Missing Ingredient

Reality Check

The Sandy Hook School Shooting: The tragedy and the lesson. Part 4 of 4

I read an excellent article about school shootings that was very interesting, well researched, and well presented, but it was historical in nature dealing with ten years of school shootings prior to 2001. The results presented in this article concluded that bullying, not mental health, was the primary cause of school shootings. Those that support gun rights may or may not be off base about mental health being the primary cause, but everyone desperately needs to understand why kids are shooting kids. In any case, it’s almost a given that someone psychologically prepared to kill innocent people is suffering from some form of mental illness.

 

I would like to see a follow up study like this one done for mass shootings since 2001. For example: The Aurora Theater shooter had stopped seeing his psychiatrist. Thirty days prior to the shooting his doctor “reported to a police officer that her patient had confessed homicidal thoughts and was a danger to the public”, and he was threatening her in text messages and emails. The Sandy Hook School shooter was evidently aware of [his mother’s] petitioning the court for conservatorship and (her) plans to have him committed”. Even though it’s unclear whether his mother was really filing the paperwork because the records are sealed, his attack on the school children is understood to have been because he “believed she cared more for the school children than she did for him”.

 

A friend of mine works for a nearby police department directing a television program called Make the Call about unsolved crimes. On this show the families and friends of murder victims are interviewed, giving us a personal account of the drive-by shootings, gang shootings, and seemingly random shootings so common in this area. He contends that some of the victims were wonderful loving people and some were not, but we must never forget that they all had people who loved them.

 

The tragedy is that these people, or others, lost their way before they lost their lives and the hope is that viewers with helpful information will call an anonymous tip hotline. Ignoring the causes of these situations, I would agree that the grief of the families and friends is palpable and understandable. It is a sobering reality check that the one injured or killed by gun violence is not the only victim of the crime. It naturally inspires in us the desire to do what is possible to prevent this kind of violence.

 

I concur with the thoughts and analysis by Steven Pinkers and Chris Uggen who say, “A narrow focus on stopping mass shootings is less likely to produce beneficial changes than a broader-based effort to reduce homicide and other violence. These rare and terrible crimes are like rare and terrible diseases, and a strategy to address them is best considered within the context of more common and deadlier threats to population health.”

 

“We are compelled to pay attention to extreme events and we estimate risk with these vivid examples, but as much as we should try to prevent these horrific events from taking place we should not use them as the sole basis for making inferences that determine policy. The outliers are a tragic part of the overall story, but we must pay attention to the rest of the distribution.” Whether the cause of the more recent shootings is bullying or mental health, that is where the focus needs to be: Focusing on the tool is still not the answer.