is payback. We’ve dreamed of doing this for four years. This is for all the shit you put us through”. In the aforementioned study by Dr. Stone, he categorizes the remaining not-mentally-ill (NMI) individuals into the following categories with the following results:
“Antisocial personality: 20 individuals (11.9%)
Depressive: 11 individuals (6.5%)
Disgruntled: 10 individuals (6%)
Rageful: 11 individuals (10.7%)
Paranoid: 48 individuals (28.6%)
Psychopathic: 25 individuals (16.1%)”
After seeing the results, Nickolas Cruz seemed to hit most points since he was depressive, disgruntled, full of rage and allegedly had psychopathic and antisocial tendencies. This argument helps point to other factors that may not be directly associated with mental health and suggests that maybe these incidents could be attributed to an amalgamation of other components such as anger and aggression.
Mass Shootings, Suicide and Depression
Sue Klebold, the mother of Columbine shooter Dylan Klebold, claims there is a link between depression, suicide and mass shootings. She claims that her son, Dylan, showed signs of depression well before he executed the attack on his school with the help of his friend, Eric Harris. The Columbine shooting ultimately claimed the lives of 13 people and injured more than 20. Klebold says Dylan was self-mutilating two years prior and even wrote in his journal that “he was in agony and wanted to find a gun to end his life.” She also states that 1-2% of suicides involve another person. She says that if the suicides rates continue to climb like they have been for the past couple of years, the number of people who die as a result will increase as well. Similarly, in an NBC News article, senior writer Phil McCausland says that considering the statistics for firearm related suicides is 313,641, it is more likely the mentally ill pose a greater danger to themselves instead of others. 
The graphic shown above provided by CNN also adds to Klebold’s argument by saying that 40% of active shooters take their own lives. The issue with her argument is that her son, and people who suffer from severe depression like him, were taken into consideration in a 2015 study conducted by Columbia University professor Dr. Michel Stone and the results still reflect that only 22% of mentally ill individuals are culpable of mass shootings. This means that despite there being a tangible correlation between mental illness like depression and suicidal tendencies the percentage of mass shooters suffering from theses diseases is still relatively tenuous. There may be a correlation between depression, suicide and mass shootings but like the argument for mental health, it is weak and promotes added stigma on those suffering from mental illness but, it also helps point out that maybe mass shooters could be driven by outside factors possibly social ones.
Mass Shootings 