Example one:

A father who shot and killed his five children in their Washington state home before killing himself had argued with his wife over another man before the shootings, police said.

Authorities found the children, ages 7 to 16, dead in their Pierce County home Saturday afternoon, and the father, James Harrison, was found dead inside his SUV in adjacent King County, Detective Ed Troyer told CNN Radio Sunday. Police said Harrison committed suicide by shooting himself with a rifle.

Troyer said that on Friday night, Harrison and his 16-year-old daughter found his wife with another man. The couple argued, and then Harrison and his daughter returned to the family home near Tacoma without his wife, Troyer said.

At the home, Harrison and the children held a family meeting with other relatives, Troyer said.

The relatives left, and later that night Harrison shot all five of his children — four girls and one boy — as they slept in their beds, Troyer said.

Example two:

A 911 call that brought two police officers to a home where they were ambushed, and where a third was also later killed during a four-hour siege, was precipitated by a fight between the gunman and his mother over a dog urinating in the house.

The Saturday argument between Margaret and Richard Poplawski escalated to the point that she threatened to kick him out and she called police to do it, according to a 12-page criminal complaint and affidavit filed late Saturday.

When officers Paul Sciullo III and Stephen Mayhle arrived, Margaret Poplawski opened the door and told them to come in and take her 23-year-old son, apparently unaware he was standing behind her with a rifle, the affidavit said. Hearing gunshots, she spun around to see her son with the gun and ran to the basement.

"What the hell have you done?" she shouted.

The mother told police her son had been stockpiling guns and ammunition "because he believed that as a result of economic collapse, the police were no longer able to protect society," the affidavit said.

Friends have said Poplawski was concerned about his weapons being seized during Barack Obama's presidency, and friends said he owned several handguns and an AK-47 assault rifle. Police have not said, specifically, what weapons were used to kill the officers.

Example three:

[The monk] cradled yellow joss sticks in his hands and lowered them to a flame. Smoke swirled around his bowed head, the scene of peace contrasting with the terror that beset Binghamton on Friday when a gunman attacked an immigrant services center and killed 13 people before taking his own life.

With reports that the gunman, Jiverly Wong, 41, was an immigrant from Vietnam, this small community that had lived anonymously found itself thrust into the spotlight.

As details emerged about Wong's life — recently laid off, troubled by poor language skills, unable to find a toehold in the United States — many Vietnamese here saw their own struggles in his travails. It was a reminder, as if they needed one, that their transition from war-torn Vietnam to Binghamton has not always been easy.

The first Vietnamese immigrants in Binghamton came after the Vietnam War ended in 1975, but the city saw its biggest influx in the early 1990s, residents said. Local resettlement agencies sponsored hundreds of families of former South Vietnamese soldiers and political prisoners, as well as Amerasian children and their caretakers.

At the population's height in the mid-1990s, about 600 Vietnamese families lived here, according to Nguyen, the monk. But many moved away for better jobs or warmer weather, he said, estimating that about 200 families remain.

The Wongs came under these programs, as did Be Nguyen — no relation to the monk — who prays at the Quan Am temple every Sunday. When she arrived in 1990, Nguyen said, she knew no English, so she fell into assembly line work, as did many other Vietnamese.

What is missing in each of these reports of recent killings is as any mention of mental illness. What's the meaning of this hole in the reporting? Why is mental illness something that is unspeakable or is transmuted into its opposite: a man just dealing with unemployment, a man just dealing with infidelity, a man just dealing with the current economic crisis? Meaning, these killers were only dealing with normal problems and nothing else. As a consequence, there is no real difference between the killers and any other person in society. Why this insistence on normality and this resistance to causes that might be medical or biological?

For an answer, we must turn to the ruling thinking (or ideology) of this moment. Why do we not treat these crimes scientifically and medically? This kind of questioning must be linked with the fact that health care in this country is a class issue. And we must also see any talk about gun control as kind of avoidance of the real and deeper class struggle: a health care system that only functions for those who are employed (and therefore functions as a powerful disciplinary tool for management), and, altogether, a health care system that only takes the mental welfare of the elite seriously. If you are poor, mental illness is then transmuted into underclass phenomena: homelessness, unemployment, chronic domestic instability.

The reason we don't take mental illness seriously (and yet there's enough research and evidence to show that it is far more a chemical than an a social event/expression/phenomena) is it directly negates or weakens the force of the figure at the center of our mode of production and consumption: the individual. And the ruling ideology (an ideology that produces and reproduces the relations of production) is one that depends on placing all responsibility on the individual—you fail not because you are poor but because you are you. You fail because you do not work hard enough, because you are not industrious enough, and so on and so forth. As for the rich? The rich are rich because they worked hard to be rich. With this fixed understanding, there is no need to change a social order that produces and reproduces the current relations of production.

But as long we refuse to take mental health seriously (or treat it scientifically), we will keep wondering why "normal" individuals would do such horrible things.