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Killing Sprees Confound Mental Health Fixes
These gun massacre sprees in schools, townships and churches are a painful reminder we live in a culture inhabited by a lot of seriously sick people who are ticking time bombs. Any number of variables seem to set them off.
The most recent tragedies:
A 17-year-old gunman in Winnenden, Germany, killed at least 16 students and teachers at his former school Wednesday before he died.
In rural Alabama on Tuesday, Michael McLendon gunned down 10 people, including at least five of his family members, before he took his own life.
The list of similiar episodes seems endless as well as aimless.
Invariably, each of the killers are profiled by psychiatrists, psychologists and others in that forensic fraternity seeking answers. What they find are deviant behavioral red flags unrecognized by untrained minds of friends and family. It takes more than tough love to say a loved one is whacko and requires psychiatric help that may or may not defuse the ticking bomb. Compounding that is possible legal ramifications for interfering school and health care officials.
I was a peripheral witness as a reporter on the day of July 18, 1984, when James Huberty shot and killed 22 and injured 19 at a McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro, Calif. I can assure you that bloody scene is engraved forever in the recesses of my brain.
In trying to reconcile these horror images, several broad truths seem to emerge no matter what the experts say.
First, the mass killings seem to go in cycles which indicates to me a “copy cat” influence involved and gives some sicko an idea to gain the same notoriety for his 15 minutes of fame.
Second, the victims are usually but not always the focus of the killer’s demented irrationality.
Third, by the end of the shooting spree, the gunman is dead by his own means or killed by police.
Finally, gun laws have absolutely no deterrent on shooting massacres. Guns are the tools used by these sick minds to carry out their rampages.
In the United States, anti-gun advocates blowoff their agendas every time a massacre occurs whether it’s Tuesday’s spree in Alabama, the 2007 slaughter at Virginia Tech University or the Columbine High School killings in Colorado.
The indelible truth is if a criminal or sicko wants a gun, there’s never been a law written to prevent him from obtaining one. In Europe, all firearms are banned yet the school shootings in Weddenden, Germany, or recent ones in Finland and Scotland, still occur.
Just for the record to those anti-gun advocates, I am not a member of the National Rifle Association, I support the Second Amendment and I think all guns should be registered. I draw the line at allowing hunters to own automatic weapons such as Uzis to shoot wild game. Other than that, I really don’t give a damn.
What stuck a stake in my heart this morning was reviewing lists of killing rampages of schools and wondering: Why schools? Here’s an abbreviated list compiled by The Associated Press:
Sept. 23, 2008: Matti Saari, 22, killed nine fellow students and a teacher before shooting himself at a vocational school in Kauhajoki, Finland.
Feb. 14, 2008: Former student Steven Kazmierczak, 27, opens fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, fatally shooting five students and wounding 18 others before committing suicide.
Nov. 7, 2007: Pekka-Eric Auvinen, 18, shoots and kills eight people and himself at a high school in Tuusula, Finland.
April 16, 2007: Cho Seung-Hui, 23, fatally shoots 32 people in a dorm and a classroom at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, then kills himself in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
Nov. 20, 2006: Sebastian Bosse, 18, goes on a rampage at his former high school in Emsdetten, Germany, near the Dutch border, shooting and injuring four students and the school janitor. Police commandos later found Bosse dead.
April 26, 2002: Robert Steinhaeuser, 19, previously expelled from a school in Erfurt, Germany, kills 13 teachers, two former classmates and a policeman, before committing suicide.
April 20, 1999: Students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold open fire at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killing 12 classmates and a teacher and wounding 26 others before committing suicide in the school’s library.
March 13, 1996: Thomas Hamilton, 43, killed 16 kindergarten children and their teacher in Dunblane, Scotland, and then killed himself.
That’s a death toll of 99 innocent victims, not counting the nine shooters themselves. The list did not include Charles Whitman’s carnage of 14 dead and 31 injured from the Tower on the University of Texas campus on July 31, 1966. And, we’re talking only schools and then only where multiple victims were slaughtered.
When you add in the Alabama spree, the church shootings, the McDonald’s massacre and the others the death toll exceeds numbers so painful we do not want to contemplate. It is a challenge beyond the scope of our mental health capabilities.
WebMD posts this decade-old study on its website but I doubt the incident rate has changed much.
The United States leads the world’s richest nations in gun deaths — murders, suicides, and accidental deaths due to guns – according to a study published April 17, 1998 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the International Journal of Epidemiology.
