(This essay was originally published in 2019. Sadly, it has held up pretty well. Our prayers and kindest wishes go out to the people of Uvalde, Texas. – KDG)

Mass shootings – what won’t work, and what might.

Pardon the inappropriate title to this essay.  Unfortunately that’s the term we use when describing the can’t-miss sure thing that is going to fix the problem under consideration.  Or, rather, the can’t-miss sure thing that someone is absolutely convinced will fix the problem.  But, of course, it won’t.

Mass shootings are the problem.  The magic bullet is gun control.  It would seem that no amount of evidence is adequate to convince the true believers that it won’t work.  But it won’t.

True believers, here’s a fact:  Complex problems never, ever, have simple solutions.  And if there was ever a complex problem, mass shootings are it.  It’s naïve to think that gun control is the one thing that will fix the problem.

When did a gun ever cause a mass shooting?  It’s merely the instrument.  Someone has to pick it up, load it, and pull the trigger – repeatedly.  That’s an act of volition by a sentient being that an inanimate object is incapable of performing.  A gun doesn’t have a voice that can whisper the command, “Pick me up, load me, and shoot those people!”  Anyone who hears and obeys such a voice is, by definition, crazy.

Yes, say the gun control advocates, but if the gun wasn’t available, it couldn’t be used to shoot anyone.  Fair point, which gun control opponents would prefer to go away.  After all, guns were invented because they are an awfully efficient and effective way of killing things, people included.  Make it harder to get a gun, and there will be fewer mass shootings.  Simple logic, and, as far as it goes, almost certainly correct.

But that leaves a bigger question:  Although there would be fewer mass shootings, would there be fewer mass killings?  If a gun isn’t available, will people who would prefer a gun choose another weapon instead?  Laugh all you like, gun control advocates, that’s not an idle concern.  Cars and vans are proven to be excellent weapons of mass destruction.  Molotov cocktails require a bottle, a rag, some gasoline, and a lighter, and in the right circumstances they work like a charm.  Pipe bombs are only slightly more difficult to make; or, if you prefer, use a pressure cooker.  As the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 proved, someone with a little training and wherewithal can turn a rental truck into an incredibly lethal weapon (168 dead, hundreds more wounded, and a large, well-constructed building almost destroyed).  But who needs a fertilizer bomb?  As a terrorist proved in Nice, France in 2016, a big truck by itself can be unbelievably destructive (86 dead, over 400 injured).  Anyone who would put the time and effort into planning a massacre using a gun – and most attacks are meticulously if amateurishly planned – would have no problem using another means to his end.  While certain kinds of attacks would become more difficult – the Sandy Hook school and Las Vegas concert shootings, for instance – that leaves plenty of opportunity for other kinds.

But if even a few shootings can be prevented, isn’t it worth the cost to society?  No – by the same logic, we would have to confiscate every automobile and truck in the country, and, just to be sure they could never, ever be used in an attack (including incidents of road rage), we would have to destroy them.  And, yes, it’s true that vehicles have legitimate purposes that far outweigh the risk of their use as a weapon, while guns exist solely to kill and maim – but that ignores the reason that the right to bear arms is enshrined in the Constitution.  If the right to protect oneself, one’s family, one’s property and other people and property from criminals and tyrannical government is not a legitimate right – which, in extremis, requires the use of weapons that kill and maim – then liberty itself has no meaning or value.

Gun control is not the magic bullet that solves the problem because mass shootings are a very complex problem with many causes, guns not being at the root of any of them.  Furthermore, mass shootings are a tiny part of the overall problem of murder in the U.S. (There were 17,284 murders in 2017 according to FBI statistics, the latest I could find, and about 160 of those occurred in mass shootings according to Wikipedia.  That’s 0.93%.)  So, shall we just throw up our hands and do nothing?  Of course not!!!  The preferred magic bullet won’t do the trick, but we know there are things that will work, although none of them is magic of any sort, and all require difficult decisions, hard work, and money.  But let’s be clear – driving the number of mass killings to zero is not going to happen.  We must have reasonable expectations or we will be disappointed by less-than-perfect results.

