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Predictably, those on one side proclaim that the problem is that too many people have access to guns. Predictably, those on the other side are saying that if the teachers or principal had been armed, the shooter would never have killed so many children. Predictably, religious fanatics are saying that this was caused because God has been banished from schools. Predictably, politicians and others are saying this is an example of "evil" walking among us. Perhaps predictably, I don't think any of those positions are the real answer.
Before I go further, here are the caveats. I currently do not own a gun -- well, I do have a German double-barreled percussion cap pistol from the 1700s on the wall of my office, but as far as I know, it's not in working order. I have taken a gun safety course, and a concealed carry course, and frankly, I enjoyed the target shooting we did as part of the courses. I'm considering purchasing a gun mostly for that reason. I do have several swords here in my office, so it's obviously not that I believe no one should possess weapons. But… I'd also be perfectly comfortable if it were illegal or extremely difficult for a private citizen to own a military grade weapon, even the "stripped down" versions that don't allow full auto fire, or if high-capacity magazines were banned.
There is definitely a problem with violence in this country. When one graphs out the number of violent assaults in the industrialized countries, the USA is the clear outlier -- we're way at the top of the chart. But are guns to blame? If they were, then other countries with similar numbers of guns-per-household should also have similarly high number of mass murders… and they don't. According to this site, " In Israel and Switzerland, for example, a license to possess guns is available on demand to every law-abiding adult, and guns are easily obtainable in both nations. Both countries also allow widespread carrying of concealed firearms, and yet, admits Dr. Arthur Kellerman, one of the foremost medical advocates of gun control, Switzerland and Israel "have rates of homicide that are low despite rates of home firearm ownership that are at least as high as those in the United States." A comparison of crime rates within Europe reveals no correlation between access to guns and crime."
Adam Lanza wasn't evil, but I doubt he was sane. No one who possesses a shred of empathy would be capable of massacring children as he did, and lack of empathy is a symptom of psychopathy. That's not evil; that's a mental health issue. And those who like Mike Huckabee are saying that "we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?" -- well, I don't personally believe in God in any case, but a deity who is so petty that he'd allow children to be killed because he's ticked off at not being mentioned isn't a deity deserving of worship. Not mine, anyway.
So it's not access to guns or lack of gun controls that caused the problem. It's not Capital-E Evil; it's not a ticked-off Great White Man In The Sky. It's something else: something broken in our society and our culture. Something in us.
There's a quality (or qualities) in our society that permits or encourages or allows this kind of thing to happen far too often. I don't know what that shadow is. Maybe it's because effectively treating mental illnesses is something only those with sufficient money have easy access to. Perhaps it's because as a culture we worship and glorify violence: just look at our television shows and our movies. Maybe it's because we'll allow our kids to watch a show where people are routinely murdered, but we won't let them watch two people making love. Maybe it's because when we see someone who is obviously troubled, we too often remain silent. Maybe it's all of those things or none of them.
I don't claim to know. But I do think it's a conversation we as a society need to have: without anger, without rancor, without demonizing those who don't think the same way we do. Because if we don't… well, this will just be another in an endless series of tragedies.
(And if you comment, know that I will be deleting comments that I find too contentious or fanatical. If you want to rant, you're welcome to do that on your own blog. Not here. On the other hand, I am interested in what you think -- if you can discuss that in a reasonable, polite manner.)
Before I go further, here are the caveats. I currently do not own a gun -- well, I do have a German double-barreled percussion cap pistol from the 1700s on the wall of my office, but as far as I know, it's not in working order. I have taken a gun safety course, and a concealed carry course, and frankly, I enjoyed the target shooting we did as part of the courses. I'm considering purchasing a gun mostly for that reason. I do have several swords here in my office, so it's obviously not that I believe no one should possess weapons. But… I'd also be perfectly comfortable if it were illegal or extremely difficult for a private citizen to own a military grade weapon, even the "stripped down" versions that don't allow full auto fire, or if high-capacity magazines were banned.
