The Mass Shooting Puzzle
What can we do about psychopathic warning signs?
BY HOLMAN W. JENKINS JR.
Sunday, April 22, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
There are dangerous, vicious people among us, a recognition that ought to be the starting point of any policy aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings.
In the case of Mark Barton, the disgruntled investor who shot up an Atlanta day-trading shop in 1999, he had left a trail of police officers, insurance investigators, in-laws, neighbors and former employers, who knew he was a psychopath and suspected he was a killer, though police had never been able to make a case against him. In the case of Salvador Tapia, who shot up a Chicago warehouse in 2003, he had been the subject of numerous police calls for aggravated assault, domestic battery and threatening family members with a gun.
The same is true for other committers of mass shootings, even Columbine's Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. The information existed, but it did not produce effective action.
Psychologists make a professional habit of saying that violence can't be predicted, perhaps true in the clinical setting. In the workplace and the normal encounters of everyday life, however, others do get glimpses of the personality and external circumstances that sometimes combine to produce such mass shootings. One of our enduring frustrations is that--after we've waded through the predictable thickets of adjectives describing the killer as "quiet" and the killings as "senseless"--it turns out warning signs were present, that co-workers, neighbors or family members had seen the culprit clearly enough to be afraid.
Twice this column has visited the case of Britain's Michael Stone, who'd had a long history of run-ins with police and mental health officials. When he was later accused of killing a woman and her daughter, these records spilled into the press. The public was shocked to learn that "the system" had fingered him as a dangerous psychopath but had let him go on grounds that he was "untreatable."
All but ended now is an attempt by British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government to enact a new mental health law allowing the government, on the say-so of a panel of psychiatrists, to lock up indefinitely someone judged to be suffering from a dangerous, severe personality disorder. Civil libertarians and a fair segment of the medical profession went ape, pointing out (not unrealistically) the pitfalls involved in jailing people based on the mere professional judgment of MDs.
After one of our columns on the subject, the Journal published a partially sympathetic letter from a U.S. clinical psychologist who noted the difficulty of constructing a reliable net: "Many psychopaths can adapt to society in a non-violent fashion. For example, business executives and politicians are inordinately represented--relative to other occupations--by individuals with psychopathic personality traits."
We'll take that belatedly as a sign that our hope of the psychology department and police department getting together anytime soon to identify and stop would-be mass murderers before they go on their shooting sprees was premature. How else, then, to get the "warning signs" acted upon? Let's start by understanding how the trait and the triggering circumstance can come together in a concatenation termed "threat/control-override"--and how this might help private individuals and institutions do a better job of protecting themselves.
In short, something happens to prompt the person to act on impulses that otherwise would be stayed by fear of the consequences. This has already prompted businesses to practice heightened security and keep an eye on selected employees when conducting layoffs. A divorce, a bankruptcy, an investment loss--all have been triggering moments. And the pattern and details were usually known to somebody, perhaps many somebodies, who also had an insight into the personality involved and the dangers thereof.
This suggests an alternative to trying to lock up people based on their personalities. Voices are already pointing out with perfect validity that any law-abiding student or faculty member who was in fear of Mr. Cho might have had a hard time citing an actionable cause for authorities to intervene--and also have been hard-pressed under the law privately to protect himself adequately.
If a citizen accepts that there's no electoral majority in America for taking away people's guns, then the alternative is to consider how to make the law more conducive to better outcomes in cases like Cho Seung-Hui's. Dozens of states have acted to expand a citizen's right to carry a concealed weapon. The result has not been an entire populace going around armed and engaging in firefights over every fender bender. Just the opposite according to research by economists John Lott Jr. and William Landes--few shooters seem to be looking for an encounter with an armed opponent and such crimes are rarer in concealed-carry states.
After all, some people are prepared, at their own expense, to obtain a gun, training and a concealed-carry permit. This is likely to include people who wouldn't have thought of arming themselves except when daily activity throws them unavoidably into proximity to somebody who makes them rationally afraid. If society can't process and react to warning signs given off by such people collectively, an alternative is to expand the opportunity for individuals to process and react to them personally.
Mr. Jenkins is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. His column appears in the Journal on Wednesdays.
opinionjournal.com |
