THE ROOT OF AMERICA'S FIREARM PROBLEM

The incident that occurred today (April 2, 2021) at the Capitol was a demonstration that firearms are not the cause of the egregious acts of violence that seem to plague contemporary society. A man rammed his automobile into some Capitol policemen and then got out and began stabbing policemen with a knife. One was killed and another seriously injured before officers armed with firearms put an end to his rampage. In the time immediately after the incident, before anyone involved in the atrocity was identified, the talking heads on a certain 24 hour news station wondered what would cause someone to do something like that. Since only the police deployed firearms, there were no calls to tighten gun control, and I heard no calls for automobile control or knife control. I predicted that the perpetrator would have mental health issues, and as the day wore on, it turned out that his Facebook posts revealed a young man in some form of mental torment who had been spiraling down from bad to worse over a period of years. 

Which brings us to the failure of gun control. It won't stop violence. England has stringent gun control laws, and those laws didn't stop the random acts of violence. The bad guys switched to knives, and now there is an English movement for knife control. If they get the knives under control, the violence prone can switch to axes. When they ban axes, the next weapon of choice might be the claw hammer. 

What causes gun violence? Not guns. I've been around guns all my life and have shot everything from am M79 grenade launcher (which is fun to shoot) to a single shot, rolling block .22 caliber rook rifle (which is also fun to shoot), and no firearm I have ever handled has inspired me to climb a tower and start shooting random passers by. I have never seen or heard tell of a firearm like the one in Terry Pratchett's science fantasy novel Men at Arms, which took control of its possessor and made him commit murder.

I put my finger on the root cause of gun violence in a blog post that I made in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting back in 2012, SANDY HOOK AND GUN CONTROL. The root cause of gun control is the Supreme Court's decision in O'Connor v. Donaldson, 422 U.S. 563, 95 S.Ct. 2486 (U.S.Fla. 1975). O'Connor severely limited the states' ability to involuntarily commit the mentally ill. The gist of this opinion was that mentally ill people cannot be locked up unless they are shown to be dangerous. To put it crudely, just acting weird is not enough for involuntary hospitalization. The Supreme Court put it more delicately, but they were saying the same thing: “May the State fence in the harmless mentally ill solely to save its citizens from exposure to those whose ways are different?” Before 1975 we regularly locked up people who were acting weird but who had never harmed anyone. And I believe at that time we had fewer mass murders. Most of the mass killers of recent vintage ( I’m thinking particularly about the man who ran amok at Virginia Tech) acted weird long before they killed anyone. Under O’Connor, they couldn’t be locked up because they hadn’t harmed anyone, or if they had harmed someone, there was a mental health professional who testified that they were all better now and weren't dangerous any more. I vividly remember one case we had where a man kept committing arsons. He'd get arrested, the doctors would say he was mentally ill, but he didn't need hospitalization, and under O'Connor he'd get put back on the street where--you guessed it, he set something else on fire. He finally "burned out" on his hobby of setting fires, and thankfully he never hurt anyone.

Now, I’m not in favor of locking people up merely because they act weird. Most people who act weird don’t commit mass murders. Just as most people who own guns don’t commit mass murders. 

The relevant Florida standard for involuntary commitment, which is pretty much universal throughout the United States is: 

"There is a substantial likelihood that without care or treatment the person will cause serious bodily harm to himself or herself or others in the near future, as evidenced by recent behavior." Fla. Stat. 394.463(1)(b)2. 

I was a mental health prosecutor for several years, and here's what happens in a typical involuntary commitment: The patient is held for 72 hours and released. I never felt more like I was spinning my wheels and accomplishing nothing than when handling a case with a a patient who was obviously nutty as a fruitcake and in need of treatment, but was turned loose because there was "[no] substantial likelihood that without care or treatment the person will cause serious bodily harm to himself or herself or others in the near future...." [emphasis supplied].

We had a man once who took off all his clothes in the middle of the night, got a shotgun, marched naked down the hallway of his parents house into their bedroom, announced that his father was the Devil, and shot him to death as he lay beside his wife. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and shipped off to the state mental hospital, and six months later the hospital wanted to turn him loose because he was cured and there was no "substantial likelihood" he would kill his father again. We were able to keep that one locked up.

