Movie theater shooter mentally ill?

Today's Baltimore Sun has a follow-up story on last week's movie theater shooting near Baltimore. Mujtaba Rabbani Jabbar, 24, was arrested after fatally shooting 62 year old Paul Schrum in a "bizarre" and "random" act after planning the act "for months".

Jabbar's sister, Gul Jabbar, claims that her brother is mentally ill. According to Gul:

"My brother is a good guy, he hated lying, cheating and hurting anyone," Gul Jabbar, a 20-year-old college student, said in the statement. "He was also mentally ill and our family tried our best to get him the treatment, but he refused." Because doctors said he wasn't a threat to himself or anyone else, the family couldn't force him to get help, she said.

"He just wanted to handle it himself, but he couldn't," his sister said. His illness, which she believes developed in recent years, was never diagnosed.

This all may be true, and I guess we'll just have to wait and see what investigators discover in the coming days and weeks. Some might even argue the fact that it took him months to plan something so simple lends weight to the mental illness defense.

The fact that Jabbar attended Loyola College, a Jesuit school, may indicate a less-than fanatical devotion to Islam if, in fact, he's a practicing Muslim at all. But attendance at a church-affiliated university does not, in and of itself, mean much. Georgetown University for example, another Jesuit school, as well as a host of other schools with church affiliations, admit students of all religious backgrounds.

Time will tell if this was another incidence of one-off jihadism or a simple, tragic case of a young man gone haywire.