Final answer:
Understanding mental health issues is crucial to comprehending the causes behind the Newtown mass murders, with debates highlighting the access to firearms and its link to such tragedies.
Step-by-step explanation:
The expert in the "Raising Adam" documentary claimed that if we could understand mental health issues, we could better understand the Newtown mass murders. The context of this question relates to the alarming pattern of violence in schools, such as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, where Adam Lanza killed twenty first-graders and six adults, and the correlation between such tragic events and the perpetrator's mental health status. Advocates of stricter gun control highlight the relationship between the easy accessibility to firearms and the frequency of mass shootings, while gun rights advocates suggest that access to firearms is incidental, implying that other factors, such as mental health, are the leading causes of this violence.