Last edited Thu Dec 27, 2012, 11:50 PM - Edit history (1)
Both things ARE true and seem at first glance very contradictory.
It's not a matter of playing with numbers it's just how we look at the problem. It causes us here on DU to talk right past each other. It causes hostile confrontations.
The very low risk of mass gun violence compared to the population of mentally ill, and the very high proportion of it in the mass shooting should be informative but we can't seem to get there for various reasons.
If we look at this a bit differently and rather than calling these things massacres or mass shootings, and give them a better name we might approach some meaningful insights that start to make the statistics resonate with meaning.
The 6 mass shooting of 2012 are suicides plus homicides. Ninety percent of suicides are linked to mental illness. I know, some people would say if you kill yourself you HAVE to be crazy at some level...well criminologists and epidemiologists don't think so...
They think 90%. I find that a VERY interesting number considering the 92% of the 61 mass shootings since 1982 were also almost all suicide-homicides. Those two numbers seem to play off each other in a meaningful way. If the suicide-homicides are much like suicide we'd expect the numbers to be quite similar. A two percent difference is well within what we might expect.
And suicide HAS associations within mental illness that are fairly well understood. What's missing is what motivates a suicidal person to go out with such carnage. And there is no reason to doubt that suicide-mass murder is an equifinality that is consequent to a limited number of murder motives that might deliver a desired outcome for a suicidal person...things like revenge, power over a foe, sending a lesson, terror, etc.
The risk of mass shootings from any randomly chosen legal gun owner or randomly selected mentally ill person is, frankly vanishingly small at 0.0001% or smaller for either population. Solutions that act against those classes in their entirity are likely to be quite inefficient and consequently ineffective. Even if they address our inner fears.
We know two things...mass shooting are associated with a high number of spent rounds plus surplus unfired ammunition AND a very high association with suicide.
This is a message from the empirical evidence. If we agree these events are intolerable at the current rate these are places to look for meaningful places to act. Seems to me gun owners and advocates of the mentally ill are likely to accept evidence base solutions.
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