School shootings and gun control

[GandK]

I came across this article about American gun culture differences by a guy named Colin Woodard. In 2013, he wrote a book called American Nations where he argues that the US has 11 different cultural regions:



He says each of these regions has a different culture regarding guns (regarding lots of things), which is based on that region's past, including its role in the nation's history, the home country of its settlers (if any), and the outcome of any past interactions those people have had with the government.

After reading the article, I think this could be the explanation for a lot of the disconnect I talked about in the OP. Depending upon which America you live in, the prevailing attitude about guns, how to handle them, and whether the government can be trusted at all is completely different. This could actually be a factor in a lot of the cultural things we discuss around here (like @thrifty++'s recent thread about Capital focus).

I'm officially fascinated. This book is now at the top of my NF reading list, although I likely won't begin it until December.

[7Wannabe5]

That looks like an interesting book. Somewhat off-topic, but it made me think of the regional divisions in this old (1940)cookbook which was one of the 3 or 4 I used to teach myself how to cook when I was a child. Check out the Table of Contents. Apparently, all the different realms of Dutch cookery have combined with the realm of New England cookery to form Yankeedom in Woodard's book. Makes sense since styles of cooking and culture usually go together.

http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=w ... =1;size=50

[enigmaT120]

I think the areas of the Left Coast like where I live have more in common with The Far West (which I call "back east") or even with Greater Appalachia then they do with what most of us think as the Left Coast.

It's deer season now, so guns are ubiquitous.

[GandK]

Here is a guy I listen to occasionally. I don't agree with everything he puts out, and he has A LOT of content, but I think he showcases fairly well in this video why the issue of guns is a minefield. And potentially why certain data is ignored in favor of softer targets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hyQDQPEsrs

I found that incredibly uncomfortable to watch. I wonder what sort of suggestions he's planning to put forth as a follow-up.

I'm pretty sure I've seen something of his before (Stefan Molyneux). His name is familiar to me, but I can't place it. I scrolled through his video list, trying to figure out where I'd seen him before, and... wow. He has a lot of strong opinions on a wide range of topics. That immediately makes me wary. I think most people have strong opinions on a handful of topics, but when people are all fired up about everything, they strike me as unbalanced. I watched a few more videos, and my initial impression is that this guy is trying to develop a following. And maybe not just for his YouTube videos.

[Jean]

If late male virginity and social reclusion were seen as a positive thing by society (like some cool cast of wise hermit monks), there wouldn't be any shootings.
Gun control is completly off-topic.

[GandK]

@ffj

I saw your question this morning before church and thought about it on the drive there. The first thing I was tempted to answer was, "I want to see what SM comes up with for a solution before I comment," but that struck me as a cop-out.

Then it occurred to me that I did not remember him mentioning something pretty big. On the way home I asked G, whose career has included many gun cases, "What's the one factor that is most highly correlated to gun violence?" And sure enough, he said what I was thinking: illegal drug use. I said, "Not gender, not race, not poverty?" "Nope. When there's gun violence, there are drugs in the picture somewhere pretty much 100% of the time. Either the person is so mentally ill that they're not guilty by reason of insanity - and that's an extremely small percentage - or it is a drug issue. That's been my experience." (He also, when I questioned him about why he thought that was, said simply, "Guns are about power.")

When I got home, I watched the video again. And sure enough, SM does not talk about illegal drug use. He said the word "heroin" one time in passing, so I am inclined to think this is a deliberate, possibly cherry-picked oversight. He talks about race, and poverty, and location, and even dances around politics, but he does not address drugs as a factor in gun violence.

So my current opinion is that I'm curious about whether he will connect the dots between race and drugs and suggest something sensible, or whether he's going to go completely out into left field (right field, in his case?). I will certainly keep an eye out for the promised follow-up video.

[jennypenny]

So does G think that legalizing drugs would reduce gun violence? I thought about that after watching The Untouchables on Friday night. Prohibition fueled that era of organized crime. Gambling, too. I know the reduced influence of organized crime in NJ has been attributed to the proliferation of legalized gambling venues in the area.

