Comment Central - Times Online - WBLG

How likely are you to join a gang?

The Wall Street Journal has reported on a retired university professor who, with 40 years spent studying street crime and a home burgled nine times, has devised a test aimed at indentifying those children most likely to turn to gangs at an early age, before the damage is done.

Malcolm Klein’s test consists of 70 multiple choice questions, and has been developed in collaboration with Los Angeles in the hope that it will one day stem the city's norotiously high rates of gang related violence.

The efficacy of the test will take years to assess, but if you are between 10 and 15, or worry that you are particularly easily led, you can take it yourself, here.

Can gun control be effective?

The issue of gun control in America acts as a red-flag to all parts of the political spectrum. Events like last week's tragic shootings reiterate the fact that change is needed. The problem is that no-one can agree on how.

Still, if anyone has a sensible idea to offer, it would be Gary Becker and Richard Posner. They are the illustrious team behind the Becker-Posner blog. Here and here they offer their arguments and explain the enduring nature of America's romance with guns.

The slums come to the suburbs

Much of the anguish about the killing of Rhys Jones has focused on the tragedy of his life being cut short so young. But what makes his death stand out from the recent spate of slayings of teenage boys is that Rhys didn't hail from the mean streets. Croxteth Park, by all accounts, is an "aspirational" suburb. Despite grim headlines about rising levels of violent crime, most of the disorder stays in the ghettos. This has allowed the middle-classes a luxurious degree of complacency about the dangers of Britain's flourishing underclass. Well, not any more.

Theodore Dalrymple, responding to a gunning down of two girls in Birmingham back in 2003, wrote this article which deserves re-reading.

These are just everyday scenes from underclass life in Britain, a life to which our middle classes, intellectuals and politicians have remained impenetrably indifferent for many years. Never mind: before long, they will soon get a few lessons in underclass culture whether they like it or not. They won't have to go to the slums: the slums will come to them.

Grimly prophetic.

Robbie Millen

Were video games responsible for Virginia Tech?

Here's a list:

Chain from top left closet shelf
Folding knife & combination padlock
Compaq computer from desktop
Assorted documents, notepads, writings from desktop
Combination lock
Dremel tool and case
Nine books, two notebooks, envelopes, from top shelf
Assorted books & pads from lower shelf
Compact discs from desktops
Items from desktop & drawers: winchester multi tool, 3 notebooks, mail, checks, credit card
Items from 2nd door: Kodak digital camera, Citibank statement
Two cases of compact discs from dresser top
Drive: Seagate: 80 Gb
Six sheets of green computer paper
Mirror with blue plastic housing
Dremel tool box with receipt
Dell Latitude service tag

What is it? A list of items found in the dorm room of Virginia Tech killer Cho Seung Hui according to Gameworld Network.

Their point is to rebut claims that violent video games were responsible for his killing spree.

Steven Johnson, the author of Everything Bad is Good for You, notes on his blog that even if they had found video games it would prove nothing about their impact. Correct. But not finding them proves nothing about their impact either.

Making sense of the senseless: why did Virginia Tech happen?

Why did he do it? What were his motivations? I suggested two days ago, that it is possible to see the Virginia slaying as a viral reaction – something being copied over time by a susceptible group of young people.

But others want to look more specifically at the case of Cho. Maybe his violent plays, written while he was an English Literature student at the university, can give us some insight into Cho’s motives? Blake Morrison, a professor in creative and life writing says this is a red herring:

In truth, Cho’s plays are no more violent than Shakespeare’s... though there's a lot of rage in the writing... many theatres have staged bloodier dramas. And if creative writing programmes excluded students with personality disorders, they would all have to close down.

Cho's literary experiments neither caused his psychosis nor purged him of it.

Others look at the pictures and video Cho sent to an American TV station in the middle of his bloodbath, where he seems to imitate scenes and images from the Korean revenge movie Oldboy, and the violent action film Face/Off. Gerald Kaufman writing in The Daily Telegraph, wants the film industry to take a long, hard look at itself:

Now of course the makers of Oldboy and Face/Off were in no way minded to seek to have the bloodshed in their films motivate real-life killings. Yet, in a world where the boundaries between film/video/DVD and real life are wearing thin almost to non-existence, with the ghastliest events filmed on mobile phones and then immediately beamed around the world, it may be that the time has come for film-makers to exercise at least a modicum of self-censorship, now that institutional censorship of films has vanished pretty well to the point of total evaporation.

But in the end, it’s the gun control debate that dominates. Charles Krauthammer scolds the “inevitable scolding and clucking abroad about America's lax gun laws” and suggests:

If we are going to look for a political issue here, the more relevant is not gun control but psychosis control. We decided a half a century ago that our more eccentric and, indeed, crazy fellow citizens would not be easily locked in asylums. It was a humane decision, but with the inevitable consequence that some who really need quarantine are allowed to roam the streets

But that just feels like it’s ducking the issue. Yes, people kill people, but guns make it a lot easier to do. Nobody this side of the Atlantic should get on the moral high-ground about our supposedly less violent culture – one look at the way knife crime in Britain’s inner cities should see to that. Similar shootings have happened globally - Dunblane, Scotland, in 1996, in Osaka, Japan, in 2001, and in Erfurt, Germany, in 2002 - but they are far more common in America.

