Blame everything on mental illness. Blame me personally if you want.

[JoeyT]

57. K&R

It's primarily a technique to "other" someone that's found distasteful. If we say this or that man or woman was mentally ill, we don't have to look at ourselves as a society and wonder what we might have contributed to their actions. Mental illness might play a role in a mass shooting, but it certainly isn't an equal role to our constant glorification of violence. (I don't mean video games or movies. I mean glorification of real violence against real people.)

The platform murder wasn't mental illness, it was ignorance and hate. The same bullshit that caused hicks to drag an African American behind a pickup. They weren't mentally ill either. They were just hateful bigots. It's damned useful to scapegoat mentally ill people for that one, because then people don't have to look back at what they might have said about Muslims over the last decade that contributed to an atmosphere that made someone think it was ok to kill someone they thought looked like a Muslim.

I fear the mentally ill will be the last minority it's socially acceptable to attack, because it's the most convenient and useful one to use as a scapegoat.