There is definitely a problem with violence in this country. When one graphs out the number of violent assaults in the industrialized countries, the USA is the clear outlier -- we're way at the top of the chart. But are guns to blame? If they were, then other countries with similar numbers of guns-per-household should also have similarly high number of mass murders… and they don't. According to this site, " In Israel and Switzerland, for example, a license to possess guns is available on demand to every law-abiding adult, and guns are easily obtainable in both nations. Both countries also allow widespread carrying of concealed firearms, and yet, admits Dr. Arthur Kellerman, one of the foremost medical advocates of gun control, Switzerland and Israel "have rates of homicide that are low despite rates of home firearm ownership that are at least as high as those in the United States." A comparison of crime rates within Europe reveals no correlation between access to guns and crime."
Adam Lanza wasn't evil, but I doubt he was sane. No one who possesses a shred of empathy would be capable of massacring children as he did, and lack of empathy is a symptom of psychopathy. That's not evil; that's a mental health issue. And those who like Mike Huckabee are saying that "we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?" -- well, I don't personally believe in God in any case, but a deity who is so petty that he'd allow children to be killed because he's ticked off at not being mentioned isn't a deity deserving of worship. Not mine, anyway.
So it's not access to guns or lack of gun controls that caused the problem. It's not Capital-E Evil; it's not a ticked-off Great White Man In The Sky. It's something else: something broken in our society and our culture. Something in us.
There's a quality (or qualities) in our society that permits or encourages or allows this kind of thing to happen far too often. I don't know what that shadow is. Maybe it's because effectively treating mental illnesses is something only those with sufficient money have easy access to. Perhaps it's because as a culture we worship and glorify violence: just look at our television shows and our movies. Maybe it's because we'll allow our kids to watch a show where people are routinely murdered, but we won't let them watch two people making love. Maybe it's because when we see someone who is obviously troubled, we too often remain silent. Maybe it's all of those things or none of them.
I don't claim to know. But I do think it's a conversation we as a society need to have: without anger, without rancor, without demonizing those who don't think the same way we do. Because if we don't… well, this will just be another in an endless series of tragedies.
(And if you comment, know that I will be deleting comments that I find too contentious or fanatical. If you want to rant, you're welcome to do that on your own blog. Not here. On the other hand, I am interested in what you think -- if you can discuss that in a reasonable, polite manner.)
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>>>I don't claim to know. But I do think it's a conversation we as a society need to have: without anger, without rancor, without demonizing those who don't think the same way we do. Because if we don't… well, this will just be another in an endless series of tragedies.
I agree with all this, too.
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The majority of victims of violent death in our country are male. Yet the most impassioned and visible campaigns against violence talk about ending violence against women.
According to research cited in "Pink Brain, Blue Brain," by Lise Eliot, mothers are less likely to go to boys to comfort them if they cry or are hurt.
According to a fairly widely accepted description of US culture, men are discouraged from crying, from expressing emotions, and from asking for help (or directions). They are less likely to go to doctors for preventive health visits than women.
Does anyone know the numbers? Are they also less likely to seek mental health counseling?
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The points you raise would be an excellent and related discussion. Anecdotally (and statistically-invalid, of course), I know that when I was brought up, it was considered "un-manly" to kiss my father (Denise's family, with their Arab/Greek background, finally cured me of that issue....). And while my sisters were given dolls and such to play with, I had a BB gun and toy WWII-era weapons.
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It seems that few people on either side of this issue are willing to look at ALL the statistics in the way that you do here; they cherry-pick the ones that prove their point. Looking at ALL of them leads me inevitably to conclude that the basic problem is something in the culture. But what? As you say, all of these things or none of them, but we have to talk about it sanely, calmly, rationally. One factor I would include in possibilities is the heterogeneity of our population combined with the desire in much of it for homogeneity (their own, of course).
May I link?
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And yes, I'd agree that the heterogeneity of the population is a factor to be considered. Too many people feel threatened by the "other."
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Murder in general does seem to be trending downward in recent years, from the stats I've seen (with, of course, local variations). If we could reliably answer the "why," then maybe we could do something about it.
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The culture of people who watch television and movies: I am not in it, and not (for the most part) even aware of it. That's not to say I never watch any of those, but I watch any but rarely, and those I choose very carefully. The culture of people without healthcare: I have been in it, and I have found the minimal and inexpensive care that I needed: admittedly my state provides more services that many, and did a better job of it then. Lots of other cultures I don't belong to.....
