Saturday, December 29, 2012

My thoughts on preventing large acts of violence


When I heard about the Sandy Hook shooting, I was on lunch break at work.  I read it on facebook from several people, and after I had the basic gist of what happened, that was all I needed to know.  I have not read or watched or listened to one news story about it.  Don’t need to, don’t want to.  I have prayed for all the victims and their families, and even the shooter and his family, but selfishly, I just don’t want to feel anything about this.  It’s too sad, too unthinkable.  I know this kind of awful violence happens other places, and that children die here in the United States for senseless reasons.  (Believe me, I know something about violence against children, and it’s awful.)  So, I’ve done my best to avoid feeling anything, but that hasn’t kept me from pondering and debating (with myself and others) how to prevent this sort of thing from happening. 

After a lot of thinking, I’ve come up with this idea that the reasons people make decisions to lash out at groups of innocents in horrific ways are varied and complex, and that solutions cannot be simple “either-ors.”  There are three main schools of thought that I have heard tossed around, and those are 1) An idea of “being the change you want to see in the world”, 2) mental health care access and 3) what do we do about all these guns.  I am going to use this space to break down my thoughts on each of these points.  If you have thought-out responses or disagreements with any of my points, I am very open to hearing your thoughts, as long as they are voiced in a respectful and constructive way, since that is how I am trying to frame my thoughts.

1.   “Be The Change.”  You hear a lot about how some of these people who do these kinds of things were loners, picked on, abused by their peers.  BY NO MEANS do I think that this legitimizes the action of taking the lives of innocents who don’t deserve one’s aggression.  However, I do believe that our actions have ripples, and our kind actions are likely to have kind ripples while our unkind actions are likely to have unkind ripples.  Be nicer to your neighbor than they deserve, even if they seem odd or unreceptive.

This is going to seem slightly off-topic, so bear with me.  We teach young women how to avoid rape, even though if she gets raped, it is not her fault.  (It’s not, and this point is not up for debate with me, sorry.)  The fault lies purely on the rapist.  However, we want to arm the young woman with the tools to do the best that she can to keep herself safe.  Don’t walk in strange places alone after dark.  Walk with your keys between your hands.  Be alert and assertive.  Etc.  By doing this, we are not putting the responsibility on the potential victim for keeping herself safe (if some jerk wants to rape her he will find a way), we are just empowering her to do the best she can.  I am using this as an analogy for my point here.  There are many, many people who are bullied today, and the vast majority of them don’t shoot innocent bystanders; their circumstances are different and they choose different ways of coping with their pain than forcing it on others.  But, there are a few who lash out.  And if some extra kindness and compassion could be the key to stopping an act of violence, even if you don’t feel the person deserves your kindness or compassion, why wouldn’t you go there?

Or, why stop there.  Why wait to act until the problem is bad?  Why not be proactive and look for ways to positively influence the lives of at-risk youth?  The sister of a great friend of mine wrote a wonderful piece on this, and summarizing it would never do it justice, so I’m going to link it here:
Those are my thoughts on what we can each do in our personal lives to make things better.  Next I am going to write about a couple of systemic issues.

2.  "Advice: 5c" This part of this blog focuses on access to mental health.  There is one very important point I want everyone to keep in mind though, ok?  A person with a mental illness is far, far, far more likely to be the victim of violence than the perpetrator.  I don’t speak about this lightly or without education or experience on the subject.

However, sometimes when a person with a severe mental illness does something violent, their mental illness plays a key role in the violent act.  (This is where my employer comes in.)  So when people speak about better access to mental health care, here are some of the factors at play:

First of all, like I said, I haven’t really read any news articles or watched the news on the Sandy Hook story.  I’ve heard mental illness alluded to with regards to the shooter, but I haven’t bothered to find anything.  I’m not sure if he was diagnosed with a mental illness, but I can tell you that some people do bad things without mental illness being involved.  So yes, better access to mental health care is important for those who have a mental illness, but it isn’t always the fix.  (If someone is diagnosed with a personality disorder, that is different from a mental illness.  Evidence does not show that personality disorders respond particularly well to medication or talk therapy, apart from a therapy called DBT for a subset of personality disorders known as “Cluster B.”)