I’m not going to address political and pseudo-religious terrorism, because efforts to stop it are massive, ongoing, and sophisticated.  The attacks that have succeeded in the U.S. since 9-11, while spectacular and catnip for sensation-seeking media, have actually been small-scale and ineffective.  Keep on doing what we’ve been doing, and kill all the bastards.

Let’s start with a realization that almost all of the killers are boys and young men.  We concentrate on them.  There is now a significant amount of research that shows that most are either mentally ill or suffering from serious emotional disturbance – and that the people around them are well aware of it, and worried about it.  There are a great many other markers that describe these people, each of which, on its own, is of little significance, but, when a number of them are displayed, add up to trouble.  Connecting the dots is no small task.  We also have to understand that every now and then someone who has never demonstrated any disturbing behaviors will surprise everyone and turn into a killer, like the Las Vegas concert shooter.

Let’s put aside the stupid, politically-correct pieties.  Males are designed by nature to be protectors of the tribe and to strive to be its leader, or at least close allies of the leader – which requires them to be aggressive, combative and risk-takers.  When things go wrong, these traits are the makings of a monster.  As the great economist and social commentator Thomas Sowell has said, “Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.”  Boys in particular need firm, loving discipline and strong male role models to inculcate positive, constructive behaviors to channel and control their natural characteristics to productive rather than destructive ends, to teach them to be self-respecting and respectful of others, to teach them that they have a vital part to play in creating strong, healthy families and communities – to give them purpose.  That, of course, requires strong, healthy families and communities into which they can be introduced.  (In the recent movie American Sniper, the protagonist and semi-hero of the story says to his son, and I paraphrase, “You can be a sheep dog, or you can be a wolf.  Which is it going to be?”  That’s what I mean, and much better said.)

The first step, then, is good parenting.  The second step is social and political involvement by parents to create good communities.  Of course, all children need these things, but for those in situations and/or with characteristics that might lead to trouble – and especially for those who will eventually develop mental illness – they are absolutely crucial.  Preventing troubled boys from becoming disaffected, angry young men, keeping them involved in loving families and caring communities, providing productive and useful (or at least benign) outlets for their natural aggressiveness, will head off many problems – or at least keep their problems from becoming deadly.  This is much easier said than done, of course, but it’s vital to keep vulnerable boys from heading down the wrong path.  There is nothing new about it, either.  It’s exactly what parents and communities have known to do for millennia – and failed to do far too often.  So this is a call for them, and especially fathers, to step up and do the right thing.  It’s also a call for society at large to quit making it so damn difficult for fathers to do their job.  This alone will save the vast majority of boys at risk. 

That leaves a tiny, dangerous subset who are, in effect, walking time bombs looking for the opportunity to explode.  These, we must defuse.  That’s where it gets tricky, because it calls for identifying, investigating and taking action against people who haven’t committed a crime, but who seem likely to commit one.  We don’t know how to do that without running afoul of a long list of societal norms and traditions, many codified in Constitution and law, and an equally-long list of practical problems that make it an extraordinarily difficult task.  Law enforcement traditionally focuses rightly on punishment rather than prevention, but here we have a situation where prevention is the whole point, because the consequence of waiting until there is a crime to punish is an unspeakable tragedy.  Civil libertarians on both the right and left are rightly concerned about anything that smacks of prior constraint, but that is exactly what we’re talking about.

And that, I’m afraid, is exactly what we’re going to have to do.

There is plenty of precedent to justify prior constraint in situations where the danger is real and known.  To prevent the spread of infectious diseases, we mandate vaccination, even in some cases overriding religious prohibitions.  Even under current law (which makes it very difficult), mentally ill persons exhibiting violent behavior or tendencies can be confined indefinitely.  Felons can be forbidden from consorting with other known felons or possessing guns.  Orders of protection against violent husbands and boyfriends (and occasionally women) are, sadly, commonplace.  Disabled people and the elderly can lose their license to drive.  Almost everyone agrees that these are reasonable things to do because the risk is well-known and confirmed by experience, common sense and research. 

But no one would argue that they are perfect.  One reason it’s become so hard to get treatment for the mentally ill is the record of abuse of the system by malevolent family members, aided and abetted by indifferent courts.  Felons trying to get their lives back on track benefit from the assistance of external controls, but those who aren’t, don’t find the law much of an impediment.  Orders of protection are often more wishful thinking than real barrier.  Nonetheless, the point is that although these things don’t work all of the time, they do work often enough to be useful tools, and since the insult to civil rights is de minimis, they are worth doing if proper precautions are taken.

