Watch Out for the Traumatized

Vice News reports on a study on mass shooters.

A new Department of Justice-funded study of all mass shootings — killings of four or more people in a public place — since 1966 found that the shooters typically have an experience with childhood trauma, a personal crisis or specific grievance, and a “script” or examples that validate their feelings or provide a roadmap. And then there’s the fourth thing: access to a firearm.

That last one is an example of what philosophers call "trivially true," i.e., a truth easily arrived at because of the definition of the class. Obviously, in a study of mass shooters, access to a firearm is going to prove to be one of the things they had. I've often argued that we're rather lucky that our mass killers use firearms as opposed to bombs, which are easily made (in Iraq, 'home made explosive' was readily mixed by children using common household chemicals) and often kill vastly more people than a shooter can manage. This decision to focus on the class of 'shooters' rather than the class of 'killers' tends to lead people to believe that if you could eliminate guns, the problem could be solved 'as it has been in civilized countries,' but Denmark recently closed its border with Sweden over the mass bombing problem.

The problem generalizes. Richard Fernandez recently pointed out that the biggest mass killings used fire, which is quite simply deployed by anyone. Trucks, as were used in the Nice attack in France, are also both more deadly than guns and nearly impossible to ban from cities: without trucks to carry in the food every day, the city could not exist. You could go back to horses, I suppose: have the truckers stage up in yards outside the city center, transfer their goods to carts, and have the horses pull them into town for distribution. That's a pretty costly solution for the problem of mass killings, which are statistically tiny even though they are emotionally disturbing to observe.

So if technology is not the right place to focus, that brings us to the other three factors:

1) Childhood trauma,

2) A 'personal crisis or specific grievance,' and,

3) A validating script.

The third factor is probably intractable in the age of the Internet, and at least in America it has to be balanced against protected liberties. For example, the 'jihadist' ideology taught by the so-called "Islamic State" (ISIS) can be contested, but it has to be conceptually severed from the protected freedom of religion, including the practice of Islam. Yet the conceptual roots of 'jihadism' are in the faith, and will come to be known to anyone who studies it closely; and anyone who studies the great scholars of Islam will find much support for the idea. Avicenna, that great philosopher, describes jihad as a kind of double good in his Metaphysics of the Healing, because it brings one closer to God's will while also providing you access to practical goods like slaves captured in the war. The philosopher Averroes, in a reflection on Plato's Republic, agrees with Plato that the best kind of women should be admitted to a kind of equality with the best kind of men, and that this equality means that they should be allowed to join in jihad and the taking of slaves and wealth. The Reliance of the Traveler, one of the great medieval works of Islamic jurisprudence, is a favorite example of Andy McCarthy's (who came to know it while prosecuting the World Trade Center bomber, an earlier example of mass killings by bomb).

Apart from not suppressing Islam, you can't suppress (and ought to encourage) the study of Avicenna, especially. In any case, the 'road map' certainly can't be suppressed without trying to drive Islam out of the world. The best you can do is to acknowledge it, and work with those within the community of Muslims who oppose people pursuing violent jihad to try to convince as many people as possible that it's not a legitimate path. Ultimately, though, some will be convinced, and in part because the other side probably has a better case to make about what Muhammad and his companions really meant; certainly about what the great philosophers of his tradition meant. The case is easier when the other side doesn't have a better argument, as is true for example of Klan-type movements that are based on nonsensical readings of science and demonstrably bad readings of history. But then, too, the road to success doesn't lie through suppressing the 'road map,' but in engaging it to illuminate its problems.

Attempts to suppress the 'road map,' meanwhile, run into First Amendment free speech protections. New Zealand made it a criminal offense to share recordings and videos and manifestos from the Christchurch shooter; that's an affront to basic liberty that cannot be tolerated. In Europe, meanwhile, they've apparently decided that the bigger threat is that people will draw conclusions hostile to Islam, and end up trying to suppress not the road map that's causing the bombings, but the one that could potentially cause anti-Muslim violence. All of these things are out of order with human liberty, and to be rejected. Even if you didn't reject them, though, you would find them ineffective without a more general abandonment of the ideals of self-government: you will have to suppress the press talking about these things (and so convince the press that it is unethical to do their actual job as journalists, and then suppress those members of the press who continue to do it). But the courts are going to end up trying some of these mass killing cases, so you'll end up having to suppress citizen knowledge of the facts of cases in open court. That ends up damaging the rights of the accused, who cannot rely on a secret court to also be a fair court; and it destroys our ability to keep tabs on the government, which destroys self-government as a basic idea.

So Factor Three is probably not going to be where we make much progress. You can try to educate people out of these road maps, but you can't eliminate them.

Factor Two is a universal human experience. You can look for people who are undergoing a personal crisis, and potentially make some progress by making help available to people in getting through such crises as they occur. You can't eliminate crises, though, nor grievances either.

So that leads us to Factor One: childhood trauma. Here we readily identify a specific class of people who could be subject to greater scrutiny as potential mass killers. That is to say that, recognizing them as having been victimized once, we shall be sure to continue to victimize them by treating them as dangerous hazards who can't be trusted as much as other people. Even if that conclusion were true (and these killers are so small a percentage of society that it probably isn't even true), it would be fundamentally unjust to punish people for having been traumatized.

Since it is the only thing that is really likely to work, though, injustice is the most probable outcome of future government action on this issue. My sense is that we have much more to fear from any government attempts to address mass killings than we have to fear from the tiny number of killers, bad as they are.