On 2012-12-17, at 2:27 PM, Wojtek S wrote:
> Dennis: "You said these things are less likely to happen elsewhere and
> more likely to happen here."
>
> [WS:] I said it is less likely to happen in cultures in which guns and
> narratives glorifying them are less common. The US is not the only
> country where both are common. So things happen everywhere, but in
> some places they happen more often than in others. And if you peruse
> the tables that you quoted you will find some countries appear more
> often than others and also that certain occupations, such as ex
> soldier or ex police officer feature there rather prominently. Also
> the means by which most of those acts were committed - most of them
> are firearms. If anything, this shows that access to firearms is a
> factor here.
>
> I also disagree with your and Jordan's characterization of these
> events as 'aberrations.' By the same logic, plane crashes are rare,
> so we cannot meaningfully talk about causes or contributing factors -
> which is nonsense. Rare events have causes too, just just cannot be
> investigated by methods that presuppose regular occurrences (such as
> most statistical methods.) But even statistical evidence can be
> useful here, e.g. when you examine per capita fire arms related deaths
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
> The US is on the top of this list among third world war-torn and
> gang/warlord infested countries. Our northern neighbor Canada has a
> rate that is half that of the US, and European countries are a small
> fraction of the US rate. This tells you something, does not it? Mass
> shootings are extreme events and all extremities are rare by
> definition, but they are an integral part of a larger pattern.
>
> It is not just the availability of guns per se but also the
> availability of cultural narratives that glamorize their use. The US
> is one of countries where both factors are present but not the only
> one, of course. It is, however, the only developed country in this
> category. I happen to think that gun control is a mere diversion from
> a much troubling subject - the anti-social, psychopathic even, nature
> of the US society. Gun culture is but one manifestation of this,
> other manifestations involve gut aversion to anything social by a
> majority of the population, the popularity of survivalist ideology,
> lack of social services, etc. You cannot blame that just on
> capitalism as other capitalist countries differ in all those respects
> quite significantly. Nor is it unique to the US as many third world
> shitholes share similar features. But something is definitely rotten
> here and that something comes to the surface with each mass shooting.
Mass Murderer Psychobabble Misses Gun Policy Point By Allen Frances Duke University Huffington Post August 2 2012
In his recent New York Times piece, David Brooks provides a psychological analysis of mass murderers, concluding that: "The crucial point is that the dynamics are internal, not external. These killers are primarily the product of psychological derangements, not sociological ones." He goes on to make the astounding claim that better relationships and treatment can help to prevent mass killings.
Brooks' naïve psychobabble allows him blithely to dismiss the role of public policy. He would have us focus our attention on the mind of each individual mass murderer, ignoring the issue of why the U.S. consistently produces so many mass murderers. There is no reason to assume that we have the highest gun death rate in the developed world because we have more deranged people, it's just that our potential killers are so much better armed. Brooks misses the point of both disciplines when he so ardently embraces a psychiatry he doesn't understand and so casually dismisses a sociology that actually can provide important data.
Psychiatry has no way to predict mass murder and no way to prevent it. Many mass murderers never see a mental health worker before going ballistic. Even those who do are as impossible to identify as needles in a large haystack. Violent thoughts are not uncommon among psychiatric patients, but vanishingly few will ever act on them. Future mass murderers are far too rare to be selected out of the crowd before the deed is done. Psychiatry can do wonders in treating psychiatric disorder, but strikes out in predicting or preventing violence. Brooks is misinformed to offer treatment as a solution -- his other suggestion (better relationships) is even more fatuous.
Sociology first became a valuable informant of policy more than a century ago when Durkheim noted the statistical predictability of rates of suicide and violence and their systematic variability in different countries. It is impossible to predict which specific individual will kill himself or others (and certainly to say when and how), but easy to predict how many people will kill themselves or others in each country in any given year.
There is no indication that psychiatry can change the statistics of violence or the proclivity of the violent. We need to look instead to sociological data and their policy implications. Statistics tell us that we have a saturation of extraordinarily deadly weapons unparalleled in our own history and unique in the developed world - and simultaneously that we also have the highest rates of gun related injuries. The burden of proof is on those who want to refute the seemingly obvious causal connection and to deny its policy implications.
Brooks' command of facts is as weak as his theories. According to Brooks: "People are trying to use the Aurora killings as a pretext to criticize America's gun culture or to call for stricter gun control laws. This doesn't happen after European or Asian mass killings." He ignores the fact that after the 1996 Port Arthur mass murder, a conservative government in Australia overcame strident opposition (especially among its own conservative constituents) to replace lenient gun control measures with tight and effective ones. And Brooks should know that people in other developed countries don't have to soul search about a gun culture because they don't have one and don't have to call for stricter gun control laws because they are already in place.
Homicide is as old as Cain. The capacity to kill had clear survival value, is built into the human genome, and will never be completely eliminated. But killing can be enhanced or contained depending on public policies. People will always find ways of killing people, but the number killed depends on the number and nature of the weapons available to the potential killers. It is a statistical numbers game and we stack the odds against the victims when we allow the killers easy access to semiautomatics and thousands of rounds of ammo.
Brooks' should stick to expressing his policy views (he supports gun control) and drop any attempts at amateur psychologizing. His observations would be silly, but harmless, were he not such an influential voice. As it stands, Brooks facilitates the existing suppression of a serious policy discussion on gun control which allows a mindless spread of ever more destructive weaponry. Gun control shouldn't be shouted down, or lobbied away, or rationalized with pop psychology. We need a sustained and serious debate on how best to deal with the public health problem of violent death, not wishful thinking.
Allen Frances is a professor emeritus at Duke University and was the chairman of the DSM-IV task force.