People tend also to conflate mental illness with "things I don't like". For example, when the Sandy Hook shooting happened, people were saying, "What a whackjob

People tend also to conflate mental illness with "things I don't like". For example, when the Sandy Hook shooting happened, people were saying, "What a whackjob", before they even knew who the perpetrator was, as if it were like "What an asshole". (Yes, I agree that he's an asshole, but no, I don't see reason to believe that he's literally the victim of a head injury.) It does seem likely that the man was mentally ill, but that's not all of the picture. The vast majority of people with mental illness would never do something like this, and not all mass murderers are mentally ill. In fact, as far as I know there are only two mental illnesses that positively correlate with violence. One is severe drug addiction, which is a different class of problem, and the other is psychopathy, and people with the latter tend to be above-average in social development, which is why Ted Bundy was so effective: he killed about 40 people before he was finally caught. We've seen this equation of displeasure with mental illness in the fallout as well. The NRA are referred to as "crazy gun nuts". Well, they're not actually "crazy". They hold strong ideological beliefs that we dislike, and they're almost certainly wrong (in that the benefits of ubiquitous AK-47s do not compensate for the drawbacks, because the probabilities associated with the events that would make then beneficial are ridiculously low). They're not the same thing. These radicals are dangerously wrong and I'm glad they're on the fringe, but they're not "crazy". I also take umbrage against the attempt to explain away evil using mental illness. It's like people don't want to admit that bad people or evil exist. Hitler was crazy, Adam Lanza was crazy, Ted Bundy was crazy. Well, I have no idea if they were mentally ill. They were, however, evil. Evil exists. It probably doesn't have a metaphysical platonic form (a Satan) and there's no evidence that it has any supernatural presence but, in the practical real world we live in, evil's a real thing. It's a part of our story as humans. You can't understand what we, as a species, are if you leave it out. In fact, to the extent that evil and "insanity" correlate, I would argue that the causal direction goes the other way: people who do evil things, especially if they're rewarded and become powerful, warp over time and eventually go nuts. It's not the other way around. Mental illness is painful and horrible and sometimes it makes people do harmful things but it does not make people evil. Killing 28 innocent people, mostly children, for no reason is evil. Adam Lanza may have been mentally ill but he was also an evil piece of shit.