TL;DR – Major conclusions:
- Violence is decreasing in America, with murder down to the levels existing in the 1960s
- It isn’t a mental health issue in the sense that a mental health diagnosis does not cause someone to kill someone else, although there is a strong correlation between mental health and shooters
- Gun control laws aren’t necessarily very effective (consider Chicago), since criminals don’t follow the law
- The real problem is that we no longer accept responsibility for our own actions and have pushed the natural moral law aside as if it didn’t exist.
There has been a recent spate of shootings on crowds of people. Of particular interest to me is the one in El Paso on Saturday, 3 Aug 2019, as I have a fair amount of family there. Such events are atrocious and must be condemned, but the question that always comes up is how do we prevent them in the future?
Generally, the internet and media will break into 2 camps: 1) the shooters are mentally ill and we need to work on this, or 2) the problem is the access to the “assault weapons” (or at the extreme, all guns) that are sometimes used in these events.
Those who say the problem is mental health are lambasted, particularly by the professional organizations involved in earning a living working with the mentally ill, as stigmatizing the mentally ill. Only a small fraction of the mentally ill engage in these activities, so the real problem is the guns.
Those who say the problem is lack of gun control are lambasted, particularly by the various pro 2nd Amendment organizations which profit from the sale of guns, as stigmatizing the individual who owns guns. Only of small fraction of gun owners engage in these activities, so the real problem is mental health.
I can sympathize with both sides of this argument as both a licensed professional counselor and a life member of the National Rifle Association.
What I would like to do in this (long) article is look at some of the statistics related to violent crime, some of the issues with mental health, some of the issues with respect to gun control, and finally my thoughts on the real problem and way to move forward.
Violent Crime Statistics
For the following discussion, the data used was drawn from the U.S. Dept of Justice and FBI databases/tools that can be accessed here: http://www.ucrdatatool.gov/ This data only goes to 2017, as it takes some time for the various law enforcement agencies to vet any given year’s data and provide it to the public.
Every time one of these horrendous events occurs, we hear how things are getting worse and society is becoming more and more violent. But what does actual data on violence indicate? In the U.S., looking at all violent crimes (with or without a gun involved) from 1960 until 2017, we see the following rates (note that these are in rates or # of events per 100,000 people to account for changes in population size – the rate is more important than the total number in looking at true trends):
While violent crime rates are higher than in 1960, note they have been in a steady decline since around 1992. There has been a slight upturn in the last 2 years, but the data is insufficient to see if this is a trend or a blip. Bottom line: there is less violence than any time since the early 1970s.
If I narrow the data down to look just at murders and non-negligent manslaughter (i.e. all crimes were someone died at another’s hand, except by accident), we see the following:
Again, over the last couple of years of data, there has been an upturn, which may be turning back down, but the data is insufficient to see if this is a trend or not. An actual trend is that murders have been decreasing since the mid-1990s. In addition, the murder rate is on-par with the murder rate in the mid-1960s. Note that the 9/11 terrorist attack can be seen in the blip in 2001.
The bottom line from this data is that violence is not getting worse, it is only getting spotlighted more due to the instantaneous media capability we have and mankind’s propensity to want to hear about the bad things going on without paying attention to the good.
What about the role of guns in these crimes? Unfortunately, getting this data as a function of year is a much more painful process, as they only report the most recent year in their reports, so I would have to go back over 60 reports to get the trends. Not enough energy for that, sorry.
For the most recent available data, 2017, there were 15,128 murders in the U.S. Of these, 10,982, or 2/3, were firearm related. Interestingly, only 403 were committed with rifles, which would include the so called “assault weapons” that everyone is up in arms about. In terms of the rates (# per 100,000 population) used in the above graphs, the murder rate is 4.6, firearm murder rate is 3.4, and rifle murder rate is 0.1. At the same time, the number of murders committed using knives, hands/feet, and other non-firearm weapons is 4,146 or a rate of 1.3, or 10 times the rifle murder rate.
For comparison purposes, during 2015 (last year with data from the CDC) there were 638,169 abortions for a rate of 198.8. Similarly, if we consider motor vehicle deaths, the 2018 number was 40,000 for a rate of 12.2, according to the National Safety Council. I’ll come back to this information later.
Mental Health Issues
The “it’s a mental health problem” side of the debate takes a position that it is because of the individual that these acts occur, which must imply that the shooters have mental health problems. Why else would they kill all of these people?
Their opponents, such as the American Psychological Association, say that this approach stigmatizes mental health issues, resulting in fewer people seeking the care they need. They argue that research has shown that only small percentage of violent acts are committed with people with a mental health diagnosis or in treatment for mental health issues.
The National Association of Mental Illness (NAMI) states that about 1 in 5 individuals have a diagnosis of mental illness. The Treatment Advocacy Center has a background paper indicating that even with the most narrow definitions approximately 1/3 of mass shooters have mental health issues. This would indicate to me that mental health issues are a significant concern in these events.
That aside, I do have issues with going the mental health route, as that has a tendency to shift the blame from the individual to the illness. The reality is that mental health diagnoses are not based on any quantifiable clinical data, but rather simply on looking at clusters of symptoms and/or behaviors.