Time after time these mass shooters turn out to be people with a history of revolving door mental health issues. The Supreme Court needs to readdress their holding in O'Connor and devise some way to allow the authorities to control the mentally ill who are potentially dangerous. The standard of "substantial likelihood [of causing] serious bodily harm ... in the near future" is too stringent a standard, and it allows dangerous people to go untreated and spiral farther and farther down into the abyss of desire to do violence until they act out and we have another tragedy.

The Justices of the Supreme Court are some of the brightest minds in the legal profession. Surely they can devise some means of protecting the rights of the mentally ill while protecting the public from the mentally ill.

A RADICAL SUGGESTION FOR DETERRING SCHOOL SHOOTINGS

I started this essay off with one point in mind, but as I wrote and researched it, another point made itself evident to me. I have found what I believe to be a previously-undiscovered method of deterring school shootings. I’ll first talk about the methods which have been bandied about in the press recently, and then I’ll disclose the new method of deterring school shootings which I have discovered.

What measures will best deter mass mayhem at schools? If by some form of magic, you could make all the guns in America disappear overnight, those determined to wreak havoc on schools would be deterred, but they would quickly turn to other means—like home made bombs, for instance. As Timothy McVeigh and the Austin bomber demonstrated, bombs are easily made from common ingredients. The worst mass killing at a school in American history was a bombing, not a shooting.

Someone determined to kill can inflict a lot of damage with something as low tech as a knife, as was done in the Franklin Regional school stabbing in 2014 which injured 27. The nightmare low-tech weapon for such a mass attack would probably be a katana, a saber, or even a machete. Killing sprees using swords were at one time common in some cultures, which gave us the term “running amok,” or “running amuck.” The DSM‑5 actually classifies “amok” as a form of dissociative disorder. The SAGE Encyclopedia of Abnormal and Clinical Psychology, 1:161.

Banning certain types of firearms will probably do as little to deter school shootings as Prohibition did to deter drunkenness. Under Prohibition, those who could live without drinking didn’t get drunk; but those who couldn’t live without drinking found a way. Banning the sale of AR-15’s and AK-47’s would do little to nothing about those guns already in circulation. Outlawing those guns in circulation will simply drive them underground, and a determined criminal will get access to such a gun anyhow. Assuming you could successfully ban all modern firearms, one who was intent on mass murder could simply gun up with half a dozen cap-and-ball revolvers as did William Quantrill and Bloody Bill Anderson. A half-way competent machinist can build a firearm. I actually prosecuted a murder case where a man killed his wife with a gun he made from cast iron pipe. It shot a finishing nail punch which was ½” in diameter, and he thought it would be untraceable. As things turned out, it was easily traceable to his workshop, where we found all the ingredients.

I have suggested in previous posts that enhanced mental health screening would be the best method of identifying and neutralizing the threat from potential mass-shooters, and Florida’s recently-passed Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act makes a valiant effort in that direction. The part of the act of which I was most skeptical was the provision for “arming teachers.” No offense to anyone, but as I recall my high school days, I wouldn’t trust most of my high school teachers with loaded firearms. (Especially the one who used to talk about lining his students up in front of a brick wall and machine gunning them). I was afraid that the act would simply provide for passing out guns to teachers as though they were passing out party favors. Reading the act has calmed my fears. The vetting, training, and retraining process that the act requires before allowing a non-law-enforcement school employee to go armed is rigorous. I think they ought to require all school resource officers to go through the same process as outlined in the act.

As was shown only recently in Maryland, an armed school security officer who is willing to confront a school shooter rather than stand outside the school counting his change while the shooting is in progress is the surest way to stop a school shooting. This was by no means an isolated incident, but when such incidents occur, they get downplayed. When an Arapaho County school shooter became aware that a deputy sheriff was coming to confront him, he committed suicide rather than face the deputy. Snopes.com questioned whether the imminent arrival of the deputy saved lives, saying that it was a “speculative notion” that imminent arrival of an armed officer hand anything to do with the shooter’s suicide. Other incidents where armed personnel successfully engaged school shooters include but are certainly not limited to: the Umpqua Community College shooting in 2015, the FSU library shooting in 2014, The Reynolds High School Shooting in 2014 (interestingly, although some media neglected to report that the shooter had committed suicide after being engaged by police, this fact was included in Gordon A. Crews, Critical Examinations of School Violence and Disturbance in K-12 Education, 216), the Seattle Pacific University shooting in 2014 (the building monitor used pepper spray and a flying tackle to subdue the shooter while he was reloading), and the Santa Monica College shooting in 2013 where John Zawahri started a killing spree with his parents and then went to a college campus to shoot at passing cars. He was killed by responding officers.

