I agree that insanity defenses must meet rigorous criteria...attorneys are expected to make attempts to provide a best defense. Insanity is an option that gets explored, and tried. It doesn't always work, but it's popular, maybe because beliefs such as yours are popular.
There is a logic to this... the problems of incomprehensible crimes can be explained by a lack of comprehension and proper cognition on the part of the perp. This seems to solve the discomfort we get from not having answers, it makes the perps seem like something other than the rest of us and the people we usually hang with.
But these explanations are often a murky business clouded by faulty 'common knowledge'. "Sociopathy" isn't a recognized psychiatric term so such claims are opinion/street smarts masquerading as a recognized diagnosis. It's a common mistake of street, the term you may want is anti-social personality disorder.
I understand that you have your opinion and you don't need to change it. I am not intending to challenge yours.
But other people also have opinions on this, and those others include organizations such as people who work at the FBI and HSD. They suggest that there are other reasons for multiple murders than just mental disorder...including political/terrorist, criminal (including personal or gang related vengefullness) motivations to mass killings. The Mother Jones databases on mass shooting since 1983 suggests that only 37% of mass-shooters were diagnosed with a mental disorder or had unambiguous symptoms prior to the event. The recent suicides plus mass-murders very probably have a higher association with mental illness, because between 80% and 90% of suicides are associated with mental disorders, particularly depression (but that must be seen against the epidemiology that shows the majority of the 20+ million people who have some form of depression each year don't commit suicide, murders of any kind, or violent attacks).
It's important to realize that many roads can lead to the same place. Common outcomes, such as murderous behavior can be the result of different paths...even if they are part of that 37% associated with mental illness.
Among the recent mass shootings anti-social personality hasn't been the only attributed mental illness...schizophrenia gets a lot of media play, but anxiety, autism, bipolar disorder, depression, ptsd (and variants such as c-ptsd), obsessive compulsive disorder have all been postulated in the press. Among personality disorders, borderline, schizotypal and schizoid have all been suggested in addition to anti-social behavior. If we simply move into the realm of murders of less than 5 people, alcohol and drug abuse have significant association with murder.
Of course these numbers may or may not matter to anyone depending upon their interest in the issue of gun deaths/mass murders.
If a persons' goal is to invoke a quick explanation that provides an answer that ends uncertainty, then putting the murderers into any real, or imagined, clear or fuzzy category that doesn't include the people who look just like us with whom we associate will work to make us feel arguably distant and thereby safer from the risk.
But if the goal is to really understand the motivations and cognition of murderers then greater care is required, because sloppy thinking/street diagnoses control for nothing and introduce many confounding factors that make more enigmatic an already puzzling picture.
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