The context here: the media claimed the shooter has "no history of mental illness"; Abbott said anyone like that must inherently be mentally ill. The media's p

The context here: the media claimed the shooter has "no history of mental illness"; Abbott said anyone like that must inherently be mentally ill. The media's position is untenable. If your definition of mental illness doesn't include adolescents who want to murder their peers, then it's defective by design. Your first link doesn't address mass shooters. The second one (written by an "enterprise reporter" and quoting from forensic psychiatrists) draws an astonishing distinction between "mental illness" and "sociopathy or antisocial disorders" (!), and defines most mass shooters as sociopathic and therefore not mentally ill. I don't know how anyone could read that article and be convinced by it. I should note that forensic psychiatrists are by far the most conservative (not in the political sense) practiciners in their field, a shocking number of them are quacks, they often have little experience treating patients, and they tend to believe in more black-and-white/"predictive" (and excessively confident) theories, suitable to their role in courtrooms. Under the old-school DSM mindset, if you're not diagnosed with anything, you are defined as healthy. That type of thinking will never allow us to truly address society's emotional health. Emotional health is a spectrum; we're all at varying degrees of emotional health, and the average (i.e. "normal") person is significantly emotionally unhealthy. Any reform that aims to genuinely improve society's emotional health has to move beyond the old model; and in any model of emotional health (where low self-esteem, social anxiety, low emotional self-awareness, attachment disorders become part of the picture), any shooter would be defined as severely emotionally ill; moreover, any reform that aims to detect attachment issues, low self-esteem and more, early on in life, in a systematic way, would prevent most (if not all) of these shootings from happening.