No Panacea, No Silver Bullets

The Answer To "The Gun Problem" Goes Where Most People Don't Want To Go

No one I know that is left-wing or right-wing is less than outraged and terribly distraught about what went on in Texas this week. If you aren’t feeling emotions like that then you aren’t human.

The Wall Street Journal sets up the scene well.

The profile emerging of Salvador Ramos, the 18-year-old who killed 19 children and two teachers, is depressingly familiar. A teenage loner with a disruptive family life. Bullied as a child because of a speech impediment. Immersed in video games and other virtual reality. Ramos, who was killed amid his massacre, had fought with his mother and hinted at violent ambitions. He shot his grandmother before he drove to the school and murdered children with a rifle in a fourth-grade classroom.

This is achingly similar to the profile of other young mass killers from Sandy Hook to Aurora, Parkland, Tucson, Virginia Tech and Buffalo. They suffer from some mental illness or profound social alienation. The societal challenge is anticipating when such a young man—and it is nearly always a young man—will snap, and how and when to deny him access to firearms.

The actions of each tribe are predictable.

The left always politicizes tragedy first. The perpetual candidate who is shopping for any office he can get elected to, Beto O’ Rourke, makes a scene at a press conference. Former President Obama compares the shootings to George Floyd (?)! The mainstream media talking heads trot out person after person who calls for an end to the 2nd Amendment, or highly restrictive gun measures.

They falsely compare abortion and guns because it suits their purpose.

Their answer is to take the guns away. It reminds me of the right-wing people in the late 1990’s that said, “Pray the gay away.” Restrictive gun laws don’t work.

On the right, they cite the Second Amendment and “shall not infringe”. They will tell you more people are killed by hammers in the US than rifles and they are correct. Handguns don’t kill that many people. Most handguns that kill people are used for suicide.

Suicide is a mental illness.

The right-wing will point to studies done by PhD economist John Lott but my economist friends say that there really isn’t any good unbiased data on guns in America. Lott’s studies seem to be structured with bias. They aren’t objective hypothesis tests. One of the problems is in order to study the issue, it’s hard to structure it to go through it objectively.

Both make emotional knee-jerk reactions to the incident. It’s an immovable force against an immovable force so they go to court. No one wants to talk about the real issue.

Why are young teenage boys shooting people in public places? (for some reason, girls don’t engage in this sort of behavior very often. Laurie Dann is the only one I can think of.)

In poorer urban neighborhoods, people are routinely shooting and killing people. Why? No one seems to care about that. Of course in Chicago, they took it to the next level and people were shot and killed in Millennium Park by the Bean.

In cities across America, all crime is up double digits since the George Floyd summer riots. It’s being committed by younger males. Why?

I learned some interesting data and more data is spilling out as we disassemble the tragedy.

I learned that police showed up at the crime scene in Texas and kept parents from entering the school building to try and save their children. I am not a police person and don’t know the proper things to do in this situation but it seems odd to me that police didn’t go into the building. Isn’t that what they are supposed to do?

I know that for the past two years, kids have been banned from even going to school. If you were antisocial before, you just got two free years to work on your antisociality. Sadly, the Teacher’s Unions campaigned to keep schools closed. We are in danger of losing a generation. Kids that were in rough shape prior to Covid were hurt significantly worse than kids who weren’t.

When I look at the venerable non-government institutions in our country where a lonely teenage boy looking for belonging might turn, they have been destroyed.

Boy Scouts. Destroyed by the left.

Mainstream churches. Destroyed by the left.

Nuclear families. Destroyed by the left and by government programs.

Artificially high minimum wages stop potential employers from hiring them so they can’t even find dignity in work.

You can name more for sure. There is no doubt that the Boy Scouts, churches, and nuclear families had problems but things sure seemed a lot better with the proliferation of them than without them.

We know what we have been doing for a lot of problems in America since 1965 hasn’t worked. It’s made things a lot worse. As people citing the current thing like to say, “We have the receipts to prove it.”

All kids do better with two parents. The data is clear. Yet, out of wedlock childbirth has soared in the last fifty years. Why? The answers to that question are extremely difficult for people because you have to make value judgments. Value judgments are unsettling. They make people uneasy.

We have gigantic mental health issues in America we are ignoring. It’s why the homeless population in places like LA, SF, and other cities is large. In LA, crimes committed by the homeless are on an upsurge.

Many of the homeless are drug-addicted. Drugs flow across our border unchecked. Fentanyl comes mostly from China.

What do we need to do to bring the mental health problems under control?

Social media doesn’t bring people together. It isolates them.

That brings me to this point. Do not go to the sociologists to figure this out. They just don’t see the world the right way. Sociology is not a rigorous discipline. Instead, turn to mental health pros like psychiatrists and psychologists, and economics.

Why economics?

Economics might not be able to solve the problem, but at least it will help identify it better and more importantly quantify it. