In the wake of the tragedy that struck Aurora, Colo. on July 20, there remain more questions than answers. Just like last time, in January 2011, when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others were shot in Tucson, Ariz., or before that, in April 2007, when a deranged gunman attacked students and staff at Virginia Tech, this senseless mass shooting has given rise to a national conversation as we struggle to find meaning in the madness.
While everyone agrees the blame should ultimately be placed on the perpetrator of this violence, the fact remains that the United States has one of the highest murder rates in the industrialized world. Of the 34 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the U.S. ranks fifth in homicides, just behind Brazil (highest), Mexico, Russia, and Estonia. Our nation also holds the dubious honor of being responsible for half of the worst mass shootings in the last 30 years. How can we explain why the United States has nearly three times more murders per capita than neighboring Canada and 10 times more than Japan? What makes the land of the free such a dangerous place to live?
Anatomy of a Murder
There have been hundreds of thoughtful explorations of this problem in the last week, though three in particular have encapsulated the major issues. Could it be, as science writer David Dobbs argues at Wired, that "an American culture that fetishizes violence," such as the Batman franchise itself, has contributed to our fall? "Culture shapes the expression of mental dysfunction," Dobbs writes, "just as it does other traits."
Perhaps the push arrived with the collision of other factors, as veteran journalist Bill Moyers maintains, when the dark side of human nature encountered political allies who nurture our destructive impulses? "Violence is our alter ego, wired into our Stone Age brains," he says. "The NRA is the best friend a killer's instinct ever had."
But then again maybe there is an economic explanation, as John Horgan discusses at Scientific American, citing a hypothesis by McMaster University evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and his late wife Margo Wilson. "Daly and Wilson found a strong correlation between high Gini scores [a measure of inequality] and high homicide rates in Canadian provinces and U.S. counties," Horgan writes, "blaming homicides not on poverty per se but on the collision of poverty and affluence, the ancient tug-of-war between haves and have-nots."
In all three cases, as it was with other supposed culprits like the the lack of religion in public schools or the popularity of violent video games (which are both found in other wealthy countries and can be dismissed), commentators are looking at our society as a whole rather than specific details of the alleged shooter's background. The hope is that if we can isolate the factor that pushes some people to murder their fellow citizens, perhaps we can alter our social environment and reduce the likelihood that these terrible acts will be repeated in the future. The only problem is, which one could it be?
To Err Is Non-Human
Just as it is with so many other issues in our species -- infanticide, sexual coercion, or collective violence -- I believe we can most successfully pinpoint the broad patterns in our behavior by thinking like a primate. In most social primates (including humans) males frequently engage in aggressive competition over status with other males in their group, maiming and sometimes even killing in the process. Naturally, there is a good reason for this: sex.
In chimpanzees, for example, Cristina Gomes and Christophe Boesch have documented that the two most common reasons females choose to have sex with a male are if that male has shared meat with them in the past, or if they are high-ranking. In some species, such as Hamadryas baboons, the male obsession with status has taken an extreme form. Males of this species are nearly twice the size of females because, over evolutionary time, those males that were slightly larger than others had a competitive advantage and passed on more copies of their genes as a result. Of course, all this male-male aggression comes at a price.
"The social life of a male baboon can be pretty stressful," writes Stanford University neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky in his book Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. "[Y]ou get beaten up as a victim of displaced aggression; you carefully search for some tuber to eat and clean it off, only to have it stolen by someone of higher rank; and so on." Over time the buildup of stress hormones, known as glucocorticoids, can cause serious physiological damage and the development of stress-related illnesses. But the most common result when a male loses a fight or is harassed by a higher-ranking male is to displace that aggression elsewhere (typically on someone smaller). "Stress-induced displacement of aggression works wonders at minimizing the stressfulness of a stressor," Sapolsky writes. "It's a real primate specialty as well."
There are distinct personality styles in baboons that influence how they will react to this form of social stress. Some males are what are called "high reactors" and see potential threats everywhere, whereas others, even if they lose a struggle over status, are able to shake it off and contentedly groom another member in their troop. High reactors can further be divided into those who externalize this stress by attacking at every opportunity and those who internalize, nervously withdrawing from others or even displaying behaviors that, if they were human, would be indications of neuropathology.
Similar results have been found in rhesus macaques by Stephen Suomi at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., who determined that approximately 20 percent of these monkeys were high reactors. What's more, he found that infant monkeys were likely to share this trait with their fathers even when the father wasn't around to influence their behavior, suggesting a genetic component to highly reactive personalities. But there was an equally strong case to be made for environmental factors. When the sons of highly reactive males were placed with unusually nurturant mothers, this personality trait was completely prevented. This means that borderline personalities in primates are formed by a combination of nature as well as nurture.
This influence that the social environment can have on primate behavior was dramatically demonstrated by Sapolsky in his 2004 paper co-authored with Lisa Share in the journal PLoS Biology. In a unique natural experiment a group of baboons known as Forest Troop began feeding at the contaminated dump site of a Western safari lodge. As had occurred elsewhere, the largest and most aggressive males dominated the food source. But this time their despotic behavior resulted in untimely death after they all contracted tuberculosis. In the intervening years Forest Troop developed a culture in which cooperation was rewarded more than aggression, and adolescent males who migrated into the troop adopted this culture themselves. Remarkably, the level of stress and stress-related behaviors in low-ranking males were dramatically reduced after the outbreak (and remained significantly lower than the nearby Talek Troop, which retained its most aggressive males).
"Males had high rates of affiliative behaviors, and low-ranking males were subject to low rates of aggressive attack and subordination by high-ranking males," wrote the authors. "Precedent for this unexpected implication comes from the social epidemiology literature concerning 'social capital,' in which health and life expectancy increase in a community as a function of communitywide attributes that transcend the level of the individual or individual social networks."
In other words, a culture emphasizing less aggression, and with closer bonds between individuals throughout the community, formed the basis for a more egalitarian society.
The Exceptionalism of American Violence
As it turns out, the "social capital" Sapolsky found that made the Forest Troop baboons so peaceful is an important missing factor that can explain our high homicide rate in the United States. In 1999 Ichiro Kawachi at the Harvard School of Public Health led a study investigating the factors in American homicide for the journal Social Science and Medicine. His diagnosis was dire.
"If the level of crime is an indicator of the health of society," Kawachi wrote, "then the US provides an illustrative case study as one of the most unhealthy of modern industrialized nations." The paper outlined what the most significant causal factors were for this exaggerated level of violence by developing what was called "an ecological theory of crime." Whereas many other analyses of homicide take a criminal justice approach to the problem -- such as the number of cops on the beat, harshness of prison sentences, or adoption of the death penalty -- Kawachi used a public health perspective that emphasized social relations.
In all 50 states and the District of Columbia data were collected using the General Social Survey, which measured social capital (defined as interpersonal trust that promotes cooperation between citizens for mutual benefit), along with poverty and relative income inequality, homicide rates, incidence of other crimes (rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft), unemployment, percentage of high school graduates, and average alcohol consumption. By using a statistical method known as principal component analysis, Kawachi was then able to identify which ecologic variables were most associated with particular types of crime.
The results were unambiguous: When income inequality was higher, so was the rate of homicide. Income inequality alone explained 74 percent of the variance in murder rates and half of the aggravated assaults. However, social capital had an even stronger association and, by itself, accounted for 82 percent of homicides and 61 percent of assaults. Other factors, such as unemployment, poverty, or number of high school graduates, were only weakly associated, and alcohol consumption had no connection with violent crime at all. A World Bank-sponsored study subsequently confirmed these results on income inequality, concluding that, worldwide, homicide and the unequal distribution of resources are inextricably tied (see figure below). However, the World Bank study didn't measure social capital. According to Kawachi, it is this factor that should be considered primary; when the ties that bind a community together are severed, inequality is allowed to run free, with deadly consequences.
But what about guns? Multiple studies have shown a direct correlation between the number of guns and the number of homicides. The United States is the most heavily armed country in the world, with 90 guns for every 100 citizens. Doesn't this oversaturation of American firepower explain our exaggerated homicide rate? Maybe not. In a follow-up study in 2001, Kawachi looked specifically at firearm prevalence and social capital among U.S. states. The results showed that when social capital and community involvement declined, gun ownership increased.
Kawachi points out that it is impossible to prove whether one factor caused the other, but the most reasonable interpretation is that people who don't trust their neighbors are more likely to think guns will provide security. In this way the number of guns and the number of homicides both stem from the same root, suggesting that guns don't cause murders any more than cars cause fatal accidents. This was also the conclusion of a policy paper conducted by the London-based Centre for Economic Policy Research in 2005 that found no support for the argument that more guns cause more homicides. "The appearance of such an effect in past research," wrote the authors, "appears to be the product of methodological flaws." Unfortunately, gun control may not save us after all.
The same can also be said for violent movies as a cause of violence, according to Texas A&M University psychologist Christopher Ferguson in his 2009 book Violent Crime: Clinical and Social Implications. "Does violent media availability and exposure in a culture relate to levels of violence in that culture?" he asks. "If so, then removing violent media would appear to be an easy way to reduce societal violence. Disappointingly, the answer is clearly no."
University of California economists Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna go even further and conclude that violent movies actually decrease the amount of violent crime. Because those who are more violence prone are more likely to seek out violent entertainment as a substitute, "violent movies deter almost 1,000 assaults on an average weekend." Furthermore, since Hollywood films make up to three times more money internationally than they do at home, it's hard to understand how these movies would only influence violence in the United States. Anyway, despite the clear increase in violent entertainment during the last 40 years, the level of violent crime in the United States has decreased (though it still remains high compared to other countries). It would appear that Batman is not to blame, either.
Rebuilding Gotham
The clear implication is that social capital followed by income inequality are the primary factors that influence the rate of homicidal aggression. Does this mean that John Horgan's "modest proposal" of state-sponsored socialism is the answer? Is aggression caused by inequality, and can we reduce its prevalence by imposing a level playing field?
"My tendency would be to reverse the causality," said Frans de Waal, C. H. Candler Professor of Primate Behavior at Emory University in Atlanta, Ga., via email. "In order to have a highly skewed distribution of resources or reproductive privileges, you will need a lot of aggression to maintain it. So, it's not the inequality that causes aggression, but the other way around." As primates, we don't simply respond to our environment; we actively build it through our interactions with others and the shared culture we create through a process known as niche construction, to use the technical jargon. And as any baboon can tell you, what we construct isn't always good for the least among us. Fortunately, as Forest Troop has demonstrated, there is no law of nature forcing things to stay that way.
The high level of inequality, both within the United States and between countries globally, was constructed through a process of social interactions. It can be deconstructed the same way. If the interpretation from social capital is correct, it suggests that building relationships through our schools, labor unions, farmers' markets, and gun ranges, at City Hall and the State House, or through active participation in our churches, temples, and mosques, can ultimately make us all more secure. But at the same time, it means collectively challenging the policies of those high-ranking members in our society whose obsession with status leaves the rest of us completely stressed out.
Remarkably, this kind of social activism is the single most important factor associated with reduced violence for any neighborhood in the world. According to University of Washington sociologists Blaine Robbins and David Pettinicchio, in the first global study to examine social capital and homicide, only social activism consistently predicts homicide at the national, neighborhood, and individual levels:
This is because politically oriented individuals are also more likely to serve the needs of their community and assist in collective endeavors aimed at reducing crime. All of which follows the classic Tocquevillian premise: a willingness to take part in political affairs generates a willingness to contribute to the common good, including the production and maintenance of a safe and secure society.
Are we up to the challenge? In case anyone doubts it, just consider the selfless acts of heroism that were on display at around 12:20 a.m. on Friday, July 20. With smoke filling the air and bullets flying, Jon Blunk, Matt McQuinn, John Larimer, and Alex Teves all sacrificed their lives to protect the people who were most important to them. Each reacted instantly by covering his loved one with his own body and taking the bullets that were otherwise intended for the person beneath.
It is this capacity for altruism that distinguishes us from nearly all other primates. How many of these lone and deranged gunmen, quietly secluded from the world like brutalized baboons, could have been redirected along a different path if there had been a community that made them feel secure? Our species is uniquely qualified to engage in activities that promote the public good; all we need is a little push.
An earlier version of this post appeared on The Primate Diaries hosted by Scientific American.
Follow Eric Michael Johnson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ericmjohnson
LATITUDE makes attitude. That's a simple way of expressing the impact of climate on attitude.
Around the equator, personal strength is supreme and natural selection prefers combat ability. It is not necessary for large societies to form, and in fact, there is no such thing as a large society around the equator.
In temperate zones the fact of agriculture in the summer only means that during winter, the entire society must eat what farmers produced in summer. That means they must honor the farmer, whereas around the equator it is the hunter that is worshiped.
Farther north still you return to worshiping the hunter since farming isn't possible, nor can large civilizations be sustained solely on hunting.
Thus, domestic tranquility can be expected in temperate zones or places where seasonal variation (ie, "monsoon") creates a similar phenomenon that "prefers" farming and crafts over hunting and warring.
Violence is natural; peace and tranquility is not.
