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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

In response to the Virginia Tech massacre

So what to make of the grim killings at Virginia Tech?

The Washington Post's leader, in typical stately fashion, asks all the right questions:

Would the university have suffered the same tragedy if Virginia law did not prohibit the carrying of guns on campus? Should metal detectors be ubiquitous in American classrooms and dormitories? And why are gunmen so apt to carry out their lethal rampages at American schools?

The New York Times is tougher:

Sympathy was not enough at the time of Columbine, and eight years later it is not enough. What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss.

James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice, uses a column in the LA Times to give a brief history of mass murder by gun-wielding lunatics. He examines the social changes that have increased the incidence of such massacres.

So what has changed? For one thing, the United States has become much more dog-eat-dog, more competitive in recent years. We admire those who achieve at any cost, and it seems that we have less compassion for those who fail. (Just look at how eager we are to vote people off the island or to reject them in singing competitions.) This certainly increases frustration on the part of losers.

Then there's the eclipse of traditional community: higher rates of divorce, the decline of church-going and the fact that more people live in urban areas, where they may not even know their neighbours. If mass murderers are isolated people who lack support, these trends only exacerbate the situation. Many mass murderers, for example, are people who have picked up roots and moved.

He concludes by saying this:

It should give us some degree of consolation to know that these events are exceedingly rare. But they still occur, and they are among the sad and tragic prices we pay for the kind of open, modern, democratic society we live in.

A graduate student from Virginia Tech wrote this article last year, complaining about the ban that stops students from carrying concealed weapons (hat tip Samizdata):

Now consider the situation of this past Monday. A violent criminal who clearly has no respect for other people’s lives is running loose on campus, his precise whereabouts unknown. And while the police did an excellent job of patrolling campus, they simply cannot be everywhere at once. Is it not obvious that all students, faculty and staff would have been safer if CHP holders were not banned from carrying their weapons on campus?

What the Board of Visitors has effectively done by banning CHP-holding students, faculty and staff from carrying their weapons is creating a “Safe Zone” for criminals who do not care about the rules anyway. Disarming law-abiding citizens has never made the general populace more secure.

To British ears, the idea that ordinary people carrying guns makes the population safer sounds mad. But we forget our own lost history of gun ownership. Richard Munday wrote this article a couple of years ago. It's a fascinating read:

A century ago, the possession and carrying of firearms was perfectly normal here. Firearms were sold without licence in gunshops and ironmongers in virtually every town in the country, and grand department stores such as Selfridge's even offered customers an in-house range. The market was not just for sporting guns: there was a thriving domestic industry producing pocket pistols and revolvers, and an extensive import trade in the cheap handguns that today would be called "Saturday Night Specials". Conan Doyle's Dr Watson, dropping a revolver in his pocket before going out about town, illustrates a real commonplace of that time. Beatrix Potter's journal records a discussion at a small country hotel in Yorkshire, where it turned out that only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver.

Robbie Millen

Blogging the Virginia story

Here's where to go for the inside student story of the goings on at Virginia Tech - Planet Blacksburg.

And here's the constantly updated news story the student site is publishing.

One theory of campus shootings

Going Postal.

Ever since a spate of violence by postal workers began in the late 1980s this phrase has been used to describe acts of workplace violence. And it was the phrase used by one celebrated account of the Columbine High school massacre.

The writer Mark Ames has argued that Columbine itself was the root cause of the terrible events in the school that, eerily, will have its anniversary in four days time. (Ames said last year: "Ever since Columbine, massacre plots always start to peak around April 20")

His ideas seem worth revisiting as today's news is being absorbed. But I wonder if his theory about workplace brutality as a cause will prove a useful way of understanding the Virginia shooting.

What will Jim Webb say?

Senator Jim Webb, the junior senator for Virginia, is a different kind of Democrat. He opposes gun control. Recently one of his aides tried to enter the Senate Office Building carrying a gun and was arrested by Capitol police.

How will the Senator respond to the disaster at the University of Virginia?

This is a big moment for him. A great debate on gun control is about to begin. He could be a leader at a troubled moment or sit there and watch the coalition that elected him unravel.