The U.S. was first at 14.24 gun deaths per 100,000 people. Two other countries in the Americas came next. Brazil was second with 12.95, followed by Mexico with 12.69.
Japan had the lowest rate, at 0.05 gun deaths per 100,000 (1 per 2 million people). The police in Japan actively raid homes of those suspected of having weapons.
The 36 countries in the study were the richest in the World Bank’s 1994 World Development Report, having the highest GNP per capita income.
The United States accounted for 45 percent of the 88,649 gun deaths reported in the study, the first comprehensive international scrutiny of gun-related deaths.
The gun-related deaths per 100,000 people in 1994 by country were as follows:
U.S.A. 14.24
Brazil 12.95
Mexico 12.69
Estonia 12.26
Argentina 8.93
Northern Ireland 6.63
Finland 6.46
Switzerland 5.31
France 5.15
Canada 4.31
Norway 3.82
Austria 3.70
Portugal 3.20
Israel 2.91
Belgium 2.90
Australia 2.65
Slovenia 2.60
Italy 2.44
New Zealand 2.38
Denmark 2.09
Sweden 1.92
Kuwait 1.84
Greece 1.29
Germany 1.24
Hungary 1.11
Ireland 0.97
Spain 0.78
Netherlands 0.70
Scotland 0.54
England and Wales 0.41
Taiwan 0.37
Singapore 0.21
Mauritius 0.19
Hong Kong 0.14
South Korea 0.12
Japan 0.05
These numbers and per capita rates speak for themselves. No question guns are the tools of choice for those driven to madness. Prevention is not destroying the arsenals but developing sanity to the people who use them.
Cross posted on The Remmers Report
7 Responses to “Killing Sprees Confound Mental Health Fixes”
I was dismayed to hear in the reports on the Alabama shootings that the police reported that the shooter was firing off “30 round bursts”. is there really any justification for that kind of weapon in civilian hands?
Jerry,
You keep saying gun control wouldn't help, and then you give evidence to the contrary. For example, the country with the least gun deaths is also the country with the strictest laws – Japan. Also, the German shooter had easy access to weapons – his dad was head of the local gun club. You are wrong to state Europe bans all weapons.
I agree that recognition and treatment of mental illness is the best way to prevent these shootings. It would also be nice if we stopped glorifying the use of guns – Rambo, Dirty Harry, 24, etc. But just in case we can't do that, we also need to stop making it so easy for these people to get ahold of firearms. This country has more gun dealers than gas stations. If a Mexican drug dealer needs a weapon, he comes to the U.S. The 2nd Amendment was broken 100 years ago. The founders who wrote it never imagined technology would make it possible for even a 10-year-old to gun down a dozen people.
I do not hold out much hope for gun control. Even if we enacted a total ban today, the country is so awash in guns it would take a generation to reduce the murder rate. But we need to stop kidding ourselves that easy access to guns is not part of the problem.
Reports I read indicate that, in one exchange with police, McLendon fired a TOTAL of 30 rounds.
Any weapon that could fire a thirty-round burst — with one pull of the trigger — is already prohibited from civilian hands.
I'd be dismayed to hear such things in the reports… dismayed that someone might say that, and that anyone would believe such poppycock.
bill_k said: “You keep saying gun control wouldn't help, and then you give evidence to the contrary. For example, the country with the least gun deaths is also the country with the strictest laws – Japan.”
Using statistics by country is a false trail, imho, since there's no way to quantify the social aspects. I suspect that even if Japan had guns available on every corner, their statistics would be far lower than ours.
OTOH, if Japan had guns available, their culture wouldn't be what it is anyway, would it?
The dismaying number of people who use guns on others, is a reflection of our culture… and while there are many things I love about our culture, this isn't one of them. The gun violence is (to me) a manifestation of a wider illness — kind of like a rash indicates a more serious underlying problem.
Jerry's use of the term “tools” is completely accurate. Treating the mental state of those who utilize them, though, is much MUCH bigger than merely trying to identify individuals who are a risk / danger to society.
Seems to me like the very people who are gunning folks down because life isn't exactly peachy right now are the same ones who howl about needing a gun to protect themselves from criminals except that they're two cans short of a six pack and turn into criminals themselves. Are we all going to have a strap on a six shooter because we never know when a cousin or co-worker or neighbor is going to nuts? I think we do have admit that easy access to weapons and some of these people's obsession with owning an arsenal of weapons is definitely a major part of our problem.
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