I suppose it's just trading one problem for another. Which is worse--gun violence or more widespread drug use? I'm not sure.

[jacob]

So my current opinion is that I'm curious about whether he will connect the dots between race and drugs and suggest something sensible, ...

He did mention gangs. AFAIR, the correlation was weak there?

Are gangs in control of drugs? Are drug users the ones who shoot each/other? Do blacks use more drugs than other groups---are they less able to afford drugs?

Minor issue: From an quant-based perspective, it's a wee bit "dangerous" to run correlations on something that trends over time (e.g. those scatter plots where data is taken from year 1960-2014). However, since he shows all graphs conditioned on race, this is probably fine. (Still better to color/legend code the dots by year to reveal a trend.)

Now, how does this bear on school shootings anyway?

Are school shooters predominantly black? Drug-related? In Baltimore? Not really, right.

In other news, I knew that if you conditioned US gun homicides on not being black, the US numbers are in inline with other western nations. However, I thought that it was socioeconomic and apparently it isn't. I note that there weren't any analysis conditioning on race AND poverty. (Hence the "white poverty numbers" might hide the "black poverty numbers").

Major issue: It's actually illegal to act on data analysis that has bearing on race, directly or indirectly. See,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining It's one of those unmentionables. Perhaps this is why nothing can be done.

However, being super-segregated, Chicago offers a nice DIY example. Racial composition as well as crime stats change almost immediately block by block. E.g. you will have lots of incidences on one side of a major street ... and none on the other. Same with race. E.g. white on one side. Black on the other. Hispanic on the third. Etc. Compare to crime heat maps (google "racial cartography chicago" and "trulia crime heat") and the naive conclusion is clear. However, there are areas that are mixed races and have low crime. Those are some of the more interesting and vibrant areas. (We live in one of them.) These areas also happen to be little oases of very high income (medium sixes). Look at Oak Park and Gold Coast/Lincoln Park.

To me this looks similar to Europe's immigration integration problem except the US is much farther ahead (in the wrong direction) in which there's basically a "nation"/culture of people who have been shunned/excluded from the rest of society.---This eventually turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is where the US is now. And it's where the EU is heading.

Nobody has figured out how to solve this as far as I know.

[GandK]

So does G think that legalizing drugs would reduce gun violence?

His response: "No. It would increase gun violence. Drugs impair judgment, and all you're doing is making it easier for people to impair judgment. Let's throw all the high people in the room with a gun and see if the gun gets used. Then let's throw all the sober people in a room with a gun and see if the gun gets used." We got interrupted by football, or I'd have asked him about the power dynamic shift within the illegal drug trade if you legalize it, which is what I believe you were actually driving at.

@jacob

This has zero to do with school shootings, and everything to do with some prescriptions for such shootings. There's always a vocal group that wants to make guns completely illegal, and they point to all gun violence statistics when they argue (one point upon which SM and I agree) instead of looking at what might have prevented the specific incident at hand. So then we drift into discussing the causes of other gun violence.

I agree with you about people who have been excluded from society, and I believe that's what G was driving at before when he said guns were about power, as I've heard him make similar remarks before. And if that's the real underlying issue with gun violence (as opposed to just "race," which I think is BS), then you're right, we're kind of screwed.

[7Wannabe5]

What causes more deaths, guns in the hands of drug-abusers or automobiles in the hands of alcohol-abusers? Somebody was complaining to me recently about the terrible driving habits of the immigrants from Bangladesh in our city, and I was thinking "Yeah, and they have too many kids too, but at least most of them don't drink too much and they take off their shoes before entering their homes, unlike those dirty Irish Catholics."

Also, I generally agree with Jean's suggestion, since it could be expanded to something like "If more grumpy old men were getting laid, then there would be less war." I believe that the correlation between rock-gun-womd-use and "bad" androgen levels is fairly conclusive.

