Christopher Dorner: Bonnie & Clyde: A Link in the Chain

The human mind seems capable of infinite quirks. Contrary to common sense, outlaws attract a cadre of admirers, people glorifying criminals, even to the point of condoning their murderous crimes.

An editorial by Charles M. Blow in The New York Times on February 16, highlights a recent case –mythologizing Dorner- to the point of portraying his actions “as righteous retribution.”  A former Navy reservist and policeman, Dorner wrote a manifesto threatening the lives of policemen and their families, including children; gunned down four people; and initiated the “largest police manhunt in history.” 

In popular culture glorifying criminals is known as the “Bonnie and Clyde Syndrome.” Serial killers-especially those who have received lots of media publicity- receive a lot of fan mail.

A criminal is an outsider who sabotages society in some way. If we probe deeply enough, each of us can find aspects of the  “outsider” in our psyches. Most of us want to be insiders and affiliate with other insiders. But an outsider may be motivated to identify with another outsider-even a criminal. (This observation dovetails with my last blog of February 18, the false dichotomy between “Them vs. Us.”)

The common phenomenon of “tunnel vision,” the tendency to focus on one concern while glossing over other important details, partially explains the identification some of us have with the outlaw as an outsider. Like many others, Dorner felt victimized by the police force; but unlike most, he set out on a murderous rampage.

The term hybristophilia, coined by the sexologist Professor John Money, has some relevance here. In this sexual paraphilia, an individual derives arousal from having a partner known to have committed an “outrage” or a crime.

Sheila Isenberg, author of Women Who Love Men Who Kill, interviewed many hybristophiles and discovered that some women recognized the moral wrongness, while others harbored delusions, including idealized fantasies.

My only clinical experience with a hydristophile was a woman, who practiced prostitution (herself a societal outsider) and wrote love letters to the Menendez brothers, Lyle and Erik, shortly after their crime, aspiring to marry one of them.

Similar to other hybristophiles, my patient identified with these young men as victims of violent, abusive parents. She believed they wouldn’t harm her and that she could rescue them. (They remain in prison in California for murdering their parents in 1989. In spite of having no conjugal rights, they have been married for years to women whom they met through fan mail).

Conclusion:  We humans want and need to be connected to significant others. Understanding the universality of the  “outsider” position can help us understand, but not identify, with a perpetrator of violence.

Dear Reader, Your comments are welcome. jsimon145@gmail.com

One Giant Fallacy: Guns and Predictions

Two recent incidents publicized in the media show that instituting

background checks alone is insufficient to prevent gun violence.

First, the tragic murder of Christopher Kyle the retired Navy SEAL sniper and author of  “American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History.” He was gunned down, along with another colleague on February 2, as they tried to help a fellow veteran. They could not imagine that their comrade, suffering from the paranoia of PTSD, would turn his gun against them.

The second incident involves Christopher Dorner, a former Navy reservist and a Los Angeles policeman from 2005 to 2008. Unable to get his life back on track after he was fired from the police force in 2008, Dorner went on a murderous rampage this February,  aimed at his former colleagues-police officers- and even more heinous, their families. His unpredictable attack initiated  “a plan of historic proportions,” the largest police manhunt in history, and was most treacherous because Dorner was well-acquainted with police tactics.

These examples show that:

 1. We’re overly optimistic about our ability to predict who will use a gun at the appropriate time for the right reason. The formula of Them Vs Us, the good guys versus the bad, isn’t terribly useful. More often than not, no one can predict who, whether a policeman, a military man, or a private citizen, will use a weapon to kill innocent people.

2. We overestimate the concept of self-control. As I mentioned in last week’s blog, the forensic psychiatrist Michael Stone, quoted in The New York Times on January 16 said, “Most mass murders are done by working-class men who’ve been jilted, fired, or otherwise humiliated, and who undergo a crisis of rage.”

The irony is that we issue and re-issue licenses to drive a car. We certify and re-certify physicians to treat and to dispense medications to heal.  (Please refer to my blog of December 24: Guns, Bullets and the Medical Model). Yet the laws applying to lethal weapons, which potentially endanger the lives of us all, are lax.

Conclusion:  We need strict ways to distribute weapons and ammunition for a specific purpose similar to the model for dispensing medication.

In spite of the claim that guns offer protection, the data show that, more often than not, they are used to inflict damage on innocent people, and the gun wielder himself.

Dear Reader: I invite your comments: jsimon145@gmail.com

Guns and Statistics

The human mind tends to search for and snatch quick solutions, especially, in the face of complex problems.

The conundrum of gun control and ownership falls into this category.  Several “authorities” have pointed to people who suffer from serious mental illness as the cause of violence and the source of the solution. They suggest instituting mental health laws to solve the problem.

