Steve Taylor – Lecturer in psychology in UK and the author of Back To Sanity: Healing the Madness of Our Minds
Sam Vaknin – Analyst, author of Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited , and Editor-in-Chief of Global Politician
Theresa Fraser – Canadian child psychotherapist, play therapist supervisor, and author of book Adopting a Child with Trauma and Attachment Disruption History
Dave Scotese – Software consultant, writer, and founder of the literary community Litmocracy
Craig Kyzar – Attorney and writer with a background in International Law
Carol Forsloff – Senior journalist and editor in chief of the Journal of Humanitarian Affairs
Ernest: First of all, I would like to ask about the psychology of such violence. Why does this kind of killing happen at all? Does something terribly go wrong all of a sudden with these young people who take the gun and target human life?
Steve: Alienation – psychological disturbance – longstanding grudges – lack of support for psychologically disturbed young men – plus the easy access to firearms.
Sam: Most spree shooters are loners. They are either schizoid (with deficient interpersonal skills) or paranoid and even paranoid-schizophrenic (psychotic, delusional). Their dysfunction is all-pervasive: their family life, career, romantic relationships, professional, and material accomplishments are all adversely affected by their mental mayhem. They feel excluded and shunned and are profoundly ashamed of and frustrated with their inadequacies and with their sadistic, self-destructive, suicidal, and self-defeating "inner judge" (inner, introjected "voices" or narrative). This frustration builds up and results in pent-up aggression which ultimately manifests as furious, uncontrollable rage. The typical spree shooter is in love with all things violent: guns, the military, police work, virulent racism, and crime.
Since spree shooters have no one to share their emotions with, these tectonic and volcanic shifts get shunted (displaced): when the spree shooter seeks to explain to himself why he is so angry constantly, he blames it upon his ultimate victims and their behavior or idiosyncrasies. Members of despised minorities (Roma, Jews, blacks, homosexuals, etc.) are perfect scapegoats because their persecution is socially-sanctioned and the spree shooter catches two birds with one shotgun: for the first time in his life he feels that he "belongs", that his conduct is socially-acceptable and peer-condoned; and he vents his fury on easy, vulnerable, risk-free targets.
During the attack, the spree shooter feels elated and his anxiety relieved. Contrary to the persistent myth, the shooter is aware of his environment, but he suspends morality, judgment, and his sense of danger. The shooter usually takes his life as an act of defiance, not of desperation, rendering himself out of the reach of the Law. It is a grandiose gesture, sort of "Twilight of the Gods". At the same time, self-annihilation tends to uphold the shooter's view of himself as "worthless", a sempiternal loser and an incorrigible failure.
The timing of the spree shooting is usually determined by a life crisis: losing one's job, divorce, incarceration, personal bankruptcy, the death of a loved one or significant other. The spree shooter often hits rock bottom before he erupts.
Theresa: Pursuant to these horrific events we all ask why. What sent the individual over the edge? Often when we look at the life and lifestyle of the perpetrator, there is much evidence of mental health history as well as developmental deficits. Attached is the 40 Developmental Assets for Adolescents from the Search Institute. Utilizing these, it is much easier to recognize what treatment planning should occur for our adolescents and young adults. They didn’t just wake up isolated and disconnected from people, peer groups, or their communities. Now add a diagnosed mental health issue with lack of supported interventions, lack of supervision and access to weapons, and we have the recipe for disaster.
Ernest: Far as I have come across news of such terrifying shooting incidents, the killers are most often young men. Can we call this a gender-specific problem?
Steve: Around 90% of all violence crimes are committed by men. Some scientists believe it’s due to a high level of testosterone, but I think that’s simplistic. One major factor is a response to slights. Most murders are committed in response to perceived insults or slights. Perhaps you could even interpret the killing in Connecticut in these terms, and other mass killings – the murderer was perhaps taking revenge for the mistreatment he perceived at school, or by others in his generation. One important difference between men and women is that men are more sensitive to damage to their self-esteem. Alcohol is often a factor here too – as it has the effect of increasing a person’s self-worth, more sensitive to slights, and less able to control their aggressive impulses. Of course, another factor is that men are socialized to respond with violence, being brought up to be ‘tough’ and emotionless, and repeatedly seeing images of aggressive men on TV, films and computer games.
