Thursday, December 3, 2015
San Bernardino, Colorado Springs, Roseburg, Chattanooga, Charleston, Isla Vista, Killeen, Washington, Santa Monica, Newton, Aurora, etc. Ad Nauseam...
by Tom Kando
It happened again, as it now happens almost daily. On December 2, three terrorists murdered fourteen people in San Bernardino, and wounded many more. Two suspects are dead, one is still on the loose as of this writing. And the list goes on (See Mass Shootings in the US).
Yes, they are/were terrorists. You don’t need to know who they were, what their religion and ethnicity is/was. Their actions by definition makes them terrorists, as is Robert Dear, who murdered three people at a Planned Parenthood Clinic on November 27, and all the others, regardless of race creed or color. Some random thoughts about this topic:
1. America is afflicted by a lethal combination: There is a diffused rage that is spreading like wildfire, and Americans are armed to the teeth with the most sophisticated weaponry imaginable. This is a very combustible mix.
The rage is fueled by those who peddle anger, angst and discontent to the population, many of them working-class, DOWNWARDLY mobile white males, along with assorted others. The peddlers include political candidates and their media outlets, all the angry people at Fox and other channels.
Among the hundreds of mass shootings over the past few decades, I can’t recall any by blacks or Hispanics, or by women (although there has been a tiny amount of female participation, and of course the homicide rate among Hispanics and African-Americans is quite high - primarily against each other).
2. The police? Yes, black lives matter; yes, police misbehavior is rampant; yes many cops are racially biased. However, when a society globally descends into chaos and violence, the police becomes an ever more essential life buoy for the citizenry. We cannot exist without a police.
3. Whether terrorists murder 130 Parisians or hundreds of Americans, what is lacking altogether is knowledge and UNDERSTANDING of what is going on. It would be extremely beneficial to catch many of the murderers alive. It would help a great deal if, instead of permitting them to blow themselves up or killing them in a final fusillade, many such people were captured, and then studied in great detail.
I taught courses on Violence and Terrorism at the University for many years. This is a complex scientific field of study, not unlike the medical study of disease. The “mental illness” cliché is facile and used widely. It explains nothing. Rage is an ageless phenomenon. Are we to believe that there is more of it - and more mental illness - today than in the past? That would be nonsensical.
We have much to learn about rage, violence, terrorism and mass murder. A disease must be understood before it can be eradicated, or held in check. I do not bemoan the death of most mass murderers. I merely suggest that by destroying most of the patients, we miss the opportunity to learn about the disease.
4. Gun control: This is not a debate. The presence of hundreds of millions of fire arms among the population, including ever more sophisticated automatic assault weapons, is the ONLY reason why mass murder has become so common and why America differs so much from all other comparable countries in this regard. It is not the main reason. It is the ONLY reason. Anger, political strife, fighting, tribal feuds, mental illness - none of these things are new. What is unprecedented is the insane volume of sophisticated weaponry in the hands of the populace, and the ease of obtaining it.
There is no point in playing games with people like Wayne LaPierre and the NRA, refuting alleged data about other heavily armed citizenries under entirely different conditions (Switzerland, Israel), etc. None of their arguments holds water. The only sane policy is to reduce the size of our national arsenal of exquisitely effective weapons of mass murder.
President Obama, speaking on the day of the San Bernardino mass shooting, was right - as he usually is: We may never achieve 100% safety, but we sure can improve the odds and the frequency of these horrendous events.
5. Facts matter: when my wife and I returned from Rome a few months ago, many of our friends and neighbors said, “Oh, we are so glad that you are back, safe and sound in the good old USA!” It was no use reminding them that Rome and Paris are considerably safer than Sacramento:
Murder rate in Rome: 1.3 per 100,000
Murder rate in Paris: 2.0
Murder rate in Sacramento: 7.1
Murder rate in Italy: 0.9
Murder rate in US: 4.5
6. At the same time, we should not panic. The panic fuels the fire. After every mass shooting, thousands of Americans go out and buy additional firearms, deluding themselves that this will make them safer.
Here is another fact for you to mull over: The overall US homicide rate is now 4.5 per 100,000. It hasn’t been this low since the mid 1960s. In 1980, it was 10.2 - more than twice what it is today. Thus, while spectacular mass shootings are up, the total number of homicides is sharply down.
The last thing we need is the inflammatory rhetoric spewed by political candidates and bloodthirsty media, urging us to be ever more enraged at everybody, be it the government, politicians, Muslims, Planned Parenthood or illegal immigrants.
© Tom Kando 2015
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25 comments:
"However, when a society globally descends into chaos and violence, the police becomes an ever more essential life buoy for the citizenry."
I disagree on this. When chaos and violence grow big loyalty mechanisms within the police will make them protect themselves before the people, which make friends, neighbours and family more valuable and reliable than the police force.