My argument, then, is that we must overcome our unwillingness to implement prior constraint against potential mass shooters because the danger is real and known, but, crucially, it must be done with the proper precaution of due process, and with an expectation of good but not perfect implementation.  If we can reach agreement on this, there are things we can and should do.

Since the problem is largely (although not exclusively) one of emotionally troubled and/or mentally ill boys and young men, the first step is identifying them.  It’s been noted that the people around them are almost always aware of their affliction and concerned about them.  Family members, friends, teachers, social-media acquaintances, all are in a position to sense the developing danger, but only in rare cases are they qualified to do anything about it.  That means they must overcome their reluctance to report what they’ve witnessed to someone who is qualified and can do something about it. 

I have personal experience with this.  My oldest son came home from middle school one day terribly upset about something.  He reluctantly, with gentle prodding, told me that he had overheard an acquaintance talking about bringing a gun to school and shooting up the place.  I immediately called the school superintendent, and the next day the situation was defused.  I’ve often wondered what would have happened if my son had not found the courage to speak up, or if I’d dismissed his concerns, or failed to make the call.  Thank God, we’ll never know.  I can’t say what became of this would-be school shooter, but I do know there was an intervention that identified a troubled youngster and provided the opportunity to get him the help he needed – and, perhaps, prevented something awful from happening.

The next thing is making sure that people who are in a position to do something can do so without fear of repercussion.  For example, school counselors need to be able to quietly discuss a situation with the school’s personnel, mental health professionals and police without fear that they are violating a student’s rights.  Police should be able to monitor social media for signs of trouble, and quietly, informally check out someone who comes to their attention.  Although intelligence services can and do monitor the websites of a wide variety of potentially violent groups, recent experience would argue for a stepped-up effort and quicker response to signs of brewing trouble.  Although it’s unsettling to think that the NSA could call the FBI, which would forward the information to a local police department, it’s more unsettling to think that failure to do so might have terrible consequences.  It’s equally if not more unsettling to consider enlisting social media companies themselves in the effort, but the plain fact is they already monitor their users’ every move.  Should it be a crime for them to report something truly disturbing to the police?  I freely admit that all of these things have the potential for violation of civil rights, but argue that it’s a risk worth taking, and one that all but a handful of absolutists would find reasonable, even at the cost of a slight diminution of privacy.

Next, give competent authorities the ability to intervene before a problem turns into a tragedy.  A series of court rulings on the civil rights of the mentally ill in the 1960s and ‘70s has made it incredibly difficult to get them the help they desperately need.  Furthermore, the scandal of conditions in state mental institutions in the mid-20^th century, and hopes that powerful psychoactive drugs and in-community treatment centers could do the job better, led to the closing of many hospitals.  The results have been tragic.  Although violent people are a tiny part of the mentally ill population, common sense alone argues that they must have intensive, confined treatment, and the fact that many attacks in recent years have been committed by people who were known to be mentally ill and showed violent tendencies only confirms it.  Need it be said that jail is not the right place for that?  Yet it’s the default.

However, the much bigger problem is the situation of the deeply emotionally disturbed, who, while functional, are filled with irrational rage that sometimes boils over into murderous hatred, or radicalization in a violent ideology such as Islamism, Nazism, the Klan, or Antifa.  From there it’s a short step to mass murder – for a few.  It’s important to keep that in mind, because it greatly complicates the problem.  Start with a small population of deeply emotionally disturbed but functional people, of whom a few will be radicalized, of whom one or two will decide that mass murder is an appropriate reaction to the world’s injustices.  Now go find that needle in the haystack.

