Three mass murder shootings in seven day. It’s utterly horrifying to contemplate but today I am not going to discuss the pros or cons of firearm regulation but rather the tired cliché of describing the cowards behind the trigger as ‘mentally ill.’

It has been said before and will be said again that people suffering from mental illnesses are far more likely to be victims of violent crimes and assault than perpetrators and yet every single time this happens there are those who rush forward to blithely pronounce the murderers as mentally deranged and ill. If the facts so clearly support the concept that the mentally ill are victims of violence why are people always placing the blame on them? I think it comes down to three major reasons. I am not presenting the three reason in any order of importance, each one’s weight varies upon who is making the argument and why but I do think that all three broadly and culturally apply.

It’s a Dodge.

In the context of mass shooting when someone with a firearm starts killing as many people as they are able politically for those on the right it’s vitally important to shift the conversation as fast as possible. This is not to say that either side of the control argument has the stronger case but rather an observation that the political payoff for the right and conservative is to move the topic away from the gun itself. I call it a dodge rather than a reason because if this were a sincerely held belief, that these events are a result of seriously mentally disturbed people then those making that argument would be at least attempting to mitigate the effect with some action but that is almost never the case. No serious attempts are made to strengthen or enhance our deplorable mental health facilities in this nation and hence this argument is a dodge.

Popular Entertainment

For literally decades lazy incompetent screenwriters, and creators of all sorts, have waved away the haphazard and inconsistent motivations of their antagonists with the proclamation that the characters are ‘mad.’ The insane violent psychopath became an easy tired trope of bad writing and burrowed itself into a collection consciousness until for far too many people the blurry line between flawed artistic creation and reality faded into nothingness leaving us with the actually belief that murderous violent people are in fact psychopaths and that psychopaths are murderous and violent.

Rationality has Destroyed Evil.

The Enlightenment and Modernists thought insists that the world is a rational construction and that everything within it can be understood with the power reason. For so many aspects of reality this has held up extraordinarily well modern scientific thought has given us a world of abundance, long life, and unparalleled health even if those benefits are not yet even distributed but one thing we have loss in the calm logical model of the world is the concept of genuine evil. When these evil cowards appear and begin their indiscriminate slaughtering logic and reason fail to comfort us and in a desperate attempt to ‘explain’ people reach for madness as the answer. Because believing in actual evil has fallen out of favor insanity, a vastly misunderstood aspect of human health with much more to learn than is known provides a rational if utterly wrong answer to the question Why.