Scratch "gun" and start over. Origin of violence.
Bad question. Violence started with two single celled animals, one wanting to eat the other.
BETTER: Studying the origin of peace and non-violence.
EXAMPLE: Iceland. It wasn't always peaceful. In fact, they had hundreds of years of civil warfare culminating in "Berserks". Basically they exhausted the violent genes right out of their gene pool.
Firearms were often referred to as equalizers in the recent past.
My great Grandfather was born in Texas close to Waco in 1861.
When I was a child in the 1940's, one of my chores was to generally take care of him.
I asked him once what it was like when he was a young man and every man on the street was armed, and he responded that, "it was just like today, except that everyone was just a whole lot more polite to one another".
Conflicts were avoided where possible, because everybody was armed and anybody could kill anybody else if they wanted.
I asked him if he was a fast draw with a pistol, and he responded that, "a man with a rifle was always more deadly that a man with a pistol, and that he always carried only a rifle in case he came across a deer or a rabbit that would be meat on the table for dinner that night for his family, in addition to his own personal self defense."
He also said something to the effect that "pistols were only useful in bedrooms and barrooms".
He stated that, "if there was a business dispute, someone cheating someone else in business, or some other disagreement between various people, the aggrieved person knew where the offender lived and the road or trail that was taken each night by the offender to the offender's personal residence.
The aggrieved person would usually hide in the bushes and shoot the offender as he rode by on the road to his house, in the back if possible." This unspoken threat probably caused people to be more honest and honorable in their business dealings.
People apparently only gave their victims a "fair chance" to shoot back in the movies, not in the "real west" of the late 1800s.
Criminals robbing innocent victims also did not give their robbery victims a fair chance to shoot back, normally killed the victims, as this lessened the criminal’s chance of detection and punishment.
Texans apparently did not follow the European dueling code that was sort of followed by gentlemen in the Eastern and Southern parts of this country in the 19th century.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/duel/sfeature/rulesofdueling.html
Don't get me wrong, I love Old West mythology...and I love Westerns. But it's often just that.
They thought that it was necessary.
The Criminal element is armed to the teeth, and do not pay any attention to their "Gun Control" Laws.
The police in those nations are afraid of those criminals and sonetimes on the payrolls of those criminal organizations.
In the nations where the citizens are essentially prohibited from ownership of firearms, the criminals are all armed and the criminals "shake down" the unarmed Citizens similar to the Protection Rackets in New York City before the citizens in NYC were allowed to own and carry firearms, which destroyed the Protection Rackets in New York City according to some of my NYC friends.
I don't understand. The link you provided showed a 40% decrease in deaths in the US from assualts since 1970 and, at the same time, from multiple sources in the Huffington Post today, income inequality has dramatically increased. How can two such wildly divergent statistical measures have a strong positive correlation?
When my child was 6 and went to Europe, two of her first questions were: "why are there so many people around?", and "why are there so many children around?". There are more people in the US than in Europe, but you wouldn't know it by walking on the street. Some of the questions she asked later were "Why is the food so good here?", and "Why are the drinks so good here?".
We think we're so much better than everyone else, living in our personal ivory towers, proud of how much more stuff we have than everyone else, and losing sight of the fact that stuff doesn't make us happy (hence the enormous depression rates in the US), people do (hence the much lower depression rates in many developing countries).
The US does nothing for itself. It does hot hate, it does not love. It does not act. It has no feelings.
"We think we're so much better than everyone else"
Really? How many of you are in there? As for me, I think I *am* better than 97 percent of the population, or so my testing tells me, over those subjects the tests measure.
The other was a friend whose life didn't turn out as well as mine. I gave her a house to live in. I finally married and had kids. Her response was to call child services on me. It was dismissed but it was the end of the rope for me.
I’m sure there will be many gun control advocacy comments. Most will be a variant of “If we would just get rid of guns, things will be peachy”. Maybe not. It might be good to go beyond ideology and consider practical reality.
1. The laws of supply and demand apply to guns as they do to any other commodity. The fewer the guns, the more valuable they are.
2. The more valuable the commodity the greater the demand. The greater the demand the greater the effort to obtain and trade that commodity.
3. The fewer the guns in a particular population, the greater the marginal power of each gun.
4. Any tool and die maker or skilled machinist can make a gun. (I knew a tenth grade high school student who made a high quality pistol)
5. Any machine shop can support the manufacture of guns (including machine guns).
6. There are tens of thousands of machine shops in the USA.
7. The "war on drugs" demonstrates how easily a high demand product can be controlled and/or eliminated with just a little government effort. (NOT)
8. Prohibition worked
9. The great holocausts of the last century came AFTER the population was disarmed. Of course, it can't happen here. We're different.