The psychology supporters (my master’s is in counseling psychology) try to make it appear that psychology and diagnosis is a hard science but in reality it is not even close (my doctorate is in physics). For instance, in my practice I have met close to 200 individuals with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. However, when questioned about how their disorder manifests, it turns out that I have actually only met 2-3 individuals who actually qualify for the bipolar diagnosis. The others really just have issues with impulse control and emotional reactivity.
Generally speaking, mental health diagnoses are really maladaptive coping mechanisms for how the individual perceives their life and not some fundamentally organic problem in their brain.
Gun Control
It is a truism that if we were to get rid of all guns, then violent crimes committed by guns would go to zero. This is, of course, an unrealistic goal, as the U.S. is estimated to have 120 small arms per 100 residents (Small Arms Survey). This goal also ignores that the criminal element would find ways to either import or construct small arms for their use.
The gun control side of the argument says that a big part of the problem is the readily available number of guns, particularly “assault weapons”, that can kill a large number of people quickly. If we could get rid of those guns, or at least limit who has access to them, then the violent deaths would decrease substantially.
On the other side there are two arguments. First, many argue that such controls don’t work and cite examples such as Chicago, which has some of the strictest gun control laws in the country, yet the highest murder rates. They go on to argue that even though the U.S. has the highest number of guns per household in the world, they only rank 41st in the world with respect to homicide rate by firearm, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC). Here is an interesting look at the increase in gun ownership compared to the gun homicide rate (caveat lector: I haven’t verified this data):
The second argument relates to the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which (not so) clearly states: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” The pro-2A side indicates that this clearly states that citizens have the right to arms. The pro-gun-control sides says that this only applies to the militia and that it doesn’t apply to modern “assault weapons”. The Supreme Court case of District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008 said that the Second Amendment does apply to individuals and not specifically members of the militia.
The reason the Second Amendment was put in place was that the founding fathers had just come off the war for independence from England and recognized the importance of having available the means of freeing themselves from a tyrannical government. The Amendment basically says “we recognize that the government needs a militia to protect the state, so to protect the people from the government gone wrong, the people are allowed to have guns.” (Interpretation by me.)
What is the reality of relationship between gun control and violence? Unfortunately, we may never know, but Rand conducted a study reported in 2018 that basically found for the most part the evidence for the effectiveness of laws regulating guns is inconclusive or limited with a few minor exceptions, such as laws about restricting access to guns by children and related unintentional injury.
Another issue the gun-control side tries to push is the use of background checks. The problem with this is that there are already background checks in place when you purchase a weapon. The problem with the checks is that not all of the various law enforcement agencies and mental health facilities do a sufficient job in reporting their information, often due to lack of resources.
There are other aspects of gun-control that should be mentioned in passing, but I won’t expand upon them: the UK, with complete gun-control, has a violent crime rate of 2,034 versus the U.S. rate of 466; the FBI has found that states that introduced concealed carry laws have reduced violent crimes by 3-8%; nearly all (until the most recent) mass shootings have explicitly occurred at sites that are gun free (schools, theaters); Kennesaw GA mandated that every household have a gun and the burglary rate dropped 89%.
A final point about gun-control laws is that the individuals involved in these mass shootings are already breaking the law (murder is illegal), so why would they suddenly start obeying the law when it comes to access to firearms? Without eliminating all firearms on the face of the earth, criminals will be able to get access to firearms, regardless of the law.
The Real Problem and a Way Forward?
I think the real problem with what is going on was something I saw on my Facebook feed after the El Paso shooting. A cousin reposted a meme with Gloria Steinem essentially saying that if we regulated guns like abortion was regulated, then the problem would go away. Of course, as I pointed out earlier the abortion rate is 198.8, while the firearm homicide rate is 3.4. In addition, every person who goes in for an abortion is seeking to kill a human being, while only 1 in 30,000 guns (rough estimate) are actually used in a homicide.
The real point of this is that in our modern society we have learned to devalue life to the point of thinking of killing an unborn human as simply a woman’s health choice, rather than the act of murder that it is. This devaluing of life spreads into other areas, so that if I am treated poorly, there isn’t a problem with killing other people (Columbine), or if I don’t like illegal immigrants it is okay to kill other people (El Paso).
This is the real problem. It is not about guns or mental health (per se), but about a society devaluing life and saying things such as that morals are relative. There are absolute moral standards that exist (killing is bad, stealing is bad, and the other elements of the natural moral law found in the Ten Commandments), whether we agree with them or not.
This is tied to the increase detachment and even disbelief in God that is occurring in society. As a physicist and nearly a theologian (only my thesis and comprehensive exam left – both of which I should be working on rather than this), I can gladly argue all the rational reasons to believe in the existence of God (although not at this moment). That disbelief leads to a nihilism and an attitude of “I can do whatever I want.”
We need to re-instill a sense of the importance of our own moral responsibility for each of our actions. Mental health issues don’t change this responsibility, although perhaps they make it more difficult to respond appropriately. The gun is not the responsible party in these attacks. It is the person pulling the trigger on the gun. If it is the gun, then we should more rapidly be getting rid of abortions and cars, as they cause far more deaths.