I can name gun owners in my immediate circle whom I trust with the responsibility of guns, whom I do not trust and frankly am surprised they haven't shot someone, and whom I am leery of. I have handed guns responsibly and irresponsibly. Would you trust me with guns?
K.
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It appears that you are asking for facts about the future, and have ruled out facts about potential similar situations. I don't see how you are going to get an answer that is useful to you.
K.
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B
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While ease of access to guns and gun ownership on their own may not be factors, I think that combining ease of access with a culture that doesn't teach gun safety and responsibility from an early age is a problem.
Our mental health system, or more accurately, our lack of mental health treatment is another factor. Too many perpetrators of mass killings or attempted mass killings turn out to have mental illnesses. It isn't just that many people can't afford treatment though. There's also the issue of how we should handle people who have mental illness but don't want treatment. There is talk that Adam Lanza had a personality disorder. I haven't seen any mention of which one, but I know that people with cluster B personality disorders tend to be very resistant to admitting that they have a problem at all never mind getting help with it. How do we protect society as a whole from people who have antisocial personality disorder or borderline personality disorder without violating anyone's rights? Most of them never commit any terrible crimes but when they do, the crimes can be spectacularly terrible.
I think we need to do better at teaching children and young adults how to maintain mental health. I'm not talking just about people with an actual mental illness. People need to learn healthy ways of handling the things that happen in life and the emotions that go with them. Everyone gets angry sometimes. If some killers had learned how to manage anger as children, perhaps they would never have gotten to the point of snapping and shooting people.
Portrayal of guns and violence in entertainment is another factor. I don't think watching a few violent movies or playing violent games for a few hours here and there causes people to kill others but I can't see any good coming of people feeding themselves a constant diet of violence, blood and gore that doesn't have appropriate consequences. People do get desensitized to violence at some point and that can lead to inappropriate behavior. Some people get disconnected from reality after being too immersed in such entertainment.
The way the media covers these events may contribute to more of them happening too. I think the "going out in a blaze of glory" idea does appeal to some of the people who do these things. They like the idea of their name being known far and wide.
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You're right, of course, that American culture is vast and diverse and not all the same. I don't believe there's any way to remove violence entirely out of our society -- people get angry and people as a result do stupid things; people have mental health issues that affect their judgment as well -- but I do wonder if there isn't something(s) we can do to reduce the number of mass killings like the one yesterday.
As I said above, I've no solution to offer, however. I think the first step has to be determining the causal factors.
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As for the non-scientific argument, I wonder what would be different about our discussions on gun control if the majority of gun deaths in our country (most related to the Drug War) went away? Our gun violence problem is, for the most part, an artifact of that war. The next largest group of gun murders (interpersonal disputes and relationship collapses) are the kinds of deaths that really don't seem like they'd diminish much if there were no guns involved.
What if we stopped fighting the drug war and that weird bulge of gun violence in our national statistics went away? Thing is, I don't think that would change the frequency of this kind of thing. It'd just take one of the traditional planks of the gun control extremist argument out of play. The school shootings and work shootings would probably seem even MORE freakish and alarming against a quieter societal violence background.
Hell, I'm not even sure what I'm trying to say here. It's just a really hard conversation to have, especially for somebody like me with a foot in both camps. Socially, I'm more on the progressive/liberal side (non-christian academic-trained anarcho-socialist) but gun control is one of the places I cross the line. I am unconvinced by most of the arguments from the folks I generally consider my peers about the urgent necessity of prying all guns out of the hands of everybody but the cops and the army. And if you don't think that's the argument you're making, you're not listening to yourselves.
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Finding for every study an equal and opposite study is very frustrating. One of the problems, I think, is that the accepted definition of "mass murder" is apparently "at least 4 dead, not counting the shooter." But that seems to me a pointless limitation when one is trying to get at causes of violence, and "mass murder" (at least by that definition) is not always what is being studied. So how to assess, and how to compare?
I started more that ties in to what I just said, but it got long, so I am putting it in my LJ. You're invited over.
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The site is Cato.org, the article date is 2000, and their paragraph is short and over-simplified. I've seen recent posts elsewhere that say the requirements for license in Switzerland and Israel are stronger than Cato indicates. I suggest you find a better source.
