Mental illness does not leave out politics....get real, people who do these things are usually mentally ill to be the type of person who can kill that many innocents for their cause without a war going, to give yourself the go ahead to kill, the trigger that allowed even that crazy person to act out their fantasy...it is those reasons those triggers being discussed, which movements even just seem to attract more of those type of people....those reasons usually have to do with politics or religion that set them off movements that seem to give their personalities reasons to act, movements that seem to attract way more of their fair share of these people from the general population.
Let's go back and look at the reasons behind the mentally ill people who have shot up malls, shot Regan, killed Martin Luther King, rammed planes into sky scrapers, mailed bombs, blown up marine barracks, shot the Kennedys'...etc. ...etc. ..etc.
These political or religious people were the crazies of the movements but the movements themselves were hard for a logical man to follow, you have to be crazy or have no since of logic to follow them or just plane dumb and easily led by propaganda to follow them. Having an off the chart I.Q and no common sense or off the chart I.Q. and a just plane crazy makes these movements the perfect place for more of these types to lean toward in history.
How many crazy conservatives in history have assassinated one of our presidents or how many Christians are there flying panes into buildings, shooting up schools, malls and theaters?
Seriously, if we had an honest media or honest history writers there is cause and effect even in a good number of crazy people and where they migrate in society.
All the 9/11 hijackers were likely sane, as are suicide bombers in general.
John Hinckley clearly wasn’t sane. There can be a gray area in-between (probably Kaczinski, for example.)
But there is such a thing as mental illness representing a chemical imbalance in the brain that can result in violent actions for which a person is not actually responsble. Not to say that they shouldn’t spend their life locked up in an asylum.