10. Gun control doesn’t eliminate guns but transfers them to the State. Employees of the state are different than the rest of us. They can be trusted
Hey, just say’n
I live in Australia, a country that introduced strong gun control laws in 1996 following a massacre, including a ban on all automatic or semi-automatic weapons. The result has been a massive fall in homicides, suicides and armed robberies. That's been matched by an equally dramatic fall in police firearms use.
So the thought experiment is interesting, but there's a 22 million strong practical experiment that went the other way.
One of the interesting things about this, btw, turned out to be how hard it is to kill someone with a single shot weapon, as opposed to an automatic or semi-automatic. First you've got to hit them. Then you've got to hit them in the right place. Then you've got the pesky problem of unarmed bystanders jumping on you while you're trying to reload. OK for shooting kangaroos and rabbits - they don't fight back if you miss :-)
It is not "clear" at all. Look at the chart called "Cooks Index". It is all over the place but proposes some sort of correlation. It is interesting that UT has the highest volunteerism, it also is heavily armed.
I'm not sure what to make of it. Do you?
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
Federal Bureau of Investigations
Yeah, I do, and very likely so do you. If you are a sincere seeker of truth you have already discovered that gleaning meaningful information is quite difficult.
For instance, showing a correlation between increases in violent crime in California and their successive increase in the waiting period is easy -- but it cannot show which came first. Did the increase in crime lead to a demand for increased waiting? Or does the fact of increased waiting lead to more crime of opportunity?
Probably both. Some of the better analyses attempt somewhat anecdotally to answer these kinds of question, and better analyses are also careful to show that certain kinds of crime are reduced by widespread gun ownership (Utah for instance) but this tends to *increase* other kinds of crime. In other words, and related to the topic at hand, criminals have certain goals in mind and will use whatever weapon is convenient (baseball bats are popular in Pittsburgh) and *are* deterred by armed citizens. But this is criminal against homeowner. If you lump gang wars into the mix, you get a different picture -- then it basically is criminal against criminal. That's what Chicago is trying to reduce. Hell with the homeowner; lets reduce gang wars!
Curbing violence is a problem, but wouldn't it be better if people survived the encounter?
But answering why murderous rampages take place is easy - there are a lot of crazy people out there, and if they didn't have access to semi-automatic weapons they would use something else. It's an occupational hazard that comes with being the dominant species by virtue of our being the best killers on the planet, and it's been going on as long as there have been people.
Events like this serve to remind us how thin the veneer of socialization really is - the Beast is never that far away for any of us - but the fact that we are sickened by it when it happens is a good sign.
Automatic weapons were invented for a reason... so that a single soldier could shoot dozens of enemies in mere minutes. If they didn't give a great advantage at killing, we would still be sending our boys into war with a wooden club, don't you think?
Now let's see.. The last time somebody stabbed or clubbed a dozen or more people to death without being stopped...
Well, there was one in China in 2000, another one in China in 2003, and then China again in 2006 (maybe China needs to outlaw clubs and knives), one in Vietnam in 1998, Indonesia in 1987... and of course the poster child of melee, Idi Amin - his weapon of choice was the baseball bat - and let's not forget Ruwanda - but that was thousands of crazy people with machetes and clubs so I guess it doesn't count.
Guns do make it easier, I agree. But crazy always finds a way.
Gun violence statistics need to be carefully parsed. Gang-on-gang violence should be backed out. The dynamics are completely different and gangs will always have guns. Violence related to the "war on drugs" should be backed out, this is government caused violence.
Comparisons to the rest of the world are misleading. After the Aurora event AP news published a piece on the ten worst gun related civilian mass killings in the world - Three were in the USA. Of the rest, five were in countries with the strongest gun laws. Some countries with very high gun ownership have low violence numbers.
The number of guns per person is misleading. Most gun owners have several guns, often in the 5 to 20 range. If they were inclined to violence, they could only use one or two, the rest are irrelevant. Many parts of the country with the highest per capita gun ownership have virtually no gun crime other than suicide.
Now that we haves this triviality out of the way... what was this article about, exactly?
Shakes head... walks away slowly...
“It’s not what you don’t know that will hurt you, but what you do know that isn’t so” (paraphrased, attribution various)
You may as well go back to sleep, now.