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