One factor to look for would be, just what kind of weapons are licensed. How many allow the number of bullets shot in the short time of these US incidents?
/Edited to correct italics/
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The problem I see with the WaPo charts, though, is that it's "guns per 100 people" -- and it would seem to me that a better comparison would be "gun ownership as a percentage of population" -- in other words, how many individual people (as a percentage of the overall population) own a gun or guns? That would eliminate any skewing of the data by people who own several guns. If one person in a group of 10 owns seven guns and the others own none, then in the WaPo charts that would be seven guns for every 10 people (70%), whereas it's really one gun owner in ten people (10%).
Of course, then there's the issue that such data could only account for legally-owned and registered firearms, not for illegal ones...
However, despite the squabbling over data and charts and what they prove or disprove, I have to believe that reasonable people can have a reasonable discussion of how to overhaul the gun laws in this country. To your last point, as I say in the post, I would personally be in favor of making either entirely illegal or making it very difficult to own any military assault weapon, even those being sold in a "civilian" stripped-down form. I fail to see any valid reason why a normal citizen has a need to own such -- or to possess magazines capable of holding large numbers of rounds.
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http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/brothers-in-arms-yes-but-the-us-needs-to-get-rid-of-its-guns-20120731-23ct7.html
Research published in 2010 in the American Journal of Law and Economics found that firearm homicides, in Australia, dropped 59 per cent between 1995 and 2006. There was no offsetting increase in non-firearm-related murders. Researchers at Harvard University in 2011 revealed that in the 18 years prior to the 1996 Australian laws, there were 13 gun massacres (four or more fatalities) in Australia, resulting in 102 deaths. There have been none in that category since the Port Arthur laws.
A key component of the 1996 measure, which banned the sale, importation and possession of all automatic and semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, was a national buy-back scheme involving the compulsory forfeiture of newly illegal weapons. Between 1996 and 1998 more than 700,000 guns were removed and destroyed. This was one-fifth of Australia's estimated stock of firearms. The equivalent in the US would have been 40 million guns. Australia's action remains one of the largest destructions of civilian firearms.
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There are two groups of people, the first can't imagine their life without arms, others wish to impose legal restrictions on its free circulation and ownership. Two groups of people who do not listen to each other and do not want to find points of convergence of their positions.
But the solution of problem is in the rapprochement and mutual concessions.
Historically, the United States is a country of "armed individuals" (as your story is seen from Mars), for that reason, a group of supporters of the restrictions must arm themselves, or if you like, "get back to basics." This means a ban gun-free zones and that means you’ll get an extremely armed country. I understand people who do not want to have anything with «militarism», but in my opinion, the only way to change the position of the gun freaks, is to become a one of them…
The group of supporters of arms would have to make major concessions on restricted free sale, no AK-47 and so/// (aren’t you think that Mars attacks?). Ban a secondary weapons market (USA is a rich country, you can live with that), prohibit possession of anti-tank weapons by individuals (russians busy with their chores, please believe me ...)))
That transition to extreme armed nation (and severe restrictions on arms trafficking), would reduce the number of crimes, making them meaningless because of the extremely high
risk immediate punishment ...
Please excuse my poor English///
Please accept my sincere condolences to the families of the victims///
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However, the culture is completely different. Violence is not glorified, and people care about each other. It feels like a completely different place (which it is). I have never felt at risk there.
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A different culture, yes -- and another indication that the US's proclivity toward violence is embedded in our own culture (and will thus probably be difficult and slow to change...)
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But... my hope is that the middle can eventually prevail. Right now, the loudest voices we hear are the extremes of each side; those in the middle, those most likely to desire compromise and those most willing to work toward solutions that neither of the extreme ends of the spectrum are going to like because they are compromises, are being drowned out.
But if the middle happens to hold the majority, maybe there's hope.
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I can see someone out there thinking "Hey, I could beat that, and then I'd be the most famous one of all!"
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What I also wanted to say is that yes, it is a cultural problem, which makes it difficult to change, but not impossible. What we need to do first is actually start making that change.
For a cute little bit or trivia, the woodland camo still is use there is referred to as "Vierfruchtpijama", or "Four Fruit Pijama", referring to the popular four fruit jam typically made of plums and berries.