It’s an impossible problem.  There is no way to predict who the killer will be.  The only realistic approach is to cast a wider net – one that will inevitably catch a lot of people who are probably in need of psychiatric treatment, but who pose no mortal threat – and allow it to be cast by a number of actors who are in a position to recognize the potential problem.  That, too, is a price I think the nation is willing to pay, because the alternatives are to do nothing and suffer a mass killing, or burn down the haystack.  Families, social workers, doctors, and the police should have the ability to request a so-called “red flag” intervention by the courts to order appropriate in-patient psychiatric care and medication, and the courts shouldn’t hesitate to grant it.  The patient’s objections must be considered in light of the fact that the mentally ill are, at the very least, impaired in their ability to rationally exercise their rights and responsibilities.  Far better to subject a harmless person to the indignity of a few days of involuntary commitment than, out of an overwrought concern for civil rights, allow a potential killer to walk free.  The law will need to be changed.  So be it.

So let’s do what we can on the mental health front – and there is so much to do, for reasons that go far beyond the small problem of mass killings (as noted above, that’s the brutally honest truth of the matter).  I’m firmly of the opinion that, if we do, most killers can be deterred and/or detected before something awful happens.  But, once again, we must recognize that, no, we won’t stop everyone, and, yes, there will be a threat to civil rights.  I regard these as inevitable and unavoidable facts that are worth the cost, but only if sound due process safeguards are put in place to prevent egregious abuses.  The oldest problem of liberal governance – Who watches the watchmen? – is clear in this case, and must be treated with the seriousness it deserves.  Courts are human institutions and thus subject to occasional failure, but we simply have no better alternative than to trust that they will provide the due process oversight that will be necessary.  Or, let’s put it this way – if someone has a better alternative, please enlighten us.

So, having addressed the mental health issues that lie at the heart of most mass shootings, let’s move on to the weapons.  And here is a quandary, for none of the measures suggested seems to show enough promise to be worth the cost. 

We already strictly control the most destructive weapons like fully automatic machine guns, and who argues for private ownership of machine pistols and “street sweeper” shotguns, much less hand grenades, RPGs, and other military weapons?  (Not that this doesn’t require constant vigilance.  Take the case of the Las Vegas concert shooter.  The “bump stock” he used is an ingenious device that allows a semi-automatic weapon to operate like a fully-automatic one.  The Obama administration’s failure to ban them administratively, or, better, to request an emergency clarification of the law by Congress, was a failure of common sense and a terrible lesson in the failure of the hyper-legalistic approach to regulation.  Like the law, regulation is not a suicide pact.)

Universal background checks?  To the best of my knowledge, not a single mass shooting in the last 10 years could have been stopped by them (I could be wrong – my research hasn’t been comprehensive).  The guns were obtained legally in almost if not every case, and the killers passed background checks.  I’ve already stated my willingness to accept a slight diminution of civil rights if that what it takes, but building the data base that might have a chance of stopping every mass shooter would require a massive invasion of privacy.  That’s not acceptable, and it’s not going to happen.  Nor does it address the 2 other, glaring problems that arise.  The first is substitution – if a gun can’t be obtained, then another weapon can be used.  The other is the black market for guns, which can only grow in the face of tightened restrictions.

Ban “assault rifles”?  Ask anyone who knows guns about this, and prepare to be laughed at.  “Assault rifles” are nothing more than traditional sporting guns fancied up to look like military weapons, and no more lethal.  Nor are they less lethal.  If AR-15-style weapons are taken off the market, and if one can’t be obtained illegally on the black market, a traditional hunting rifle will do just as well.  And, irony of ironies, a pistol will probably do better.  They require less training to use effectively, are easier to use in close quarters, are just as deadly at close range, and are much easier to conceal.  Banning “assault rifles” would be a counterproductive exercise in feel-good futility.

And what beyond that?  Frankly, beyond that, it seems we’re out of options.  Mass shootings are the product of terrorism and/or mental illness (broadly construed), and to eliminate all we can possibly hope to eliminate, those are the issues that must be dealt with.  Gun control, beyond the banning of military weapons on which we all agree, will do little or nothing to help, and that at tremendous cost.

The solution to any problem involves tradeoffs that almost always create problems of their own.  The trick is to be reasonably sure the problems we’re substituting are less daunting and destructive.  That’s not an easy trick, and it’s doubly true in the case of a small but awful problem like mass shootings.  The consequences of a mistake are so devastating that we must be as sure as we can be that we’re making the right moves – and that we can live with the consequences of the mistakes that will inevitably be made.

Kenneth D. Gough © 2019