I am not religious, so I don't believe in the concept of evil. I rather believe we are all influenced by a combination of nature and nurture, though sometimes much more one than the other.

I don't believe a child is born a racist or terrorist. They are taught/influenced to be. Sadly misguided! Honestly, it's a shame for them. And many criminals without mental illness are brought up under terrible conditions, misguided themselves, perhaps desperate, often influenced by drugs.

So what about psychopaths that kill or torture for "pleasure"? Many psychiatrists do believe they have a mental disorder that made them think dysfunctionally. So, stigma against psychopaths (or say, pedophiles) is particularly harsh because their illnesses seem particularly scary.

"Did he/she choose to have antisocial personality disorder?" Or "Did he/she choose to be taught that killing infidels is good and will result in a better afterlife? That it's a good deed and not a bad one?"

I wrote a blog post sort of on this topic a while back. I did get some angry responses. A fellow person with bipolar disorder wrote that he "sort of agreed with my points, but in the case of pedophiles, he'd be the first one to pick up a gun and shoot them dead or torture them." Well, his strong feelings are indeed more common than rare. Though I absolutely agree that dangerous people must be kept from hurting others, I sort of feel that it's a double standard coming from a person with a mental disorder who claims to hate stigma. So, don't stigmatize people with a mental disorder who are not "as sick" as other people with a mental disorder? Might he be thinking he doesn't deserve to be stigmatized because he can work a full-time job while having bipolar disorder, but I do because I am on disability and a "leech on society", as my brother calls some people, though of course not his little sister.

Mass shootings are horrible tragedies, indeed, for all of the people who lost their lives and the people who loved/cared about them. There are surely plaques with the names of the murdered people on school walls and elsewhere, but those plaques don't include the killer who also may have died that day. It's understandable in this day and age, but those persons are also quite tragic figures.