As the Economist’s leader says today:

Cho killed his victims with two guns, one of them a Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol, a rapid-fire weapon that is available only to police in virtually every other country, but which can legally be bought over the counter in thousands of gun-shops in America. There are estimated to be some 240m guns in America, considerably more than there are adults, and around a third of them are handguns, easy to conceal and use. Had powerful guns not been available to him, the deranged Cho would have killed fewer people, and perhaps none at all.

In 2005, there are 14,000 gun related homicides in America. In around the same period, there were 73 in the UK. In Japan, just 2. In America there is an average gun-killing rate of 3.97 per 100,000 of the population; in Switzerland, where it is legally mandatory to hold firearms, it is 0.51. I just can’t believe that’s because Americans are inherently more violent than the rest of the developed world.

Murad Ahmed

Your guide(s) to gun control laws

Arm yourself with facts. Here are the state-by-state guides to gun control laws in the US.

Depending on which way you lean on the issue, you can take your pick between the guide by the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence here (bumper sticker: "sensible gun laws save lives") or the one from National Rifle Association here (bumper sticker: "an armed society is a polite society").

Murad Ahmed

Gun controls: Ask a stupid question...

There are many questions being asked in the wake of the Virginia shootings. This is, by far, the stupidest:

Why didn't anyone rush the guy? It's not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness' sake—one of them reportedly a .22.

At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren't very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can't hit squat. I doubt this guy was any better than I am. And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage—your chances aren't bad.

This guy has guns. Is there a better argument for gun controls?

Murad Ahmed

From Columbine to Virginia Tech - the virus infecting America's susceptible young

One aspect of the Virginia Tech tragedy that makes me despair is the gruesome inevitability of it all. As Gerard Baker wrote in his superb piece on Tuesday:

It’s so familiar you could write the script yourself. Only the names change — Jonesboro, Columbine, Lancaster County and now Virginia Tech. And the numbers

Gerard believes, and it’s hard to disagree, that such slayings will keep happening again and again. But why? Maybe, Virginia Tech happened because the Lancaster County massacre happened before that and the Columbine massacre before that.

In the The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell points to a situation in Micronesia in the 1970s and 1980s where the islands had the highest rate of teen suicide in the world – ten times higher than anywhere else on the planet. Gladwell traced this rise back to the first ever teen suicide in Micronesia, which became romanticised and repeated by the islands's susceptible young.

In a now spookily prophetic post, he says:

Teenagers were literally being infected with the suicide bug, and one after another they were killing themselves in exactly the same way under exactly the same circumstances. We like to use words like contagiousness and infectiousness just to apply to the medical realm. But I assure you that after you read about what happened in Micronesia you'll be convinced that behaviour can be transmitted from one person to another as easily as the flu or the measles can. In fact, I don't think you have to go to Micronesia to see this pattern in action. Isn't this the explanation for the current epidemic of teen smoking in this country? And what about the rash of mass shootings we're facing at the moment - from Columbine through the Atlanta stockbroker through the neo-Nazi in Los Angeles?

Even the deranged learn their behaviour from somewhere – in this case, from each other.

So how does America deal with this deadly virus? Will gun control laws help? Maybe. But not if the controls are as half-hearted as they are now. Currently in Virginia, if you’re over the age of 18 you can buy an Uzi or an AK-47 assault rifle if you pass a background check into your suitability to hold such arms. Surely wanting an Uzi or an AK-47 in the first place is a bad sign? Limiting your quota to one gun a month, as Virginia does currently, is merely playing lip-service to gun control.

As Magnus Linklater concludes in his piece today:

Banning the use or possession of weapons may be a useful palliative, but it is not the solution. Any government that wants to be seen to be taking action after a violent event can reach for legislation, but it is likely to discover that the social malaise that led to the violence is more deep-seated and intractable. There are strong arguments to suggest that American states such as Virginia should begin copying the reforms adopted by, for instance, California, which has tightened up its gun laws; and they must move against the glorification of the gun, which encourages not only the ownership but the use of arms.

In the end, however, that will not be enough. What is needed is a wholesale shift in the national culture — and that will take rather longer than an arms ban.

Murad Ahmed

UPDATE: Making sense of the senseless - Why did Virginia Tech happen?

Obama gets it wrong on Virginia Tech

We shouldn't be surprised that politicians use tragedies like Virginia Tech to giddy-up their high horses. But some remarks by Barack Obama on Monday seem remarkably dumb. He gets a good drubbing at Reason for comparing the violence of Cho Seung Hui to the "violence" of outsourcing.

Robbie Millen

Restraint from the trigger-happy

The Virginia Tech slaying will strengthen the hands of gun-control advocates. So what has been the response of the National Rifle Association? This. What else could the NRA have said?

Robbie Millen