I would suggest...if you took apart every mass-shooting (FBI defined as three or more dead to include the shooter), and gazed over a twenty year period....counting guns, knives, and whatever...that the massive bulk (roughly ninety percent) fall within delusions, paranoid behavior or schizophrenia.
Cops and prosecutors really don’t want to get into this type of identification....nor do they want drug tests done on the shooters right after the event. That’s something that should be done, but it just messes up the whole police case.
So I will lay out a mass shooting in my home town of Bama...from four years ago as an example. I grew up with a family down the road....younger brother and older sister in high school. The two graduate and move on in life. The brother marries some girl at the end of college, and he displays a number of mental issues...establish authority and domination over the wife.
Years go by....he is successful in life....his wife is miserable, and they have a daughter.
The guy’s sister goes on to have a Air Force career, marry, and has a son.
One day....the guy’s wife who only has one friend that is allowed (the guy’s sister)....makes the decision to divorce him. He’s been nutty and paranoid for the past decade. He might have been seen by a doctor but that’s never been established by the cops.
Divorce going forward....the guy isn’t taking this in a nice way. Court meeting on Monday...the wife asks her sister-in-law to drive down and be with her.
Over that weekend....the paranoid guy shows up at the house....kills the wife, his daughter, the sister, and her son, then kills himself. Cops come to investigate....clean up the mess...and just write a record of the event.
No drug test on him. He’s one of the 2010 statistics of a mass-shooter....and he was absolutely paranoid in behavior (probably even going back to high school).
There’s a big story here, but I just don’t see investigative journalism going out to see paranoid behavior across the nation as a epidemic. Drugs helping them? Maybe, but on if they took them as they should. The sad truth? We were a safer society in 1939...because a couple of folks would petition the county judge to put paranoid folks in a state mental hospital. We live in a hostile and dangerous world.
Two men were executed in South Carolina a couple decades ago or so for murder. One was apparently semi-retarded and did what the other guy told him to do. The leader was ex-Army I think and was said to have gone to doctors at least twice and begged to be locked up because he was afraid of what he was going to do some day. He apparently was sent on his way with no further action taken because nothing could be done under the law until he committed a crime.
"Doctor, there's 27 people in the waiting room and they all claim that the president is an undocumented, illegal mulatto bastard and is out to kill them and the United States"
"What? .. O never mind, they're experiencing a functional delusion .... give them all a script for atavan ... and bring me another scotch"