John's comment is valuable.
However, I believe that it takes BOTH the police AND those other sources of support he mentions. I was struck again when watching the news about the San Bernardino mass shooting yesterday, by how hard the police was working in this crisis.
another good piece by my favorite Hungarian (retired prof from CSUS)
I agree with John that the police tend to use overwhelming force and think of protecting themselves first rather than protecting the citizens. This is one reason the Black Lives Matter movement has gained traction. The more removed the police are from a community, the more violent they are. Federal police are much more violent than local police who have to live in the neighborhoods they patrol. Part of our problem is allowing the existence of federal police, who were outlawed by the U.S. Constitution, which demanded the Federal government use state militias, which could be a check on Federal power. With the creation of the FBI, the recent purchase of millions of hollow round bullets by federal agencies, and allowing these people to train at Quantico, we are setting the stage for a police state that will lead to more terrorism.
Gordon puts his position well.
He is consistently a states'rights advocate - a Jeffersonian rather than a Hamiltonian. That position has a great deal of merit, of course. However, I hope that his dire prediction will not come true. While federal overreach is always a potential problem, the FBI does perform a needed function in American society.
Hey Tom, we haven't talked for a while. I wanted to be sure you saw this article. And the accompanying graph which is just unbelievable. This country is a crazy, crazy place. Most days there is at least one mass shooting. Sometimes five or 10. And we're about to elect Donald trump for president. Merry Christmas ha ha. How can such a wonderful country be so wacko?
Yes indeed...it's essentially a white male issue but I suspect for more salient reasons than "downward mobility". To get to these reasons let's first take a look at the assailants by age cohorts...are there any clues here? Certainly this kind of data has been assembled by someone and is generally available.
As Tom has already acknowledged one social class of white males feels threatened.
There are, however, a wide range of other reasons why white males might also feel "under attack"...none of which I will speculate about here but would encourage Tom to do so.
As a sociologist and a very wise man I'm sure he's up this challenge.
I thank anonymous for his/her comments.
Yes, "age cohort" is the first thing that comes to mind. I have previously discussed the extremely strong correlation between age and violent behavior ("demography is destiny"). As I used to joke with my students: You (people under 50) commit 98% of all crimes. Me (people over 50) commit 2%.
The 2 variables - sex and age - explain the vast majority of all violent crime.
As to why white males feel under attack: if you have been the top dog all along, in control of everything, enjoying higher status and more power than all other groups for centuries, and this is now increasingly being questioned and challenged, you probably get pissed off.
This is a horrible situation and who would've thought that California in San Bernardino ... we need reforms and a peaceful way to get back to a healthier society .
These weren't downwardly mobile white males, but Moslems carrying out something which has become too common.
M Riley
Yes all sorts of deranged folks in the terror space. To throw more debris into this dialogue see Malcom Gladwell's article "Threshold of Violence" in the October 13th issue of the New Yorker.
And with regard to the age cohort concept what I really had in mind is laying the generational map on the last five years of domestic terrorism to see if there are any cultural variables over the past 30 years or so from which a few societal based explanations emerge. What percent of the shooter ages cluster in the Boomer Generation for example.
Why the hell is everyone beating around the bush??? The most obvious, down to earth
step is forbidding the man on the street to possess weapons! THIS IS SOOO BASIC!
AND HAS BEEN EVER SINCE THE BEGINING OF TIME. WEAPONS ARE TO BE USED ONLY BY
PERSONS WHOSE MISSION IS TO PROTECT SOCIETY. This would not solve the problem, but as it is the case in the rest of the "civilised" world, it would restrain trash.
It's not all white males, the following all killed at least four Americans:
Syed Farook – 2015 San Bernadino – Pakistani immigrant
Chris Harper-Mercer – 2015 Oregon – Black immigrant
Elliot Rodger – 2014 Santa Barbara – Asian
Tsarnaev Brothers - 2013 Boston – Chechen Immigrants
Kesler Dufrene - 2012 Miami – Haitian immigrant
Eduardo Sencion – 2011 Nevada – Mexican Immigrant
Nidal Malik Hasan – 2009 Fort Hood – Moslem 2nd generation immigrant
Jiverly Wong – 2009 New York – Vietnamese immigrant
Seung-Hui Cho – 2007 Virginia Tech – Korean immigrant
Sulejman Talovic – 2007 Salt Lake City – Bosnian immigrant
Salvador Tapia – 2003 Chicago – Mexican immigrant
Colin Ferguson – 1993 Long Island – Jamaican immigrant
Tom, according to Nat Silver's web site http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/black-americans-are-killed-at-12-times-the-rate-of-people-in-other-developed-countries/ the homicide death rate per 100,000 for blacks in 2010-2012 is 19.6, the US Overall 5.2, and for Whites 2.5. So the White rate of 2.5 is not that far from European figures, so don't worry, if you stay in the white areas of Sacramento you should be about as safe as when you visit Rome and Paris. I hope that will ease your concern.
