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