Theresa: As a Canadian Child Psychotherapist Play Therapist, my experience is that boys externalize feelings of frustration and anger while girls are more likely to internalize these. Hence, adults recognize the behavior of boys as evidenced by behavioral classes that are most often comprised of boys. However, when girls experience feelings, they struggle with and don’t express; they are more likely to internalize issues so cutting or eating disorders become additional concerns.
Sam: Most spree shooters are male adolescents and young adults. Most narcissists are male. Healthy narcissism is common in adolescents. Their narcissistic defenses help them cope with the anxieties and fears engendered by the demands and challenges of modern society: leaving home, going to college, sexual performance, marriage, and other rites of passage. There is nothing wrong with healthy narcissism. It sustains the adolescent in a critical time of his life and shields him or her from emotional injuries. Still, in certain circumstances, healthy narcissism can transform into a malignant form, destructive to self and to others.
Ernest: What is the impact of such incidents on people? Apparently they will be afraid and perhaps would like to opt for owning guns for self-defense.
Steve: As a UK citizen, the widespread ownership of guns in the US seems like a bizarre type of pathology to me – a strange mixture of fear and aggression. I’m sure it will create more fear, but hopefully it will also create some rational debate and action on reducing access to firearms.
Sam: One's (or someone else's) looming death, violation, personal injury, or powerful pain are sufficient to provoke the behaviors, cognitions, and emotions that together are known as PTSD. Even learning about such mishaps may be enough to trigger massive anxiety responses.
The first phase of PTSD involves incapacitating and overwhelming fear. The victim feels like she has been thrust into a nightmare or a horror movie. She is rendered helpless by her own terror. She keeps re-living the experience through recurrent and intrusive visual and auditory hallucinations ("flashbacks") or dreams. In some flashbacks, the victim completely lapses into a dissociative state and physically re-enacts the event while being thoroughly oblivious to her whereabouts.
In an attempt to suppress this constant playback and the attendant exaggerated startle response (jumpiness), the victim tries to avoid all stimuli associated, however indirectly, with the traumatic event. Many develop full-scale phobias (agoraphobia, claustrophobia, fear of heights, aversion to specific animals, objects, modes of transportation, neighborhoods, buildings, occupations, weather, and so on).
Most PTSD victims are especially vulnerable on the anniversaries of their abuse. They try to avoid thoughts, feelings, conversations, activities, situations, or people who remind them of the traumatic occurrence ("triggers").
This constant hypervigilance and arousal, sleep disorders (mainly insomnia), the irritability ("short fuse"), and the inability to concentrate and complete even relatively simple tasks erode the victim's resilience. Utterly fatigued, most patients manifest protracted periods of numbness, automatism, and, in radical cases, near-catatonic posture. Response times to verbal cues increase dramatically. Awareness of the environment decreases, sometimes dangerously so. The victims are described by their nearest and dearest as "zombies", "machines", or "automata". The victims appear to be sleepwalking, depressed, dysphoric, anhedonic (not interested in anything and find pleasure in nothing). They report feeling detached, emotionally absent, estranged, and alienated. Many victims say that their "life is over" and expect to have no career, family, or otherwise meaningful future. The victim's family and friends complain that she is no longer capable of showing intimacy, tenderness, compassion, empathy, and of having sex (due to her post-traumatic "frigidity"). Many victims become paranoid, impulsive, reckless, and self-destructive. Others somatise their mental problems and complain of numerous physical ailments. They all feel guilty, shameful, humiliated, desperate, hopeless, and hostile.
PTSD need not appear immediately after the harrowing experience. It can – and often is – delayed by days or even months. It lasts more than one month (usually much longer). Sufferers of PTSD report subjective distress (the manifestations of PTSD are ego-dystonic). Their functioning in various settings – job performance, grades at school, sociability – deteriorates markedly.