(To refresh our memories: Adam Lanza, perpetrator of the Newtown massacre, did not seek psychological counseling. Nor did anyone document that he suffered from a mental illness.)

We’ve probably all heard the phrase, “You don’t have to be insane to commit an insane act,” and the statistics, in the case of gun violence, bear that out:

 An article in The New York Times on February 1 states that only 4 percent of violent crimes involve the serious mentally ill and only 2 percent of these involve weapons. In fact, the mentally ill are 11 times more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the general population.

Rather than mental illness, it is the availability of guns coupled with sudden fits of anger, jealousy or an overwhelming emotion that constitute gun violence.

A study at Harvard School of Public Health found that guns in the home are used more often to frighten intimates than to thwart crime.

A New York Times Editorial on February 3 summarizes:

1. In the 1990’s, a team at the University of Pennsylvania documented the injuries involving guns in homes (in Memphis, Seattle and Galveston, Tex). The researchers found that for each single act of self-defense, there were seven criminal assaults (including homicides, accidental shootings, and suicides, attempted or successful). 

 

2. A 2003 study documented that females living with a gun in the home were 2.7 times more likely to be murdered than females with no gun at home.

That guns are essential for home defense and safety turns out to be a myth.

Quoted in The New York Times on January 16, the forensic psychiatrist Michael Stone said, “Most mass murders are done by working-class men who’ve been jilted, fired, or otherwise humiliated, and who undergo a crisis of rage.”

Dr. Stone’s point brings up the matter of  (what lies at) the core of humanity: namely our connectedness to significant people in our lives. When caring bonds are threatened or destroyed, many of us “go off the deep end” in one way or another. For some, this loss is interpreted as humiliation and stirs up the passion for revenge and violence toward self and/or others.

(Adam Lanza may have feared that his mother was thinking of finding him another home or committing him to a psychiatric facility. He may have experienced this as a threat of rejection and took revenge on his mother and the young people he thought she cared about more than she loved him.)

In The Week of February 2, Sean Faircloth wrote, “In a sane world, getting a gun would be treated more rigorously than buying a car, and government-mandated safety training and psychological screening would be required before purchase.”

The access to guns is an emotional issue which taxes and tests us all. Statistics support the reality: increasing the number of guns worsens the problem.

Who becomes violent is most often impossible to predict. Access to a gun allows a person, most often a man, to kill in a fit of passion.

Conclusion: The question is: will we be able to put aside our egotistical and monetary concerns  for the betterment and safety of our innocent children and our society at large?

Dear Reader, I welcome your comments. Jsimon145@gmail.com

Anger, Rage and Management (Arm with Understanding)

Many books have been written about anger, a feeling viewed as a ‘bad trait’ in our society because we focus on the downside and its negative expression. The goal, however, is to recognize anger as a normal human emotion and to learn to deal with it in appropriate ways. We’ll benefit from understanding its complex roots and avoiding labels which stigmatize.

A person with uncontrollable anger is, first of all, a threat to himself.  Anger affects our bodies by releasing stress hormones-adrenaline and cortisol- which increase heart rate and blood pressure. In excess, these chemicals can damage blood vessels and weaken the heart. Anger can also suppress the immune system, increasing one’s susceptibility to illness.

An angry person may turn to food, alcohol and/or cigarettes in order to keep angry feelings at bay and even become addicted to one or more substances.

Anger affects interpersonal relationships, driving away friends and family, creating problems at work, and contributing to social isolation.

Neither anger nor rage, its extreme manifestation, is categorized as mental illness. Yet these undergird many of the random mass killings with firearms. Contrary to common public opinion, it is a minority, or about 20 percent of these rampages, that are committed by seriously mentally disturbed people. Quoted in The New York Times on January 16, forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Michael Stone said, “(M)ost mass murders are done by working-class men who’ve been jilted, fired, or otherwise humiliated_ and who undergo a crisis of rage and get out one of the 300 million guns in our country and do their thing”.

For me anger is unpleasant, whether it is my own or others; it is dissonant, and jars like a musical note played off-key. Displeasure motivates me to transmute and analyze it, probing its source. My observing self asks my experiencing self, what has aroused the ire?

The real tragedy is that violence sells: First, in the manufacture and sale of firearms, and second, in the media.  Sadly, the factors that would dissipate violence are far less lucrative, such as:

1. Teaching parenting skills that include nurturing, limit-setting and acting as role models who solve problems and resolve conflicts.

2. Teaching conflict-resolution in the classrooms.

3. Propagating positive role models in the media.

Conclusion: Our society glorifies anger and violent expression as a sign of strength and power. The media propagates this message. In actuality, the opposite is true: Real strength lies in containing frustration, anger, and rage. Genuine strength lies in the power to transform anger and rage into constructive expression and action.

Dear Reader, I welcome your thoughts. jsimon145@gmail.com