Motus Mentis

In his daily newsletter, Morning Jolt, political commentator Jim Geraghty posts a response to a question from NPR on “what kind of debates the country should have after a mass-shooting tragedy”. *

I’m reproducing Mr. Geraghty’s answer in full, below, because I think it is forthright and sensible.

I am rather skeptical of most gun-control proposals. The ones that are pitched in the aftermath of mass shootings are particularly cynical, as they often attempt to regulate circumstances unrelated to the shooting. I still grind my teeth at Mayors Against Illegal Guns running ads in my state citing the Virginia Tech shooting, and talking about the need to shut the “gun show loophole” — even though the shooter didn’t obtain his weapons at a gun show. These sorts of arguments strike me as one part craven opportunism, one part feel-good placebo. (I wanted to say “panacea,” but panacea actually means a genuine cure-all.)

If someone wants to propose a new restriction on gun ownership after a tragedy, and cites that tragedy as a reason to pass it, it’s necessary to show how that new restriction would have prevented, mitigated, or impacted that tragedy. For example, almost none of the gun laws proposed after Newtown would have changed much of anything in that awful shooting, as that disturbed young man stole his mother’s legally-purchased guns.

I suppose there are two potential changes to the law that would have significantly altered events in Newtown. First, a total ban on private ownership of firearms, which our friends in the gun-control movement keep insisting isn’t their goal.

Second, a restriction on gun ownership by people who live under the same roof as a person who’s deemed mentally incompetent or a threat to himself or others. Of course, then you get into the questions of what constitutes, “mentally incompetent or a threat to himself or others,” what constitutes “under the same roof,” etc.

Then there are the proposals to limit how many rounds each gun can fire before reloading. Almost every spree shooter — we need a better term for this ** — has had more than one firearm when they’ve launched their attacks. Instituting ten-round limits would mean that future shooters would get off 20 shots before pausing to reload, presuming they only brought two guns. It’s reasonable to conclude future mass killers will just bring three or four guns when they begin their rampage. This strikes me as a quite modest mitigation to the danger of these shooters; too modest to seriously consider.

[Also: with a little practice, a shooter can swap magazines in the blink of an eye. See here. – MP]

The gun-control debate occurs in the context of some very familiar culture-war territory — “blue America” largely supports gun control, “red America” largely opposes it. The “Acela class,” largely living in low-crime areas and working in buildings with private security, because they don’t see a need for a gun in their own lives, can’t imagine why anyone else could need a gun. (If Mike Bloomberg or Piers Morgan worked the midnight shift at a 7-11, they might be more sympathetic to those who wish to defend themselves with a gun, since they might be more uncertain that police could respond to a life-threatening situation in time.) I find the arrogant, dismissive, “bitterly clinging to guns and religion” tone is rarely far from the surface in these debates.

After each shooting, we hear pundits and columnists declare, “it’s time for a national conversation on guns.” But we actually have had national conversations on guns after each one of these awful events; the conversation usually ends with lawmakers rejecting new restrictions on gun ownership. The pundits and columnists pretend the national conversation hasn’t occurred because they keep losing the argument.

There isn’t much of a culture-war component of discussing mental illness, other than a few folks on the Right who blame the Left for deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill in the 1960s. I suspect that there is no real constituency in favor of the Second Amendment rights of the mentally ill — provided, of course, the definition of “mentally ill” is clear, explicit, and taken seriously. (If you think there’s a stigma to admitting you’re seeing a therapist, a psychologist, or getting mental-health treatment now, just wait until some of your legal rights can be restricted because of it.)

Thankfully, I’ve never known anyone who has had violent episodes or a threatening mental illness. My sense of the issue is that people rarely “snap” and become dangerous killers overnight. As you’ve probably found in your research, there are certain common threads: withdrawal from others and lack of a support network; hostile behavior and lack of temper control, outbursts, etc. It is maddeningly infuriating to hear friends and acquaintances of past shooters describe behavior that seems, in retrospect, to be a warning sign or red flag.

(Correct me if I’m wrong, but my sense was that after Columbine, many school administrators tried to institute a new ‘if you see something, say something’ approach to individuals behaving in a threatening manner. Then we saw in Virginia Tech, that many, many students reported the gunman for strange and threatening behavior, including stalking. School administrators ultimately couldn’t do enough to stop him — I don’t know if this stems from fear of lawsuits or overall bureaucratic inertia.)

I see Fairfax County has tried a “Mental Health First Aid” program; a friend of mine participated in this program.

I’ll admit that I don’t know how effective a program like this would be; one would hope that people would already know to report strange, troubling, or threatening behavior to authorities. In past writings, I’ve emphasized that the only authority that can put someone on the federal firearms restriction list is a judge, and so that these sorts of concerns are best sent directly to the cops, not to a school administrator or company HR department.

However, a country where more Americans are trained to spot signs of serious, untreated and potentially dangerous mental illness strikes me as a better path than yet another effort to restrict the rights of 40 million gun owners because of the actions of a handful.

Two of our own previous posts on spree killings are here and here.

* I think it’s generally wrong to call these crimes and atrocities “tragedies”; the word leaches away all agency and responsibility. Mental illness complicates this, however: it diminishes, and thereby diffuses, the responsibility of the individual.

** There’s already a word for this. See here.