Charleston Shooting: When Politics Trump Logic

None of the people writing opinion pieces and filling airwaves with their babbling concerning what they KNOW happened in Charleston actually know what happened in Charleston. Just as the Columbine shooters were not nerdy losers who didn't have any friends, the Sandy Hook shooter didn't go to the school to kill someone he knew, and the Duke Lacrosse players didn't rape anybody, there are bound to be aspects to this story that we all "know" right now that will be corrected in the future. People are more complicated than one Facebook picture, and millions of dollars are going to be spent by South Carolina over the next few years on a trial that will give us a much fuller picture of what happened thanks to their idiotic insistence on trying this case capitally.

What we do know to a near certainty is that a 21-year old male walked into a church and shot nine black people to death at a historically black church while telling them that he had to do it to stop them from taking over the country. It is unquestionable that race played an important role in this shooting. Only idiots (Fox News) would doubt that. But it is only slightly less idiotic to completely dismiss the role that mental illness almost certainly played in this shooting.

If you want to find stupid things written by liberals, Salon.com is almost always a reliable source, and they do not disappoint here in a piece by Arthur Chu.

"We barely know anything about the suspect in the Charleston, South Carolina, atrocity. We certainly don’t have testimony from a mental health professional responsible for his care that he suffered from any specific mental illness, or that he suffered from a mental illness at all."

Chu is right. We don't know almost anything about the suspect (other than that he fits the profile of nearly every mentally ill mass killer in American history). What we know is that there are millions of racists in America. There are tens of millions of gun fanatics. Almost none of those people commit mass murder. On the other hand, if there were no black people involved in this killing, and Sun Roof or whatever his name is had gone to shoot up a bowling alley full of white people because bowlers were a threat to take over the country, NOBODY would be dismissing mental illness in a discussion of Storm Drain's motives.

"We do have statistics showing that the vast majority of people who commit acts of violence do not have a diagnosis of mental illness and, conversely, people who have mental illness are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators."

And.... If you can figure out the relevance of general statistics on violence and mental illness to a mass murder apparently motivated by a delusional desire to start a civil war or stop black people from raping white women, please explain it to me.

"We know that the stigma (sic) of people who suffer from mental illness as scary, dangerous potential murderers hurts people every single day — it costs people relationships and jobs, it scares people away from seeking help who need it, it brings shame and fear down on the heads of people who already have it bad enough."

Yea. We also know that the stigmatizing as pedophiles of men who want to work in jobs caring for small children is damaging and costs men jobs in elementary education and daycare centers. However, if a man goes to work at a daycare so he can take pictures of naked children and masturbate to them, are you going to not call him a pedophile because it might stigmatize other men working with small children as pedophiles? Or maybe you'll focus your concern on the vague notion that some humans are attracted to children, and therefore we should try to stop people from being attracted to kids?

"What’s also interesting is the way 'The real issue is mental illness' is deployed against mass murderers the way it’s deployed in general — as a way to discredit their own words. When you call someone “mentally ill” in this culture it’s a way to admonish people not to listen to them, to ignore anything they say about their own actions and motivations, to give yourself the authority to say you know them better than they know themselves."

This might be true in some cases. Again, it's irrelevant. If someone is mentally ill, there's a very good reason not to be concerned about their motivations if they are delusional. John Hinckley wanted to kill Ronald Reagan because he wanted to impress Jodie Foster. Should we really dig into those motives and try to make sense of them? Or should we try to figure out how someone's mind can become so damaged that Jodie Foster's affection seems attainable through presidential assassination? If Moon Roof was mentally ill, which seems very likely, should we try to figure out what his motivations and behaviors say about people who are sane, or should we try to understand how a kid can think that murdering nine people will start a civil war or keep a non-existent black takeover of America from happening? Maybe we should ask how someone this unhinged was allowed to have a gun. Maybe there's something we can do about that.

"That’s as deliberately obtuse as reading the Facebook rants of a man who rambled on at great length about how much he hated religion and in particular hated Islam and deciding that the explanation for his murdering a Muslim family is that he must’ve just “gone crazy” over a parking dispute."

I live in the neighborhood where the Chapel Hill shooting happened (literally about 200 yards away from the crime scene). People get pissed about parking in our neighborhood, and many people all over America have been murdered over parking and road rage. When I was living in Miami, two guys prevented me from getting out of my car until I moved out of a parking spot that they had claimed as their own in a nearly empty grocery store parking lot. The only reason to summarily dismiss a parking dispute as the proximate cause of a homicide is ignorance or a desire to push a different narrative (both of which are operative in Mr. Chu's case I'd guess). Also, I've written and talked at great length about how much I despise religion. Along with nationalism, I think religion is the most toxic and damaging aspect of human society, and we will never be able to recover from the damage it's done. That hardly means every crime I commit against someone who is religious (which is almost everybody in America) must be because of my hatred of religious people (which is non-existent). You will notice that Chu doesn't say that the Chapel Hill shooter wrote about hating Muslims (because he didn't), and the "in particular Islam" bit is editorializing. The Chapel Hill shooter also wrote in defense of the Ground Zero mosque and believed that people have the right to be religious, but he has the right to call them morons (something pretty much every atheist believes). The Chapel Hill shooter also hated Christianity according to his writings, but that just doesn't fit Chu's narrative so he doesn't mention it. Basically, Chu is a shameless hack.

"Well, 'mental illness' never created any idea, motivation or belief system. 'Mental illness' refers to the way our minds can distort the ideas we get from the world, but the ideas still come from somewhere."

That's true. There are murder defendants who have shot and killed people because they believed that aliens had snatched the bodies of their human victims and were now disguised invaders of our planet. Did mental illness create that idea? No. It's a plot point in tons of science fiction books and movies. Should we then ignore mental illness in those cases because the mental illness just "distorted the ideas" and instead focus all of our energy on stopping science fiction writers?

There's no question that racism is a problem in America, and there are people with demented ideas about black people. However, IF (if if if) it turns out that Mr. Storm Cloud is suffering from a mental illness that creates delusions in his mind regarding the necessity of applying lethal force to black people to save America (which seems likely to be the case here), then it seems to make sense to try and figure out how we can identify people like him who need help BEFORE something like this happens and maybe prevent people like him from having guns. Talking about racism isn't going to stop insane people from doing insane things because there will always be some idea that a damaged mind can latch onto. If racism really was the proximate cause of this killing, then every black person in America should move to another country yesterday because there are a shitload of racists in this country and a shitload of guns.

You can't stop people from being racist. You can have a health system that treats mental illness like any other illness and provides help to people who need it before awful things like a mass shooting happen.