The Myth That Mental Illness Causes Mass Shootings
“A sick, demented man.” That was Donald Trump’s assessment of Stephen Paddock, who shot nearly 600 people, leaving 58 dead, during a concert in Las Vegas earlier this month.
Tage Rai is a research associate and lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on moral violence, conflict resolution, organizational justice, corporate personhood, and the marketing of terrorism. He is the author of Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships (with Alan Fiske).
“A sick, demented man.” That was Donald Trump’s assessment of Stephen Paddock, who shot nearly 600 people, leaving 58 dead, during a concert in Las Vegas earlier this month.
To understand why one person would actively desire to inflict suffering upon another, we have to look to a counterintuitive source: human morality.