Guns Or Roses: Identifying the Problem in Mass Shooting Incidents
These days, it seems like every time we hear a report anywhere of a gun going off in anger or in crime, or even by accident, the old divide in society rears its head again: pro-gun vs anti-gun lobbies scream loudly and push their agendas.
Digging In
Both sides end up digging in their heels, stubbornly holding to their own positions without any apparent sense of compromise. Each side uses each crisis to whip up their own support base and arguments end up spilling over on social media, mass media, and in interpersonal dealings everywhere.
Every time we hear of a mass shooting somewhere in the country, we can be sure that three things will happen.
Liberals will instantly screech that “guns kill people” and loudly chant that all guns should be made illegal.
Conservatives will instantly counter “people kill people, and invoke the gods of the NRA to reiterate that the Second Amendment gives them the right to “bear arms.”
Both sides will then completely ignore the elephant in the room.
Incidents like these clearly show that no one in power really cares about solving the real problem in this country that causes the a number of the mass shooting incidents in the first place: the lack of adequate mental health care.
Since we were inundated with two mass shootings in the last couple of weeks, let’s review them.
Buffalo
On May 14, 2022, perpetrator Payton Gendron, an 18 year-old self-described ethno-nationalist and supporter of white supremacy and similar extreme far-right conspiracy theories, murdered 10 black people in a Buffalo, NY area Tops grocery store, while injuring three.
According to investigative reports, he had cleared background checks to purchase a shotgun and an AR-15 style rifle as soon as he turned 18. However, investigation revealed he had purchased a high-capacity ammunition magazine in Pennsylvania since such things were illegal in his home state of New York.
There is more than sufficient evidence to document his status as an extremely-far-right conspiracy theory believer and white nationalist. However, one thing in the reports does not seem to be as prominently featured.
In June 2021, Gendron had been investigated for threatening other students at his high school. Also, he was referred to a hospital for a mental health evaluation after commenting to a teacher regarding his plans after the school year, “I want to murder and commit suicide.” He was held under voluntary commitment for only a day and a half, and was released. There is no evidence of any further mental health treatment or evaluations being done on him prior to the incident.
Uvalde
Also known as the Robb Elementary School shooting, this occurred several days after the Buffalo incident, on May 24, 2022 in Uvalde, TX. Salvador Ramos, an 18 year-old former student of the school, fatally shot 19 students and 2 teachers while injuring 17 others.
The police were criticized by the public and public officials for their overall handling of the incident. It was discovered that the police officers waited for more than an hour to breach the building. The police also got into violent conflicts between themselves and and parents and other civilians who were attempting to enter the school to rescue children when they saw that the police were refusing to do so.
Ramos, the perpetrator of the incident, was investigated and found to have issues which certainly impacted his mental health. According to reports, he was frequently bullied at school due to a speech impediment and his poor family background. Although he had no specifically documented mental health issues, an investigation revealed that he had searched the term sociopath on the Internet and received an email about possible treatment. He was known to use the Internet frequently to live-stream his abuse and killing of animals, and verbal threats to kidnap and rape girls. He was also fascinated by guns.
It was also revealed that Ramos engaged in self-harm activities. His home life lacked consistent parental figures, and he lived in relative poverty. He was identified by his school district as being at risk but apparently this was never addressed or treated. According to the report from the Texas House committee on the incident, while there were plenty of warning signs as to his mental health problems, he apparently received no mental health treatment.
Extreme Reactions
Nearly every Democrat in power feels the need to follow, in a tight goose-step, the established party line that guns are bad for the general population to have. This policy stems from the concept of liberalism to begin with: that the populace must be governed, and freedoms dictated by, a large government. The perception that gun ownership is an expression of the freedom and independence which makes the people less reliant on an all-powerful government may be inaccurate, but many liberals tend to have that perception. The liberal end-goal through multiple stages of gun restrictions, is a total ban on private ownership of all firearms. Through this process, liberals ignore the real problem.
On the other side of the political aisle, there are sufficient number of Republicans in power who feel threatened by gun regulations. They tend to perceive that their constituencies are all gun owners strongly committed to the Second Amendment, and thus they fight against any legislation that would initiate mandatory gun confiscations, restrictions on types of guns permitted to be sold and owned, and any pre- or post-sale review of the fitness of a person to own a firearm (aka background checks). By spending all of their time fighting these issues, many conservatives ignore the real problem.