Theresa: We don’t have the same issue in Canada. Guns are around us but not in the same numbers as relevant to population when we compare our numbers to the USA. I would also say that as a parent I am glad I don’t have guns in my home accessible to me or my children. I know how to shoot a rifle and have scored high at the rifle range but don’t want a gun in the milieu where individuals with mental health issues have access to these.
Ernest: Right. In the US, however, this does seem to be a major issue at the moment, and we have Carol Forlsoff here to tell about the situation in the US. Carol, you have a rich experience of American culture and values as well as a long career in journalism. Would you agree that such violence has got more frequent and more terrible in the past 10 years or so?
Carol: Although violence has always been with us in some form, the nature of it seems to have changed and local problems developed with the increase in social media and the unique and often aggressive attitudes occurring from lack of face to face communication and the type of speech shielded by anonymity. Verbal violence and the lack of significant social connectedness fosters an atmosphere where people become apathetic, depressed, isolated, and insulated from the type of closeness one found in typical families and communities years ago. While people have more options for learning about history and psycho-social problems, the emphasis on the quick and less detailed information means people have streams of it, often consisting of more opinion than substance, and myths and stories may then supersede consistent and accurate education. The attitude that anyone can say anything in any way and not have any consequences for it promotes again an environment where anything goes and where personal freedom outweighs community ethics and concerns. In other words, verbal violence in the form of writing and speaking must be recognized for what it is; a type of aggression that can exacerbate existing mental and social health problems.
Ernest: Do you support a strict gun control policy for a safer America?
Carol: For more than 50 years, I have advocated strict gun control measures that include registration of firearms and the prohibition of firearms like assault rifles. In addition, I believe that all those who sell or purchase guns should be required to pass both a written and practice examination, just like one needs to drive a car, to answer questions about the laws regarding guns, the ethics, the rules, the physical details, and to perform a safety test. No one under the age of 18 should be able to own a gun, and there should be background checks for everyone. But coupled with this, mental health care should be on parity with physical health in how people are educated about the early signs of mental health problems and how they are treated. I grew up in a small town where most adult males had a rifle in the home, but it was locked and children were not allowed to use it without adult supervision; and the purpose of the gun was to hunt for food. And it was not called a "sport", so that the concept of killing was not taught as equivalent to playing tennis. How we view guns and the purpose of them has everything to do with what happens in our communities.
Ernest: Dave, you have previously written about the possibility of strict gun control law as a solution; and you don’t appear to be a supporter of strict gun control as solution to such violence. How would you comment on the recent killings in Oregon and Connecticut and the recurring cry for gun control?
Dave: I have not looked too deeply into the Connecticut shooting, but Morgan Freeman, the famous actor, supposedly pointed out that the media tends to aggrandize the shooter in these incidents, and that this contributes heavily to the motivation of those mentally unstable enough to consider killing as a viable path toward their goals. My position on gun control derives from the basic non-aggression principle and has not changed. We all have a right to protect ourselves using whatever tools we can get without violating others. The shooting in Connecticut was most likely undertaken with firearms owned and registered to the shooter’s mother, a divorcee whose ex and firstborn son both work for Ernst & Young. She does not sound like the kind of person who would be denied a license to own a weapon to protect herself. Those who would shoot innocent people tend to have no qualms about finding ways to commit their crimes regardless of the legality of those methods. So the shooting we’re discussing is itself a good example of gun control failure.
Ernest: As a parent, would you feel safer with a gun at home than being unarmed but living in a strict gun control state?
Dave: Abdicating my responsibility to protect myself and my family by supporting the disarming of everyone else is both foolish and irresponsible. After all, legal requirements are ignored by the worst kind of people. For a criminal, gun control converts an otherwise challenging and dangerous environment into low-hanging fruit. There is no contract that the government is violating when it fails to protect people, so suing the government for failing to protect you involves the fantasy that you’ve made some kind of agreement with it that it has violated. If there were a contract, then whoever signed it would have the right to sue – in fact one might call it a responsibility at that point. However, if government protection came from a signed contract, it wouldn’t be called government; it would be a private security company.