[jennypenny]

It's impossible to generalize about the reasons for gun violence the same way it's impossible to generalize about the reasons for war. They are all about power, as GandK said, but it's too simplistic an answer to provide a solution. IMO, school shootings are this era's version of workplace violence. Schools have become just as institutionalized as other work environments known for inciting this kind of behavior. Maybe we should stop putting people in concrete boxes for 8 hours a day and telling them what to do and think.

The SSDI problem is misrepresented. People are usually given drugs like SSDIs after serious mental issues or threatening to use violence on themselves or others. It's a population of people that includes more people prone to violence than the general public, so it's no surprise that people who commit violent acts are frequently on those drugs. If anything, I think the problem with SSDIs is that people assume the drugs work better than they actually do, so people stop going to treatment or stop monitoring the behavior of people taking the drugs. They are probably over-prescribed (like most other drugs), but again, these are people who might be self-medicating with alcohol or drugs if they weren't taking SSDIs, so the premise that they would be 'clean' and non-violent without the drugs is false.

Regarding the rest, the solution to that problem will have to come from within those communities. They may not be responsible for ending up in the situation they find themselves in, but now that it's a problem of culture as much as anything, they are the only ones who can get themselves out of it. Laws can be passed to facilitate any change, but the communities have to want the change and initiate it. It's no different than changing cultures of bigotry or misogyny. Younger people will have to push for change from within and, most likely, wait for an intolerant generation to die off before fully realizing the change.

---

Aren't overall crime rates down significantly over the last 50 years? That's the part that gets overlooked. It's only the news coverage that's increased, which is probably true of most 'sensational' crimes. Doesn't anyone remember the '70s? Even though I was a kid, I clearly remember the Summer of Sam, the hijackings, the kidnappings (like Patty Hearst), and the Munich Olympics, all with Vietnam and the Cold War as a backdrop. Are things really worse now? And so bad to the point of limiting long-standing rights like free speech and privacy in addition to gun ownership?\

[Dragline]

Aren't overall crime rates down significantly over the last 50 years? That's the part that gets overlooked. It's only the news coverage that's increased, which is probably true of most 'sensational' crimes. Doesn't anyone remember the '70s? Even though I was a kid, I clearly remember the Summer of Sam, the hijackings, the kidnappings (like Patty Hearst), and the Munich Olympics, all with Vietnam and the Cold War as a backdrop. Are things really worse now? And so bad to the point of limiting long-standing rights like free speech and privacy in addition to gun ownership?

Yes, overall crime in the US is way down since it peaked around 1990, after increasing from about 1960. (Of course, that may not be true in your neighborhood, which is the real news for you to be considering in your daily life -- not crime rates in some other city or overall rates.)

This is some of the most misused data in these kind of debates. Advocates will pick an example of preferred policies in the 1990s if they want to say their preferred policy "made gun violence go down." Conversely, they will pick an example of policies they opposed from the 1970s to show that "gun violence went up" after that. In reality, the overall crime data overwhelms anything related to gun policies. This why most historical arguments in this area are little more than data manipulation.

If you really wanted to measure for gun violence alone, you would have to normalize the data to pull out the overall effect of the crime rate. I have not seen anyone attempt this -- it would not be easy to do. I suspect the results would be inconclusive and/or highly localized.

As for why crime went up and down from 1960 to now, it probably does not have that much to do with guns. This is a much broader topic with many competing theories, relating to such varying things as legalized abortion, new policing methods and lead-based paint (I'm not kidding). None of these is very satisfying, though if you look back in longer history and see crime going up and down without any of those factors involved. The only viable theory that I'm aware of that spreads over many generations and hundreds of years are Straus & Howe's generational theories of history.

[GandK]

Aren't overall crime rates down significantly over the last 50 years? That's the part that gets overlooked.

Yes. You're right.

Crime in the United States

[Ego]

The SSDI problem is misrepresented. People are usually given drugs like SSDIs after serious mental issues or threatening to use violence on themselves or others. It's a population of people that includes more people prone to violence than the general public, so it's no surprise that people who commit violent acts are frequently on those drugs.

