What Can Psychologists Say About Gun Control?

Robert Brown wrote his review of the book Ending Campus Violence: New Approaches to Prevention before the horrible killing in Newtown, Connecticut, but the book and the review are relevant. The book's author, Brian Van Brunt, calls for a team approach to preventing campus violence. He proposes establishing three teams that will focus on the following issues: threat assessment, behavior intervention, and risk assessment. Psychologists working in schools at any level might benefit from studying this approach and the case studies Van Brunt presents.

Given the strong, emotional national reaction to the Newtown tragedy, gun violence is likely to be a topic for discussion in graduate and undergraduate psychology courses. How will those discussions be framed? I imagine that in graduate professional courses grief management and prevention of violence will be the focus. However, in most of the rest of the country, if my middle-class neighborhood is any indication, the debate will focus on gun control issues. That debate should not be simply political bluster. There is a psychological side to owning and using weapons of all kinds.

The Newtown killer used guns, including an assault rifle, that were part of a collection belonging to his mother. Leaving aside the Freudian implications, this example raises questions about parental modeling, the desire for owning many weapons, and the basis for the thrill of firing powerful guns. Many people are using dispositional explanations for mass killings—the killers are crazy. An official of the National Rifle Association is blaming video games. How can psychologists contribute to this discussion?

Read the Review

College Campuses Are No Longer Ivory Towers
By Robert D. Brown
      PsycCRITIQUES, 2013 Vol 58(1)

Comments

[Thomas Scheff]

Watch out for Humiliated Persons

As yet there has not been an attempt to summarize the motives of mass killers. One of the difficulties is getting adequate information about their lives.

However, there is a closely related study that is relevant: over two hundred perpetrators who killed their own partners and children, (Neil Websdale 2011).
Websdale came close to solving the problem of adequate information by making use of a wide variety of sources; not just media releases, but also police investigation reports and even interviews with persons who knew the family. Most of these sources were made available by the Domestic Violence Fatality Review movement. As a result, descriptions of most of the families and killings are quite detailed.
The author tests James Gilligan's thesis

The emotion of shame is the primary cause of all violence... The different forms of violence, whether toward individuals or entire populations, are motivated by secret shame. (For example, in his study of prisoners, the most murderous of them explained that they killed because they were "dissed" (disrespected) ).

Websdale finds considerable support for this thesis when there is enough detail to allow him to judge the presence of shame in the killer, that is, in a substantial majority of the 211 cases. All of the detailed cases suggested that the killer was secretly ashamed, as the theory states.

[Morgan Sammons]

As the debate over America’s excessively permissive stance on gun ownership heats up in the aftermath of the most recent tragedies, psychologists, marital therapists, counselors and other mental health providers will play an increasingly important role in shaping and implementing policy. It is my belief that an untoward focus on mental illness as an explanatory factor in gun violence is both spurious (most people with mental disorders are not violent) and a cynical attempt to deflect debate from the real issue (untrammeled access to weapons designed only for use in combat). If you share this belief, I think it is our obligation to ensure that our voices are heard in the policy debate.

As mental health providers, there will be increasing calls for stricter reporting standards, and perhaps even calls for mental health providers to play some evaluative role in determining access to weapons. This creates burdens on trainers of mental health providers as well as safety and liability issues for the providers themselves.

I believe it is vital for our community to help shape this debate, not only so that we can reduce the scourge of gun violence but that we can better define the roles of our professions in defining the intersects between mental health assessment and treatment and violence.