The Real Problem
Let’s make one thing crystal clear: THE GUN ITSELF IS NOT THE PROBLEM.
The REAL problem that no one seems to want to address, is the appalling lack of mental healthcare and support in this country.
Clarifying the Issue
I came across an article some time ago that discussed four topics essential for improving mental health strategies in our country in relation to gun violence.
When we consider the mental healthcare implications in gun violence perpetrators, we find two erroneous beliefs by some of the public.
Some have a mistaken impression that all perpetrators of gun violence are “mentally deranged”. There is also a mistaken impression out there that gun violence is its own separate mental health diagnosis.
Neither of these impressions are actually correct, but pressing them only serves to hurt the ability of our healthcare professionals and our government in actually solving the problem.
Predictors
It would be impossible to predict with 100% accuracy which person with mental illness in any degree is going to turn so violent that they would resort to a gun to commit mass murder. So, painting all mass murderers with a broad brush of mental illness is not helpful.
Many people with mental illness in our country are not violent in any degree. Those who can be helped by mental health therapy and/or medication, should be able to receive these services easily, either through mental health specialists or their primary care providers, many of whom readily diagnose “common” psychiatric disorders and are completely able to prescribe medications to help control the condition.
But studies have shown a potential links to sets of circumstances that may the better predictors of violent behavior among people. If we can identify these markers in people early enough to intervene and provide adequate mental health services and ongoing support, we may be able to stop many incidences of gun violence before they start.
Learning from History
If we look at the history of school shootings for example, we can see that a number of the perpetrators of school shootings, from Columbine’s Eric Harris & Dylan Klebold through to Ramos at Uvalde, had sets of circumstances in their lives that combined to make them the gun violence perpetrators that they turned out to be.
Beyond the circumstances noted above for Ramos, both Harris and Klebold were widely believed to both suffer from clinical depression; indeed Harris was prescribed the antidepressant Luvox which was said by some to have worked in a manner opposite to intent and made him more aggressive. Unfortunately, no one apparently followed up with Harris to ensure he was receiving appropriate and ongoing mental health treatment.
In addition, circumstances such as problematic family structures, social constructs, academic performance, and adherence to belief in antisocial or extremist viewpoints (including radical religious, radical political, racist, or white supremacist beliefs) may all be markers for mental disorders in certain individuals, that can lead to violent behavior.
Changing Policy
Keeping with the school focus for now, the effort to catch and respond appropriately to abnormal patterns in our youth would require the wholesale change in attitude amongst school districts and governments toward policies to provide more funding and support for mental healthcare. It would also require a wholesale attitude change on behalf of teachers, who deal with these young people on a daily basis during the school years.
Now, I know that a number of teachers are very conscientious and look out for the welfare of their students. Such teachers will readily report issues as they see them arise, because the overall attitude is to give every student every possibility to succeed, knowing that the patterns described earlier could hamper success and happiness.
Hampering Success
However, the ongoing success of such an effort is hampered by three issues.
Lack of Motivation
First is the sheer number of educators who either feel it is not their job to monitor students for potential mental health issues, or (let’s face it) are too damn lazy to care. Such teachers see their work as a burden, not a gift, and they maintain an attitude such as “the least I have to do, the better.”
Privacy Concerns
Second are privacy concerns. Some teachers and administrators feel that reporting potential markers of growing mental health, interpersonal, or social issues to appropriate health or school officials would violate the student’s privacy.
Certainly the recent “gender identity” push hasn’t made the privacy concern any easier, since some teachers have been called on the carpet for inadvertently not addressing a student by whatever gender, identifier, or pronoun he or she chooses to use at any particular time. It’s easy to see then, where many teachers could feel reluctant to report genuine concerns about a student’s behavior, attitudes, or performance.
Parental Guidance
Maybe we should call this one the “lack of parental guidance”.
In my day, my parents – and just about every other parent I knew – were deeply involved on our well-being and behavior as children. They took an active interest in what we did, where we went, with whom we spoke. Any behavioral problems were rapidly identified and addressed.
Although not very parent some 50-odd years ago acted as same, the level of involvement, attention, and intervention was the norm, not the exception.
These days, the situation is largely reversed. Children seem to be left to their own devices by their parents, who tend to take less interest and involvement in their lives as they start growing older. It also seems that some parents don’t want to “stifle” or inhibit their children from making any decision, even if they may disagree with those decisions.