Prescription Drugs Associated with Reports of Violence Towards Others
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/articl ... ne.0015337

We identified 1527 cases of violence disproportionally reported for 31 drugs. Primary suspect drugs included varenicline (an aid to smoking cessation), 11 antidepressants, 6 sedative/hypnotics and 3 drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Conclusions

Acts of violence towards others are a genuine and serious adverse drug event associated with a relatively small group of drugs. Varenicline, which increases the availability of dopamine, and antidepressants with serotonergic effects were the most strongly and consistently implicated drugs.

Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors and Violent Crime: A Cohort Study
http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/a ... ed.1001875

This study is interesting because they did the research in Sweden where they have access to both criminal records and medical records. They eliminated the cofounding factors you mentioned and found SSRI use correlated with increased violence.

From Swedish national registers we extracted information on 856,493 individuals who were prescribed SSRIs, and subsequent violent crimes during 2006 through 2009. We used stratified Cox regression analyses to compare the rate of violent crime while individuals were prescribed these medications with the rate in the same individuals while not receiving medication.

The association between SSRIs and violent crime convictions and violent crime arrests varied by age group. The increased risk we found in young people needs validation in other studies.

[jennypenny]

Dragline is right that I shouldn't generalize wrt crime statistics. Location is a big factor.

Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors and Violent Crime: A Cohort Study
http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/a ... ed.1001875

This study is interesting because they did the research in Sweden where they have access to both criminal records and medical records. They eliminated the cofounding factors you mentioned and found SSRI use correlated with increased violence.

I agree, and I'm not saying that the drugs don't contribute to destabilizing the patient in some cases. Some teens have a terrible reaction to the drug (usually resulting in suicide), but that risk is mostly during the initial adjustment phase.

That said, I think the study backs up what I'm saying. If a male--most violent offenders are male--starts talking about harming himself or others, he might be put on an SSDI. If he then commits a violent act, is it because the drugs made him do it, or because the drugs didn't work and he committed a violent act that he would have committed anyway without the drugs? The fact that the study shows that teenagers fall into this group more than older men makes me even more suspicious of the drug's involvement. A 16yo hasn't had as much of a chance to commit a violent act yet (that would be recorded). The drug intervention might happen as the teen is becoming violent, and, if the drug is ineffective, violent events might still occur subsequent to starting the drug.

In the over-24 group, it's much more likely that the person in the study has already committed a violent act if they were going to do so because they are out of the educational system and presumably out from under mommy and daddy's control. If the drug is ineffective in this group, they only appear to remain violent; they don't appear more violent. (unless the study showed an increase in the intensity of the violence in the over-24 group? did I miss it?)


I'm not saying that they won't find evidence to back up what you're saying. I just think more is needed to make the leap from correlation to causation. Many men who are put on drug regimens for high blood pressure end up having heart attacks, but that doesn't mean the drug caused them. It means the drug didn't help prevent them. It wouldn't surprise me if they found that SSDIs were simply much less effective than advertised. What I've read suggests that we aren't intervening early enough in issues related to mental health, and that waiting to treat until after serious issues develop makes the treatment much less effective.

[Ego]

If a male--most violent offenders are male--starts talking about harming himself or others, he might be put on an SSDI. If he then commits a violent act, is it because the drugs made him do it, or because the drugs didn't work and he committed a violent act that he would have committed anyway without the drugs?

....and...

I'm not saying that they won't find evidence to back up what you're saying. I just think more is needed to make the leap from correlation to causation.

School shootings are a new phenomenon. The number of school shootings increased as the number of prescriptions increased. Kids had problems forever yet suddenly they are taking it to this extreme.

I agree that there is a correlation/causation issue. In the past these kids would have been prescribed formal cognitive behavioral therapy and way back when grandparents, pastors, teachers, and family would have done the old fashioned version of cbt. We know beyond doubt that cbt works. So I agree that the problem might not be the drug itself. It might be the biological model where they are told they have a chemical imbalance that they cannot control - IMO research is showing this to be untrue - whereas in the past they would have been told that they need to rejigger the way they are dealing with problems.

A great resource for this topic is http://www.madinamerica.com/
Most of the contributors are psychologists rather than psychiatrists so there is a bias towards cbt and against drugs.

