The “ordinariness” of American mass murder – It is indeed a mental health issue

With each instance of slaughter in places we rightfully expect to be safe and free of violence – schools, churches, grocery stores, health clinics – Second Amendment absolutists (aka the political rightwing, and notably the Trumpified Republican Party) trumpet the same unconvincing cliches – Guns don’t kill people, people kill people; the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun; restricting gun rights is a sure road to government tyranny; mass killing events are neither a gun problem nor a regulatory problem, but a mental health problem.

This last pseudo-explanation is my favorite, in large measure because I agree with a version of it: American violence, horribly common in myriad forms, and not merely in its worst expression of mass slaughter of innocents, is indeed fundamentally a mental health issue – just not in the way that the gun rights fundamentalists claim that it is. It is a mental health issue because American society has become thoroughly saturated by deeply corrosive, destabilizing and interrelated social pathologies.

Restricted access to basic health care and preventive health measures is a deeply corrosive and destabilizing social pathology.

Extensive poverty and extreme income inequality are deeply corrosive and destabilizing social pathologies.

Systemic racism is a deeply corrosive and destabilizing social pathology.

Tolerating widespread and growing homelessness is a deeply corrosive and destabilizing social pathology.

Privatization of public goods is a deeply corrosive and destabilizing social pathology.

Inability to hold powerful elites accountable for their crimes, no matter the damage done, is a deeply corrosive and destabilizing social pathology.

Gutting social welfare spending in the midst of a devastating pandemic reflects a deeply corrosive and destabilizing social pathology.

Mass incarceration – reflecting divergent systems of “justice,” one for the well-off and the other for everybody else – is a deeply corrosive and destabilizing social pathology.

The cancerous growth of the “surveillance security state” (which clearly fails to provide security) is a deeply corrosive and destabilizing social pathology.

Spending unlimited sums of money on war-making, death and destruction abroad is a deeply corrosive and destabilizing social pathology.

Scapegoating immigrants, refugees, and other marginalized persons is a deeply corrosive and destabilizing social pathology.

“Diseases of despair” – substance abuse, addictions of all kinds, self-mutilation, suicide – reflect a deeply corrosive and destabilizing social pathology.

Let’s not be afraid to say it out loud, social workers: American society itself is mentally ill. Mass murder by way of legal weaponry is indeed a mental health problem, but only insofar as it is a symptom of a deeper, systemic pathology. We will not effectively address the problem of murderous guns without confronting our deeper disorder.