Secondly, in some cases, and with some illnesses, the illness itself can make a person treatment-resistant.  There are lots of reasons for this.  One commonly cited example is that people with bipolar disorder sometimes do not like to take medication, because in their manic state they are more creative and, in ways, productive, and they do not want that taken away.  (This is certainly not the case for ALL people with bipolar disorder, but it happens this way for some people.)  Others may resist treatment to avoid stigma.  (This goes back to my first topic of focus…we need to treat people with kindness, and confront bullying behavior.  Reducing stigma is everyone’s responsibility.)

Thirdly, who pays for the better mental health care access?  My dream is to someday have a private counseling practice, and at that point, I do intend to take on some clients pro bono.  On the other hand, I worked hard to put myself through graduate school, and I don’t think I should have to resign myself to be stuck with low wages my entire life just because I chose a helping profession.  Mental health professionals deserve a reasonable wage.  I don’t expect to be a millionaire, but I expect to be able to have a family, and feed it too.  I don’t mean to lump a bunch of people into one cluster, but the argument that I’ve heard that “This isn’t about gun control, it’s about better access to mental health care” tends to come from people who are a bit more conservative.  And that’s fine.  But I will say that it also tends to be the more conservative group who opposes publicly funded healthcare.  Now, if you are big on the second amendment AND you are opposed to government-funded social programs, I am wondering if you have a solution for where the money comes from that I haven’t thought of yet.  And I mean that as an honest statement:  if you have ideas, by all means, speak up.  (And don’t just tell me, write to your congress person.)  (I would also like to point out that I am just a social worker, and when fully licensed, will only be able to do talk therapy.  Meeting with a prescriber and getting prescriptions filled is even more costly.)

Now, this is not all to say that I disagree that better access to mental health care is a good idea.  I absolutely agree that it is a good idea, and that it may be helpful in preventing some violent incidents.  I make all these arguments to point out that better access to mental health care, all on its own, is insufficient as a prevention to horrific violence.  (In fact, my whole point in writing this is to highlight that a single-pronged approach, no matter WHAT it is, is insufficient to prevent horrific violence.)

3.  The controversial topic, which everyone seems to have an opinion about.  Gun control.
My gut reaction was this: a world where guns didn’t exist and nobody had them or could get them would be way safer than a world where every person had a gun, and that’s the world I’d rather work toward.

But let’s break it down.  At this point, we are not going to rid guns from our society.  So we can either do what we can to ensure that those who possess guns use them safely, or we can arm everyone so that everyone can protect themselves.

I will say off the bat that I disagree that arming everyone is a good idea.  It creates this whole culture of “don’t harm me because I can harm you.”  To me, this is a culture of fear, and alienation.  My experience with people tells me that, with most people, they pose the biggest threat to me when they are scared and defensive.  I don’t want to live in a world where we are all walking around scared and defensive.  It creates a whole slew of mental health issues (depression and anxiety resulting from alienation and trauma), and it’s MORE, not less, dangerous.

I will also say that I have zero problem with a responsible, level headed person owning some hunting equipment.  I don’t hunt, I don’t like guns and have zero desire to ever own one, but I support healthy hobbies.  And camping with some friends while enjoying the great outdoors and also coming home with something to feed your family with sounds like a mostly healthy hobby to me.  The question here is, how do we predict with a high level of certainty that a person can responsibly own such a weapon?  I also understand that the shooter in the Sandy Hook shootings did not own a gun, and was denied the right to buy one, but stole one from his mother, who was also his victim.  What can be done about all this?  To start off with, I think it needs to be at least as difficult to buy and keep a gun and ammunition as it is to obtain a car and driver’s license.  Some may think this is too restrictive, but I would also like to see anyone wishing to own a gun have a psychological evaluation.  I am concerned about severe mental illness, but I am even more concerned about signs of psychopathy and narcissism, as well as a tendency toward rage or anger.  I also think that if you purchase a gun, it should be mandatory for you to purchase something secure to lock it up in along with the gun, and have penalties associated for failure to maintain/store correctly or for allowing someone else who is not approved to have access to the gun.

