@RnDanger @Strandjunker
Thank you.

TL;DR: We can't force ourselves to stop being biased about something, but we can guide our subconscious. The language we use about things with ourselves and others has a powerful effect on what direction we steer our thinking towards and it's critically important to be mindful of that.

This kind of thing instills and reinforces the association of "mentally ill" with "violent" in people's minds, often on a deeply subconscious level. A person might say "of course I know that just because someone has a mental illness, it doesn't mean they're violent" and objectively know that's true, but it's not our set of objective facts that shape our unconscious biases and prejudices.

Reading "shooter" and immediately think "mentally ill" is one way this manifests, but how often are biases that hyper-specific? How likely is it that a single kind of knee-jerk reaction is the *only* subconscious prejudice that someone has about mental illness?

I really want to stress that nobody should be judged just for having subconscious prejudices. We all have them. When we can acknowledge to ourselves that something we think, say, or do stems from a bias without beating ourselves up about it, we can explore other ways that bias warps our view of things that we don't realize.

Anytime we consciously realize that the words our brain associates with one of our biases are problematic, we have an opportunity to gently challenge our subconscious to find some other language to describe what it's trying to convey to us.

@TimWardCam @Strandjunker What you’re doing here is equating mental illness with the kind of lazy “they’re just crazy” dismissal that only harms mentally ill people and gives cover to dangerous and harmful choices people make.

I understand a distaste and distrust of guns, but please don’t express that by being careless with where you place blame.