Practical problems with “gun control”

Advocates of what we can lightly call “gun control” point to its success in reducing access to firearms in countries other than the United States.  These countries have very limited private access to firearms of any kind.  More importantly, the number of guns is far smaller than the number in the United States.  Here there are supposedly 300 million firearms of all types, one for each person; other countries have as little as one for every hundred people.  Any discussion of true gun control is based on limiting the access to firearms of people who should not own weapons.  There are currently intricate rules for who is allowed to legally purchase a firearm, and a form is filled in, a background check done, and the citizen must wait a week or so.  There are vast quantities of “assault weapons” and large magazines legally purchased and stored in the closets of upright citizens, unused.

Alongside this legal framework of registered and licensed owners there is an equally large illegal network that requires no paperwork, only the ability to locate your neighborhood firearms supplier.  Suppliers say they don’t sell to people who look like they are unstable, but that is an elastic standard, and no records are kept.  Virtually all of the firearms that change hands in this shadow network are pistols and revolvers; assault weapons are usually not chosen because they are too difficult to conceal.  According to the feds, about 40% of firearms change hands in this way.  97% of murders are committed with handguns.

Most assault-type weapons and their accompanying large capacity magazines are sold legally to registered owners, who leave them in their closets all of the time, or take them to the range to put them through their paces.  However, the recent occurrence of shootings in which the shooter wore body armor and carried an assault weapon has led some local police responsible for school security to stock similar weapons for carrying by officers on duty at schools.  This sounds suspiciously like an arms race.

The stocking of assault weapons at schools is occurring despite expert skepticism about the effectiveness of one or two armed guards against an adversary girded with body armor and carrying an assault weapon with a couple of hundred round magazines.  The police have been behaving as if every reference to a gun, no matter how vague, warrants and complete lockdown and  five hour search of a school.  It seems that paranoia rules the day.

However, since almost all murders are committed with ordinary, legal handguns, a more aggressive posture might include a task force of prosecutors to take down illegal gun fairs and track down the black market suppliers.  It is possible that restricting the illegal market will have more effect on the number of murders than restricting assault weapons.

Since there are so many weapons in the United States and there is such a strong feeling that each person should have a gun, or several, of their own, it might be more productive, still assuming that our goal is to prevent mass shootings, to target the individuals responsible for these shootings by trying to predict who will do it and preventing them.  To take two recent examples, we had young, 20 or 21 year old white men who displayed strong signs of mental illness long before the shootings; the first, in Arizona, had made many Internet postings foreshadowing his crime.  The second, in Connecticut, was known to be highly withdrawn and possibly antisocial for, possibly five or six years before he shot his mother and a classroom full of children.  This type of person should not be that hard to spot, and we should change our mental health laws so that we can pick them out and treat and/or confine them.

I know that this type of change will be considered highly intrusive, especially if it is done the wrong way.  The mental health strategies that will be most successful probably would involve interviewing and testing children at around the age of twelve to sixteen if the appropriately nonstressful screening instruments can be developed.  Children who are extremely withdrawn and display antisocial personality traits can be invited (firmly) to participate in treatment programs that, in some cases, might require removing the child from his or her previous environment if the parents are causing problems.   Actions such as removing the child from his home could be cast as a big move up rather than a punitive step; it is entirely possible for the remover to state that the child has won a prize and will be going to a special super quality school, and even hand over bribes.

It will be true that the children will be going to a special school, and it is important to make it comfortable and compassionate to them.  They will be offered a lot more praise than they had received before.

The children must be taught prosocial behavior traits and profusely rewarded for approaching correct behaviors.  It may help to have a mother figure and/or a father figure in a residential counselor, for example.  Issues such as this should be subjected to objective evaluation and the program quickly changed to reflect new information.

At issue will also be the cost of this endeavor, as we may assume that, at least, initial costs will be high.  There will be ways to develop income related to the work of the children which can offset costs.  In addition, costs should include the costs to society that would be avoided given the success of a necessarily large diversion program like this.

In addition to diverting potentially psychotic shooters at a young age, it will be helpful to develop increased mental health screening and treatment for all ages.  This effort will be costly as well.  Nonetheless, we can expect a large response, and if sharing information about patients is built in to the medical records software, supervisors can compare and rate potentially dangerous traits or states in patients.  At first, this cannot be used to rate patients unless they display obvious symptoms of homicidal psychosis, but the more patient evaluations there are, the better they can be compared and rated for homicidal risk.  Since treatment is paired with ratings, the work will eventually fulfill a dual purpose: better mental health and reduced risk of homicides.