As many love to say, “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”  Believe me, I am aware that someone could also kill me with a knife, a rope, a candlestick (in the billiards room!  It was Colonel Mustard!).  So if that’s the case, if there are more weapons available than guns, why don’t we give knives, ropes, candlesticks to police officers so they can use these items as incentive to maintain the peace?  It’s because these items don’t kill quite as quickly, cleanly, or reliably as a gun.  A gun on its own sitting on a shelf kills nobody (unless there is some sort of mechanical problem?), but a gun in the hands of a person who has the capability to snap or the desire to harm others is more dangerous than other weapons.  It can be used to harm someone from a distance, which protects the conscience of its user and it doesn’t require much human force for it to be used properly (at least not relative to stabbing, strangling, or clubbing someone).

I am also uneasy with the idea that having schoolteachers trained to use guns and having them in their classrooms is a good idea.  I think we start sliding down a slippery slope there.  All it would take is one teacher snapping (or being a sociopath in the first place) and deciding to shoot his or her own class, and we’d all be saying that we need to send our kids to school with concealed weapons.  I’ve known and loved a lot of 6 year olds, and believe that they are innocent beings full of light and wonder, but at certain tender young ages, we just don’t understand the consequences of our actions or abstract concepts like death, so I reject the idea that having them carry around weapons is a good idea.

What do I think of certain citizens being allowed to have concealed weapons permits?  The answer to this is that I’m not sure.  I’m told that someone with this sort of permit aimed a gun at the shooter in a recent Clackamas Town Center mall shooting, and that it was at this moment that the shooter shot himself.  I am glad that the shooter was taken out of the position to kill others, but can’t say that I’m happy to hear about the death of any single individual.  I’m not saying that the individual with the concealed weapon did the wrong thing—at all.  Just trying to wrap my head around this situation.  My understanding of a concealed weapons permit is that they are pretty difficult to obtain and there’s a lot to go through.  I also haven’t heard of a mass shooting at the hands of the holder of one of these permits.  I still don’t like the idea of a world where we are all walking around with guns, and I still favor a “love thy neighbor” approach to working toward safety, but in social work they tell us it is important to work within our competency, and I have no real education on what’s involved in getting a concealed weapons permit or why they are important, and therefore I have nothing very valuable to bring to this part of the conversation.

So what am I trying to say?
To tie this all back up together, I think that when a person offers a potential prevention to mass murder/violence, we owe it to that person to hear them out.  They might think of something we haven’t thought of, and we might even be able to add pieces of their argument to our own ideas, making them stronger.  I have heard a lot of people saying that this issue is not about gun control.  I don’t have all the answers, and maybe that argument has something to add to the conversation too, but I don’t think that the idea of gun control is something that we can or should avoid discussing when we keep hearing about horrific acts of violence where a gun was the weapon of choice.  And while not everyone who is mentally ill is violent, and not everyone who is violent is mentally ill, when those two things intersect things get a little dicey, so I DEFINITELY support better access to mental health care, and more research in properly caring for the mentally ill.  (I would love it if more were prevented from coming my way.  It’s not that I don’t like working with my patients, just that I would prefer they were never allowed to get to the points that they did, so they could live freer, happier lives.) 

Perhaps my most important point is that a kinder world is a safer world, and it starts with you.  Go out of your way to be kind wherever you can.

No comments:

Post a Comment