It cannot be denied that armed security personnel in schools can stop school shootings. How about deterring the shootings? They're not going to deter a school shooting if their presence and effectiveness are little-known facts. If they were well-known facts, I think that would serve as a deterrent.

A common theme I found in researching the shootings listed above was the reticence of the articles I read to say anything about the shooter being neutralized by the police. Perhaps one thing that can be done in order to deter future school shootings would be for the media to give wall-to-wall coverage of school shooters getting shot by security personnel similar to the wall-to-wall coverage they give to mass shootings. Would-be shooters who see massive coverage of the grief following a shooting are encouraged to go out and cause more grief. Would-be shooters who saw enough footage of school-shooters being stopped by armed officers might decide to go somewhere other than a school to do their mass shootings.

My previously undiscovered method of deterring school shootings, therefore, is this: Find some way to persuade the media to give massive publicity to the officers who neutralize school shooters, thereby demonstrating to potential school shooters that there is little to be gained beyond a shortened life-expectancy by running amok in a school.

THOUGHTS ON THE FORT LAUDERDALE SHOOTING

The BBC described the recent shooting in the Fort Lauderdale airport as “the latest in a series of mass shootings in the US in recent years,carried out by people who had easy access to weapons under US gun laws,”  demonstrating that they completely missed the real issue, which is not gun control but people control.

Esteban Santiago had mental problems. He was hearing voices and thought he was the subject of mind control by a US intelligence agency. He went to the FBI for help. They took his gun away and sent him for mental health evaluation. He got a “clean bill of [mental] health,” was released from custody, and was given his gun back. CNN senior law enforcement analyst Tom Fuentes explains this mind-boggling series of events by saying "He hadn't been adjudicated a felon and he hadn't been adjudicated mentally ill." Santiago’s family says his “mind was not right.” I’m going to go with Santiago’s family on this call.

Ironically, on the issue of whether someone should be confined in a mental institution, the courts of our land are not concerned about whether a person is merely "mentally ill." Before someone can be confined, that person has to be "mentally ill" AND dangerous; and in this area the courts have a very restrictive definition of what is dangerous.

Based on the few known facts, Santiago was mentally ill, but he was not mentally ill to the point that he could be confined in a mental health facility. How could this happen? I wrote about this issue some years ago in a blog post which discussed O'Connor v. Donaldson, 422 U.S. 563, 95 S.Ct. 2486 (U.S.Fla. 1975), in which the US Supreme Court ruled that you couldn’t confine a mentally ill person in a treatment facility unless the person was likely to harm himself or others. This led to a vicious cycle that I saw repeated time and again when I was a prosecutor—(1) a mentally ill person would get off his medication, decompensate, and act out violently; (2) he would be briefly confined and gotten back on his meds; (3) the doctors would proclaim that he was no longer likely to harm himself or others, and he would be let out; (4) the three-step cycle would repeat again and again.

We once had an arsonist who kept setting buildings on fire. He would get arrested and jailed. The psychiatrists would proclaim him incompetent, and the charges would go away. The psychiatrists would say he was unlikely to harm himself or others, and the judge would be unable to confine him in a mental health facility. He would set something else on fire. The process would repeat itself.  

The US Supreme Court needs to revisit the issue of confining the mentally ill. They need to adopt a more expansive interpretation of “likely to harm himself or others”—one which at a bare minimum includes “likely to harm himself or others if he gets off his medication.” If they think confinement is too severe, then perhaps they would approve some sort of supervision similar to probation or community control for people who are “not likely to harm themselves or others so long as they stay on their medication.” If, when Santiago went to the FBI, he had been committed to a mental health facility for an extended stay, then the Fort Lauderdale tragedy would not have happened. If Santiago had been on some sort of outpatient supervision similar to community control or probation, the Fort Lauderdale tragedy might very well have been averted.