A perfect example of this is the recent trend of many parents to allow children as young as 6-years-old (and sometimes younger) to decide if they “are” or want to be known as the opposite of their birth sex. Psychologically, such behavior is diagnosed as gender dysphoria, but today’s parents seem to want to ignore the psychological problem here, and instead blindly accept the modern social attitude that a long documented mental disorder is actually normal.
Culture of Failure
Whatever the reason, the lack of appropriate monitoring and oversight of “red flags” for mental health issues which may (again not always) lead to potential violent behavior in our youth, causes a culture of failure. Because of the multifaceted failures, we can too often let slip by mental health issues which will harm people sooner or later in a number of ways.
Mental disorders that go undiagnosed or poorly diagnosed, or even diagnosed but poorly treated or not treated at all, can lead to a pattern of destructive behaviors which may (clearly not always) turn violent. Again, Columbine’s Eric Harris is a perfect example of this, where the parents reportedly took no interest in their child’s welfare. The local mental health system also failed him for follow-up when he reported problems with Luvox but nothing was done. Add to this the company he ended up keeping, and it’s not hard to see how a poorly-treated mental disorder played a major role that led to the set of circumstances that turned him into the mass murderer that he was.
Certainly Not
I said before that we cannot broad-brush all mass shooters as being mentally deranged. Likewise, we cannot legitimately claim that every person with a mental disorder is going to turn into a mass murderer.
So we must not stigmatize every person with mental illness. Neither should we allow potential mental illness to go undiagnosed or untreated.
The goal is certainly certainly not to create a Nazi-like culture of fear of being spied on by informants who would turn them into the Gestapo for comments, beliefs, or behaviors that went against the Nazi regime.
The Goal
Clearly, the goal is to create the policies and processes by which schools, parents, law enforcement, government, NGOs, and social entities like clubs and religious institutions, can all work together to identify problems in their students/members. By doing so, we can create a “see something, say something” culture among our youth and indeed all of our citizens with the aim of helping people, not stigmatizing them or “ratting them out.”
By “seeing something” aka, looking for specific, well established markers of potential mental illness, we need to be – and feel – empowered to “say something”, that is, being unafraid to discuss it with the person themselves, report concerns to school authorities, and offer easily-accessible options to help people.
Changing the Focus
Unfortunately, each time a mass shooting incident occurs, the focus is far less on the background of the perpetrator, his/her circumstances and/or mental status that caused him/her to conduct the crime. The focus is almost immediately a heels-dug-in politically-partisan screaming match that matches the particular person’s sociopolitical viewpoint.
Democrats would rather spend billions on mandatory “buybacks” which amount to nothing more than confiscation by bribe or threat, rather than use all those billions to fix the mental healthcare crisis in the US.
Republicans would rather keep screaming “second-amendment rights” rather than see that some compromise on background checks and purchase restrictions is certainly appropriate.
The yellow media just cares about obfuscation of the facts, in order to benefit a liberal agenda to which they have invested so much.
A Parallel?
But does the “gun” really matter?
In the United Kingdom, handguns and some other types of firearms have been outright banned for many years. But that hasn’t stopped people intent on killing people from doing so… they just changed weapons.
There has been for many years, a “knife crime” epidemic in the UK. In fact, according to statistics (here, though this site is known to frequently update so figures may be dated later than the date of this post), over 200 murders were committed in the UK by knife in 2021 alone.
There was also a mass murder of 39 people in 2019, all found dead in a refrigerated truck. Investigation led police to believe all 39 were being trafficked, and that various people were responsible for the murders. The weapon of choice? Freezing.
Clearly, people don’t need a gun to commit murder.
The Real Problem
Everyone – liberals and conservatives, gun owners and non-gun owners alike – need to wake up to the real problem. The real problem isn’t actually the gun itself.
It’s the person using the gun. It’s the circumstance, the mental state, and the background of the person holding the gun that will help us identify the real problem.
Certainly not every mass shooting can be attributed to mental illness of the perpetrator, so not all mass shootings will be stopped by focusing entirely on the mental health of the would-be perpetrator.
Likewise, solving the mental healthcare crisis in this country won’t reduce the number of guns “on the street” and won’t address the inadequate system that literally allows certain mentally ill people to purchase firearms. That’s a topic I’ll need to write more on at a later time.
For now though, I’m going to focus on the mental health of would-be school and other mass shooters, and how we can at least solve that problem.
Stay tuned.