[enigmaT120]

School shootings are a new phenomenon. The number of school shootings increased as the number of prescriptions increased. Kids had problems forever yet suddenly they are taking it to this extreme.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_s ... ted_States

shows the grim list. They have picked up since around 1980, but another chart I found (couldn't figure out how to include it here!) showed the frequency being roughly level from 1980 on. Despite the population increase. I don't know when the prescriptions started getting pushed so much. I graduated in 1982 and I'm pretty sure I would have been diagnosed with something if I were a kid now.

[jennypenny]

School shootings are a new phenomenon. The number of school shootings increased as the number of prescriptions increased. Kids had problems forever yet suddenly they are taking it to this extreme.

School shootings have increased as the number of working moms has increased as well. Is it their fault? They've also increased with the divorce rate. And the decline in church attendance. Are any of those the reason more kids are so messed up and need the drugs? Slippery slope. There are plenty of boogeymen out there to pick from that one group or another has tried to demonize.

Seriously though, how do you measure the risk of taking the drug with the risk of not taking it? If you have a teen with serious mental health issues, whether violent tendencies, depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts, what are you supposed to do as a parent? You can't be with them 24 hours a day. Do you go with therapy alone--which many teens won't actively participate in--and hope for the best? Hope they don't hurt themselves, or others? Or do you try the drugs and hope that you're not one of the few with side effects that are worse than the problem you're trying to treat? It's a tough call, and I don't blame people who feel they have to try everything possible to help their child.

**I should add that I also think parents that choose to treat with drugs are also responsible for locking up alcohol, securing weapons, and keeping their car keys on their person at all times. Parents can't choose drug therapy under the guise of 'doing all they can' unless they also take responsibility for the child's environment.


To tie it back to the OP, one of the best predictors of a future of violence (which in the US usually means gun violence) is education level. But as with drugs and access to guns, it might only be a symptom of a larger, structural problem.

From a Frontline called Dropout Nation ...
Among dropouts between the ages of 16 and 24, incarceration rates were a whopping 63 times higher than among college graduates, according to a study (PDF) by researchers at Northeastern University. To be sure, there is no direct link between prison and the decision to leave high school early. Rather, the data is further evidence that dropouts are exposed to many of the same socioeconomic forces that are often gateways to crime.

http://www.northeastern.edu/clms/wp-con ... School.pdf

[Ego]

School shootings are a new phenomenon. The number of school shootings increased as the number of prescriptions increased. Kids had problems forever yet suddenly they are taking it to this extreme.

School shootings have increased as the number of working moms has increased as well. Is it their fault? They've also increased with the divorce rate. And the decline in church attendance. Are any of those the reason more kids are so messed up and need the drugs?

All of the above. But the drug vs. therapy choice does something extra. It tells kids their brain is flawed rather than their way of dealing with life.

[Riggerjack]

I watched the video, and I've never seen the numbers broken down by race before. Also, I never did the math on how far outside the norms my past is.
I think the numbers for white murder are skewed. Here's my reasoning.
Most white gangs operate in rural areas, skin heads, white supremists, bikers. Places where bodies can go missing and become missing persons cases, not murder cases. This is an important distinction, as murders get more manhours, and look much worse in crime stats. This means the local sheriff isn't motivated to turn a missing persons case into a big investigation, without a good chance of getting an arrest. Every criminal out in the sticks knows of a way or a place to make someone go away.
In the city, bodies tend to stay where they fall, all movies to the contrary. The reason is that the less you have to do with it, the less evidence you leave, and higher population density means less chance to handle a body without someone seeing. The only reason to hide a body is because it's in your living room. So areas where white crime is prevalent, are also good for stopping murder investigations before they start, or in this case, before they are accounted for in crime statistics.

As to drugs/gangs&violence, gangs and violence are constants. We had them before Drug Prohibition, we'll have them after. The variable is money. The more money that is available from criminal activity, the more criminals. Drug Prohibition moves profits from retail outlets to criminals. I don't understand why this math isn't obvious to everybody. If you want less gang crime, remove the money.