To anonymous, about age cohorts: Right. I’m sure that there are cultural differences between the boomers, the Millennials, etc. Maybe therefore also differences in the tendency to resort to violence. I would hypothesize that the baby boomers are more prone to violence than the subsequent generations...
To Csaba: of course. Correct. I have nothing to add.
To M. Riley: I suppose I jumped the gun with my attribution this time around. Yes, these perpetrators were Muslims, and there is now (perhaps) evidence surfacing to indicate that Farook (and his wife) had Syrian/terrorist connections...
However: there have been several hundred mass shootings in this country over the past couple of decades, and the vast majority of them were by white males. The frustration of this segment of the population is palpable. It manifests itself in the popularity of angry hate-mongering demagogues such as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and, yes, I believe that this frustration is at least part to blame for the increased number of mass shootings. I believe that the frustration is caused by the cultural and economic changes which have dethroned and disempowered those who were formerly, let’s be blunt about it, the “patriarchs.” It is also accompanied by the sad news that the only segment of the population whose life expectancy is now in sharp decline are white, middle-aged, working-class men.
To the other two anonymouses:
M. Riley’s point is reasonable: I share his ambivalence. Sooner or later, we may have to face the fact that there is indeed a “Muslim problem.”
But you two are playing a familiar game of racial cherry picking to buttress your bad arguments: I have already stated that the black and Hispanic homicide rates are very high (and to repeat: it is mostly internal within those groups). My main point is that mass shootings with assault weapons is, IN GENERAL, more the white guy’s style than the black guy’s style.
Anonymous’ list of multiple murders committed by immigrants and people of color is absurd. One can put together a ten times longer list of similar acts committed by native Anglos. It has long been known that the crime rate of immigrants is BELOW the national average.
The other anonymous’ statistics about black vs. white homicide victims is precisely what the “black lives matter” movement is about. To him, it may be a relief that blacks die from murder four times as often as whites do, but to me it is not, notwithstanding your snide innuendo.
Baltimore murder rate: 50:100,000, as of today for 2015, 315 dead
So my 90 year old father-in-law who listens to Fox comes over for us to take him to the gun shop- we talked awhile and he forgot why he came?
Scary
A methodological point concerning Tom's remarks that he would want to have some of the shooters alive rather than killed in order to understand their motives to kill, etc. I don't think you need them alive so much as to get to know similar guys who haven't killed yet. In Europe we have masses of young fellows in many ways similar to the Paris killers. And journalists and researchers have talked to these guys at length and published many reports. So for the European case 'understanding' is not the basic problem anymore. We 'know' the circumstances and the possible trajectories, but it's nearly impossible to change the conditions or to select the ones who are actually on the brink of violent actions.
I thank Paul's remark. Yes, the problem is massive, and nowhere near being solved. But there is nothing lost by capturing (some of) these individuals alive and locking them up safely, as at least a POSSIBLE "storage of information." If nothing else, there is a chance of uncovering some networks (and I don't mean through "enhanced interrogation techniques.")
As a good sociologist, Tom, in Demography is destiny, you have correlated the strongest factor (age and sex), with murder. That is important because it indicates neither race, nor gun ownership, are nearly as important. I'll bet you could find a lot of other factors that also correlate more strongly than either race or gun ownership, like childhood role models behavior, level of education achieved, employment, or seemingly arbitrary murder of community members. I think we need more sociological research data in these areas rather than knee-jerk reactions that blame other groups or think that more gun laws will stop people from wanting to murder others.
I agree with half of what Gordon says. As I wrote in my post, no race, creed or color has a monopoly on terrorism.
On the other hand, when it comes to the gun issue:
Our country has a unique set of problems: Culturally, we differ even from countries such as Australia and Canada, whose history resembles ours in many ways. They, too, were settled by immigrants and pioneers; there, too, there was a great deal of violence between the European settlers and the aborigines (who ended up being largely exterminated). However, only America developed the lore of the Wild West, a real phenomenon as well as its celebration in Hollywood. So that’s a distinct cultural trait, I’m not sure why.
Then, too, I don’t believe that other comparable countries have anything similar to our 2nd amendment.
And the worst problem with this amendment is its misinterpretation by reactionary courts, for example the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller Decision. Surely the founding fathers did not mean to protect INDIVIDUAL citizens to possess automatic assault WEAPONS OF MASS MURDER, which can spray a room full of people with hundreds of bullets and kill dozens of people within minutes. And what happened to the word “militia” in the 2nd amendment?
The population has been brainwashed into believing that gun control “doesn’t work.” That’s nonsense.
