Article Reflection: Mental Illness and Mass Shootings

Student’s Name
Professor’s Name
Course Title
Submission Date
Article Reflection: Mental Illness and Mass Shootings
Firearms violence is among the rampant emotive issues in the United States. As asserted in the article, firearms kill approximately a hundred persons each day in the U.S. which amounts to about 36,000 victims a year. With these many lives lost many people are invested in trying to understand perpetrators of mass shootings and develop a profile that would help identify a potential perpetrator of gun violence. From the article, the U.S. experienced over 50 gun violence instances where at least three persons were harmed. Investigation reports from these incidents showed that that two-thirds of these attacks were carried out by perpetrators who exhibited mental health symptoms. Conversely, the article points to other studies showing that majority of people living with mental health and less likely to commit mass violence compared to the general population. These finding only points to how non-specific risk factors of a “typical” mass shooter are. From the article, a profile of a “typical” mass shooter would be “white, male, angry, paranoid, impulsive, disaffected, and emotionally isolated (Akpan). From the additional research quoted in the article, the perpetrator is more likely to be a person without mental health. Other factors that would const...