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Health & Fitness

What Really Causes Mass Shootings

Why we can and should enact laws regulating possession of guns and ammunition

I can't remember crying while watching a news story the way I did while looking
at the photos of those beautiful children at Newtown -- not even during the grisly images of the Twin Towers massacre on 9/11   And, to a certain extent, grief has stayed with me as though, somehow, those children were part of my family.  One of my daughters is a teacher, and I know she'd be one to try to protect her little students.  I know it.  The slaughter at Newtown has gotten into my soul, and I know I'll never get over it.  I can't imagine the blackness of the world in which their parents much be living.

I even felt grief for Adam Lanza.  The demons that drove him to shoot his own mother, those children and then himself must have been ghastly.  I don't even want to try to imagine what was going on in his head.  But you know, nobody could have predicted that on that day at that time he was going to grab his mother's gun (WHY was that accessible to him?) and commit mayhem.  As a Clinical Psychologist who worked seven years on an admitting ward at St.  Elizabeths Hospital, I can tell you that that kind of violence is unpredictable.  Unpredictable.

Oh, we can talk about risk factors and do risk assessments and score tests, and I have.  But we can only use those tests to classify someone as a member of a group who could conceivably become homicidal or suicidal.  We cannot predict the time or place or manner of the violent behavior in that person's case.  And some mass shooters don't even fall into any of the categories one would think predictive of such behavior (you know, drug users, binge drinkers, people with serious mental illness).

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Identifying violence-prone adolescent males is even harder because many of them go through a period of monosyllabic social withdrawal. For the general public, there's no screening tool for violence and nobody expects that there ever will be.  We really are pretty helpless. 

But as I looked at the photographs of those sweet-looking children whose parents had probably already hidden away their Christmas presents, I screamed at the television set and then at my husband. "THIS CANNOT STAND!  We have to do something! " I think I even scared our dog.

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And talking about better mental health with more nuanced privacy restrictions so teachers can talk to parents who can talk to the police would be a very good thing.  But really?  The mental health conversation can also be used as a big distraction.  It is being used, in certain quarters, as a big distraction...a substitute for what would really help.

It's the guns, Stupid! I yell at the television a lot. Did you know that while Adam Lanza was shooting those children, a man with a knife was running amok in a Japanese school?  He hurt some people...maybe about 20.  But because there are no guns allowed in Japan, people were hurt, but not killed.  It's the guns.  It's the guns.  If it hadn't been for the availability of that nightmarish- sounding weapon of mass destruction, maybe Adam would  have had to use a knife or a scissors or a bat or a rolling pin.  Maybe he'd have just beat his mother. Awful!  Scary! But the number of deaths could have been zero.  "It's the guns, Stupid!" just keeps
running through my mind. 

As Adam Gopnik said when summarizing Franklin Zimring's findings[1]

"...the central insight of the modern study of criminal violence is that all crime ... is at some level opportunistic.  Building a low annoying wall against it is almost as effective as building a high impenetrable one...Those who hold themselves together enough to be capable of killing anyone are subject to the same rules of opportunity as sane people.  Even madmen need opportunities to display their madness and behave in different ways depending on the possibilities at hand."[2]

Okay. I am not arguing here against the Second Amendment.  With America's history, that would be like spitting in the ocean to make it less saline.  In fact, I earned a sharpshooters medal in high school with an M-1 rifle (we had a shooting range in our high school).  That's fine with me.  We don't need to get rid of the Second Amendment. 

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion in the landmark decision that essentially stripped the "well-regulated militia" clause from the second amendment. That decision made possession of guns an individual right. But in that decision Scalia said,

"...nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms."[3]

So it's constitutional for the for the federal government to pass some regulations. I'd like the NRA to back down a little. I'd like straw-purchasers of guns to go to jail.  I'd like the people who are coming to Virginia to buy the guns that they are shipping to terrorists to go to jail.  I want it harder for just anybody to own a weapon of mass destruction!  Because it's the guns!

[1] Zimring, Franklin, The City That Became Safe. Nw York's Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control, Oxford Press. 2012. isbn 978-0-19-984442-5

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