Sorry, you're right. I spent last year working on a psych ward, and I agree that most people with schizophrenia are unlikely to hurt others.
My guess is that mass murderers with some ideological or practical reason for choosing the people they murder are more likely to be sociopaths. I can't think of a reason to target people at a movie theater, which makes me put a higher prior on delusions or hallucinations in this case.
Well, given the specific evidence that the culprit dressed up and identified himself as the Joker and informed the police that he had booby trapped his apartment, I'd assign a high probability of schizophrenia, but I wouldn't write off preference based reasons for a sociopath to gun people down at a movie theater in general. It could be motivated by a fantasy rather than a delusion of the perpetrator. Winston Moseley, for instance, sexually assaulted and killed Kitty Genovese and two other women because he had violent sexual fantasies. Alyssa Bustamante (w...
A Ph.D student in neuroscience shot at least 50 people at a showing of the new Batman movie. He also appears to have released some kind of gas from a canister. Because of his educational background this person almost certainly knows a lot about molecular biology. How long will it be (if ever) before a typical bio-science Ph.D will have the capacity to kill, say,a million people?
Edit: I'm not claiming that this event should cause a fully informed person to update on anything. Rather I was hoping that readers of this blog with strong life-science backgrounds could provide information that would help me and other interested readers assess the probability of future risks. Since this blog often deals with catastrophic risks and the social harms of irrationality and given that the events I described will likely dominate the U.S. news media for a few days I thought my question worth asking. Given the post's Karma rating (currently -4), however, I will update my beliefs about what constitutes an appropriate discussion post.