I will add to that. He had the forethought to undress himself before he turned himself in. He didn’t want to be killed. There was some thought and planning that went into this.
For whatever reason we seem to think the people with serious mental illness have completely lost all sense of the world around them and that is not true.
I work on the trails around my home almost daily and there are mentally ill homeless people that I have encountered over the years. I always greet them like I would any one on the trail and sometimes I have have conversations with them. There was the woman that practiced her thermo and astro physics by ballet dancing with her shopping cart. There was a man who built the bluffs in seven days with cobblestones. There was the guy that restores dead trees by watering them with his water bottle and rakes the trails. This guy also talks and fights with himself at times. There was another guy that I never spoke with but I saw his camp. He was an arsonist that was caught making little fire bombs in cans. I found in his camp a bunch of lighters and melted and burned items.
When you talk with these people, they converse with you and respond to your questions. But they have trouble staying focused and tracking on a single topic. They all have very specific views on the world and they all are focused on their mission. When they explain their reason for doing what they are doing, it explains why they are doing what they are doing even if it is not normal in the minds of everyone else but there is logic there.
The Boulder shooter had expressed paranoia and he thought people were after him. He had experience hallucinations and fear for years. When people think they are being attacked, real or imagined, they act to protect themselves. The Boulder shooter may very well have taken off his tactical vest and put down his weapon because his hallucination faded and he felt the danger was over.
We as a society need to better listen to the mission of people with serious mental illness and when they express paranoia and hallucinations and they are worried that someone is going to harm them so they need to protect themselves from the imaginary with real weapons, we need to to get those people off the streets and into locked facilities.
We need to change the laws or use the laws that we have now to allow people to be involuntarily committed and we need to have public facilities for these people to be placed in because there is no financial incentive for private health care providers to care for these people beyond a few days required by law to "stabilize" them.