While the use of violence is abhorrent to me, I respect the right of others to employ it, and I would do so myself, for the purpose of self-defense. The current public acceptance of the government as the only rightful user of violence is the underlying cause for most violations of individuals. Thomas Hobbes pointed out that people, in his time, always carried weapons when they travelled in order to defend themselves. He thought that an overwhelming force, leviathan, the government, could obviate our need for weapons, but look around. Violence and government co-exist, and appear to be positively correlated. More of one goes with more of the other. One could place a significant amount of blame for that directly on Hobbes’ argument.
Ernest: Talking about law and government,Craig, please tell us a little about how a gun law can be formulated and enforced? Will it be effective? And would such a law not clash with any constitutional right to self-defense of the people?
Craig: One major consideration is that Connecticut has some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation and yet it did nothing to stop this tragedy. The simple truth is that we live in a union of interconnected states, with wildly varying gun control laws and unfettered passage across borders. Therefore, while stricter state gun control laws may reduce shooting deaths (whether these reduced shooting deaths are offset by other means of killing when guns are not as easily acquired, I do not know) within the state, they do little to prevent a truly determined killer from acquiring the weapons and ammunition he seeks. Should this nation ultimately decide to bring its firearm tolerance effectively into line with other western nations, it will have to do so at a federal level.
MS, CA, NY, CT and DC are all relatively strict in gun ownership while others are far more lax in allowing the procurement of weapons and have varying restrictions or bans on their concealed possession.
To buy a gun, Connecticut law requires residents apply for a permit with the local police, submit to fingerprints, and submit to a state and federal background check with a 14-day waiting period. To buy a handgun, residents also are required to take a gun safety course.
Many laws seem to focus their strongest restrictions on handgun ownership while permitting the ownership of many types of rifles and the like. While this targets the lowering of the likelihood of one-on-one confrontations, robberies and random fights escalating into bloodshed, it obviously leaves open the possibility of continued attacks like Sandy Hook through high-powered rifles.
The Constitutional concerns center around the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights. However, within the past five years, the Supreme Court has reaffirmed the right to own firearms for self-defense purposes unrelated to military or police service. That said, the Supreme Court has also made it clear that the placement of numerous legal limitations and restrictions on this right are not considered unconstitutional.
States have the right to pass constitutional amendments based on the will of their citizens, so long as no state law impinges on the baseline federal rights conferred by the Second Amendment to bear arms in generally acceptable form.
While Connecticut’s laws ban dozens of automatic and semiautomatic weapons, it does not ban the rifle used in the massacre. Short of rescinding the Second Amendment itself, some form of firearms will be always legally available; so I believe we need to focus on better dealing with those who would abuse the right.
Ernest: Carol, what do you think of the kind of coverage such violent incidents get in media, on TV particularly? Can extended or sensational media coverage about these incidents do more harm than good?
Carol: While it is easy to blame the media for social problems, often the media simply reports what happens in great detail repetitiously, and sometimes before all the facts are in, so people get misinformation that is difficult to unlearn and seems to offer more what the public wants as opposed to what it needs. Another problem is the proliferation of blogs and news sites administered by the untrained and inexperienced in the media who often operate by the dictum that freedom of speech means anyone can say anything. Too many people have opinions that don't contain the important details. Many don't understand how to report research, or even review it, nor understand the ethics of journalism. Journalists should have training that includes the essentials of history, psychology, statistics, and ethics, as the mission is to educate, inform, and hold power to account. Without a proper foundation, writers can make grave errors, and these errors can cause people to believe false information and thereby make wrong decisions. So reporting must be taken seriously and the learning should be continuous. If we require our teachers to be sensitive, careful, and educated for the job, we must likewise require our journalists to meet standards of practice, either through formal training, supervised training, or examination. There should be a proper balance between giving the public what it wants (sensation that drives stories) and what it needs (information and education to make good decisions).
Ernest: Finally I would like to ask each of your opinion on what needs to be done foremost to prevent or at least minimize such violence like those we saw recently in Oregon and Connecticut.