Consider “car control:” Today, the number of deaths per-mile-driven is TWENTY FIVE TIMES lower than it was three generations ago. Because the nation developed a coherent, mandatory and universally enforced set of regulations.
Look at Australia’s success story: A complete ban was passed on semi-automatic rifles in Australia thirteen days after the infamous 1996 Port Arthur Massacre. Following the ban, the Australian government bought back and melted down every semi-automatic rifle in the country. (Australia already had stringent restrictions on handgun ownership.) There have been no mass shootings in Australia since 1996, and overall rates of firearm related deaths and injuries, which were already much lower than in the USA, have declined even further.
I keep saying it, over and over again: the more firearms there are, the more people will die from firearms.
Hi Tom, I hear fear more than rage but I agree with the importance ofcapturing in order to better understand the person. As a psychiatrist from what I gather we best not paint all terrorists with the brush of Mental Illness, undoubtedly some are, but it isn't fair to most people who have a mental illness many of whom are themselves victims. I need to find interviews of terrorists who survived.
Thank you,Tom, for this soothing drop of rational analysis. I also agree with you and EM re "mental illness" -- keeping mass shooters long enough to understand them. Tim McVeigh's long incarceration and interviews gone public help us understand his connection with the military ethos and crude, pervasive right wing rhetoric. I don't believe he is or ever was "mentally ill" in the sense that a relative of mine is -- voices in the bushes commanding him to attack strangers. I agree, with Tom, that there is more rage bubbling around me, in my locale and on my techie devices, than I recall in any other of my 70 decades or my many diverse lifetime situations. The only (confined and small) social milieu I recall seething with this much rage was in Germany among the "old soldiers" of the 1950s -- poorly educated, deprived of their promised dreams of glory, and fearing the ravages of time in their ever shrinking circles. Under the laws of US occupation forces, publicly voicing hatred and playing/singing German marching music was illegal, one was subject to arrest -- those men did it surreptitiously late at night in certain small pubs owned by "friends". Rage was once better confined in the US too. Now its on the radio and TV every day (no more "equal time" requirement), and it's flashed everywhere on tech devices. So rage is enormously magnified. Also, fear is a big part of rage: the fear of losing your ability to survive, or to thrive as one was led to expect.
The perpetrators were not angry, frustrated with our political system, unhappy about their social or economic opportunities, etc. Those are the reasons that we would like to see, because those are reasons that we understand. The terrorists' motivation was based on religious fanaticism which has nothing to do with rationality. They had easy access to weapons, yes. But the Paris attacks show that where is a will there is a way. Interrogating live terrorists would confirm what they have already told us time and time again: they despise our values and are willing to die to destroy them. Why is it so hard to believe them? What does it take for us to remove our earplugs and finally admit that we are dealing with an enemy that does not play by our rules of engagement? Targeting the weak, the vulnerable, the innocent. That is what terroristm is all about. And they are getting better and better at it, because we don't listen.
The New York Times has printed a front-page editorial: In this piece, the newspaper takes a position against (current) American gun policies.
I couldn’t say it better than Naida. That is precisely what I meant. The constant in American violence are the weapons. What is to some extent unprecedented is the fueling of rage and fear by the media, and therefore their spread among T-partiers and such.
To be sure, this country has a history of paranoia - including the post-reconstruction disenfranchisement and KKK-inspired lynching binge in the Deep South, the Red Scare of the 1920s, McCarthyism in the 1950s, etc. (See Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics). We seem to be going through a similar period now.
Paul also appears to agree that America’s stance on guns is a key part of the problem of mass violence.
I’ll say it again: No race, creed or color has a monopoly on terrorism. In France, the main terrorists of the 1950s were the pieds noirs - the Frenchmen born in Algeria who didn’t want to give up Algeria, so they bombed the Paris cafes and subways. The wave of terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s was largely red terrorism - Marxist revolutionaries backed by the Soviet Union and other Eastern European communist regimes.
Today, Muslims are AMONG the world’s most active terrorists. But even now, they still only represent a minority of terrorists WITHIN THE US. It is true that 9-11 remains the bloodiest attack of them all. As I wrote in one of my responses, yes, there IS a Muslim problem.
However, at least within the US, it is impossible to deal with the problem of mass violence without addressing the country’s insane approach to gun ownership and the increasingly shrill mood of a major portion of the population.
As to whether or not there is more to learn about terrorism: I believe that there is always more to learn about anything. Of course the West needs to fight back (and it seems to be gearing up to do more of that, as we speak). But we cannot fight Islam the way we fought fascism. Islam is not going to disappear. There are a billion and a half Muslims in the world. So it is imperative to distinguish between good Muslims and bad Muslims, because we are going to continue to share the planet with them, whether we like it or not.
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