Weirdly, the suspect is both mentally incompetent and also capable of making sophisticated home-made guns. That seems an unlikely combination, but it's not impossible. As Wretchard points out, a Japanese cult once figured out how to make functional sarin gas weapons. Crazy people are not good agents, so he's unlikely to be both crazy and someone's pawn. He might be faking the crazy, I suppose.
It is something of two different axes. Many of my patients were too disorganised to be a John Hinckley or Lee Harvey Oswald, whatever intentions they might have. But not all. A lot depends on how far along you went in life before the illness overcame you. Sometimes Bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, of psychotic disorders strike in the late teens, and the prodromal years were sometimes lost to development as well, even if overt psychosis was not apparent. Other times the illness may not strike until the late twenties, at which point a person may have absorbed a great deal of learning, ability to plan, and some strategies for keeping psychosis hidden. I have occasionally had very psychotic people in science PhD programs who had only shown signs of oddness in the last few years, which was often just written off as stress or eccentricity.
ReplyDeletePersonality Disorders are even more complicated in terms of determining competence. Competence and insanity are also different beasts. Competence means whether a person understood the possible consequences of their actions, which is why those with developmental disabilities are usually not held fully responsible. They might sort of know that a gun is dangerous, but only from reputation, not from understanding the physical operation and what it means for life processes to shut down. But a person who has become insane might add a different twist. They might very well know that a gun will kill a person. They might even have been a soldier or an EMT or policeman. But they now believe that this person will come back to life, or that they were a lizard person and not a human or some such.
It's very simple in the theoretical cases, but the actual situations are often bafflingly ambiguous, and even staff who have known someone for years might disagree. I worked with plenty of NGRI's and had very definite judgements early in my career. The longer I went, the less sure I was.