Steve: Primarily, less access to firearms – but also a less violent culture, with less violent computer games and films – and better access to mental health services – and more generally, less social isolation and an increased sense of community.
Craig: Personally, I believe the issue – while valid for regulatory purposes – is entirely missing the true problem. Somebody who is determined to kill will do so. If not able to procure a gun, there will always be other means. However, we as a nation have become so fearful of stigmatizing individuals or offending the public’s delicate sensibilities that we have done a grave disservice to the mentally ill and unstable who are ultimately and invariably the perpetrators of these unimaginable slaughters. The debate on gun control ignited immediately after this latest tragedy, and yet the debate on how we handle the disturbed people actually carrying the weapon is still pushed to the back burner. Until we do more to help these psychologically disturbed people BEFORE they acquire a gun, stricter gun control laws will do little to mitigate against senseless violence in all forms. Fewer guns means fewer people shot by guns. Pretty simple logic there. However, does it mean fewer people killed overall? America is determined to blame the tool but not the hand using it. Some say guns cost lives. Others say they save lives. I say they are simple instruments to help people achieve their pre-existing goals, for good or bad. If we believe people cannot be trusted to handle them responsibly then why are we not doing more to create a responsible nation of people?
Dave: I will do my best to correct the mistake this question makes. What needs to be done to prevent or minimize violence, whether it’s with a gun or a knife or a car, a tank or a bomb or a drone, a 1040 or an IRS agent or a levy? The principles of voluntaryism need to be studied and understood by more people. The power of the individual needs to be maximized, and that means more freedom. The inherent goodness of the vast majority of people needs to be recognized and celebrated. Our compassion needs to be married to our power over each other, from fists and loud voices to guns and property theft. As our recognition and celebration as a tool of self-defense of the individual’s destructive power grows, so too will its exercise and positive effects. We have been cowed by fear and we have allowed that fear to make us weak and stupid. Let’s grow up and reclaim our freedom, our power, our compassion, and our responsibilities.
Theresa: It starts today. Limit the amount of exposure to these stories that your children have. Dependent on their developmental age they may view media stories as re-enactment of the events and children experience these physiologically as if they are occurring in real time.
Also, talk about the events carefully with children around. Answer with only necessary information. We neither want to glamorize nor accentuate the horrific events. Also point out to children that when bad things happen there are always heroes or helpers around them. Who are these people, parents, grandparents, friends, the crossing guard, and teacher, Priest or Pastor. Have the children identify who their resiliency heroes are. When we work with children who lack these, we want to find ways to increase them. It is common to look in the histories of the perpetrators and find that they didn’t have many heroes helping them when they fall.
When we practice necessary “lock down” procedures ensure that parents are made aware that these are occurring so they can be sure to spend more time with their children. Hug them, love them, and play with them at night. When children have practiced lock down and then heard about events where individuals entered their places of safety to hurt other children these experiences become connected. So though we need to practice “lock down” in hopes that children will know where to go or how to play dead in the event of an emergency, we can’t minimize the cost of this preparation on a child’s psyche. As the President of the Canadian Association for Child and Play Therapy, our press release encouraged parents to make sure that they play with their children, not just in the wake of this crisis but every day. Play is the language of children and there is POWER in Play. I would like to say that this is more powerful than guns but it isn’t in the short term. A gun can kill in a second. Play should occur over a lifetime. So I will leave it to the lawmakers to take care of the second and the rest of us need to take care of today and forever to ensure that the Adams of this world get what they need from their families, communities and mental health service providers. If they don’t, we see what seconds can do.
Carol: Gun control that includes the banning of assault rifles and handguns. Rifles to be registered, and a written examination and practice test to reflect knowledge of safety rules. Requirement for special locks on guns. No mail order sales allowed. Gun dealers to be licensed and meet special tests. No gun shows for random purchases. Mental health programs on parity with physical health programs. An Article V convention to review Constitutional amendments as provided by the Constitution to update the nation's laws on specific rights and responsibilities.
Ernest: Thank you all for sharing your views on this burning issue!
