PA Bill Number: HB335
Title: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons.
Description: In inchoate crimes, further providing for prohibited offensive weapons. ...
Last Action: Removed from table
Last Action Date: May 1, 2024
Armed and angry, the formula for gun violence :: 08/28/2015
The dust is settling after Wednesday’s mayhem du jour, the killing of two Virginia television journalists by a former colleague. The shootings commanded breathless all-day attention when the gunman introduced the calculated novelty of slaughtering his victims on live television and filming his own video for social media.
Otherwise, it was a paint-by-the-numbers eruption of reality gun drama, American style: Armed man shoots multiple victims, runs from the cops, sometimes shoots himself. A chorus arises saying we must do something about all these guns; contrapuntal voices say these killings are the result of mental illness, not of the firearms themselves.
After rushing to that impasse, we forget all about it. This process usually takes a few days; higher body counts can keep the debate going for as long as a few weeks.
That’s a cynical interpretation, but we see it play out, by some calculations, on a daily basis. The Washington Post reports that an online group tracking gun violence finds that our nation now averages more than one mass shooting per day, with “mass shooting” defined as a single incident in which at least four people are shot, if not necessarily killed.
There’s a grim invitation to cynicism. To despair, even.
Before we continue, let me reiterate my boilerplate position on private firearm ownership: I have no quarrel with responsible gun owners.
I grew up in a household with guns. Members of my family own a truly astonishing variety of weapons, including shotguns, handguns, various knives, swords, bows and arrows and (I am not making this up) weaponized throwing shovels. There are probably some musketoons and pikestaffs in there I have forgotten about.
This doesn’t cut much ice with those who believe that using the words “gun” and “violence” in the same sentence is a totalitarian disarmament scheme and that the Second Amendment enshrines the sacred right of gun ownership to all sentient beings, including babies, dementia patients and well-trained pets.
Short of that position, though, there should be room across the political spectrum for those who concede that there are at least some hands from which deadly weapons should be withheld. The popular view is that we must do more to keep guns away from people with documented mental illness. The nut with a gun is our modern-day bogeyman.
Some experts, though, are saying that’s the wrong population to be concerned about. Severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder — typical legal disqualifiers for gun ownership — are not the problem, they say. According to their studies, the most dangerous population is gun owners with chronic temper-management problems: the Armed and Angry.
The findings, published in April in the journal Behavioral Sciences & the Law, suggest that nearly 9 percent of all Americans who are prone to outbursts of anger — such as fighting and breaking objects — also have ready access to firearms.
“These are people who lose their tempers and smash and break things and get into physical fights — and they have guns,” said Dr. Jeffrey Swanson, a Duke University researcher who led the study. “That seems like a dangerous combination.”
Swanson, speaking in a video filmed by the university’s news service and broadcast via YouTube, said most people with a clinical diagnosis of serious mental illness “are not violent and never will be.”
Instead, a scientific review of interviews conducted with people convicted of violent gun crimes found not insanity, but rage.
“A lot of them do have mental health problems,” Swanson said, such as impulse control and angry outbursts. But in clinical terms, those are distinctly separate issues from what is medically and legally considered severe mental illness.
“In this country, we can’t broadly limit legal access to guns,” he adds, “so we have to focus on dangerous people who shouldn’t have them.”
Polls show broad support for that idea across political lines. As a starting point, why can’t we fine-tune the definition of who those “dangerous people” are?
Swanson and his fellow researchers suggest that lawmakers consider limiting gun access not for people who have been institutionalized for mental illness, but who have a documented history of behavior control problems: repeat arrests for violent misdemeanors, especially in combination with substance abuse problems.
Gun rights activists are fond of saying that mass shootings “aren’t a gun problem, but a people problem.”
The very least we can do is figure out which people pose the biggest problem.
