I never thought I would agree with Bill O'Reilly on an matter but even Republicans can occasionally express a simple truth. In an interview with Stephen Colbert the other night, O'Reilly was asked if he thought one of the issues raised by the massacre was mental illness. O'Reilly replied, "This man wasn't mentally ill - he was evil."
Ever since Obama was elected he has steadfastly refused to use the term "Islamic extremism". The rationale behind this is simple. The more non-Muslims demonize and alienate Muslims the more we push borderline individuals towards acts of mass violence. It is important to remember that Islam is a major world religion and that most Muslims are good people, people who would never consider violence. Islam is not the problem. It is not religion that encourages people to commit violent crimes. It is prejudice and discrimination that drive people to murder, a culture of mutual hate. This is what breeds terrorists. The Troubles in Northern Ireland did not occur because of "Catholic extremism"; they occurred because the Northern Irish divided themselves into two tribes, Catholic and Protestant, and based their group identity on allegiance to one tribe and animosity towards the other.
The situation is similar with the mentally ill. Just as we should not stigmatize all Muslims because of the actions of a tiny minority, we should not label a whole subset of the population as dangerous because of some misguided notion that mental illness alone is the explanation for these events. I know very, very many people who have been diagnosed mentally ill - people diagnosed with depression, bi-polar and even schizophrenia. None of them are violent. None of them are capable of planning and carrying out the kind of crime that occurred in Orlando. Yes, mental illness is a general, social issue. But what we require today is a recognition that the mentally ill are victims, are sufferers, and that current forms of treatment are ineffective or even detrimental. What we don't need is to increase the stigma surrounding mental illness by blaming events such as the Orlando shooting on some kind of sickness of the brain.
Even if the gunman Omar Mateen was mentally ill, then, it would be wrong to consider him representative. But, in fact, there is no real evidence that he even was mentally ill. The human tendency when confronted with a terrible event is to seek explanations, and mental illness, because it is so foggily understood by most people, is the easy answer. In the interview with O'Reilly, Colbert described Mateen as "schizophrenic". Aside from a statement from an ex-wife saying that Mateen was "sick", we don't have any reason to believe that Mateen was mentally ill at all. 'Evil', yes, but not 'ill'. We certainly don't have any reason to believe he was schizophrenic. Colbert was presumably employing the term in a very vague, generic way, as a synonym for 'crazy'. People in the media often seem to apply the word "schizophrenic" to anyone they don't like and don't understand, a habit that really irritates those like me who actually know what the term entails. I would like a world where commentators at least try to use language in an informed way. Colbert is manifestly a very intelligent person but he doesn't have the foggiest idea what the word "schizophrenic" actually means.
The shooting raises many other issues. The principal one for me, as a New Zealander, is the insanity that a person in American can walk into a shop and buy a machine gun over the counter. That couldn't happen here; it's madness that most Americans can do it. You don't need an assault rifle to hunt ducks or to defend yourself from a home invader - the only purpose of an assault rifle it to kill as many people as possible in as short a time as possible. If there is a lesson to be learned from this horrer it is not, as O'Reilly suggested, that the West should declare a war on 'radical Islam' or, as others imply, that society needs to identify and somehow neutralize (by bringing back institutions perhaps?) the mentally ill as early as possible. It is simply that the US should ban the sale and possession of assault rifles. Perhaps Hilary Clinton might be the one with the balls to carry this out?
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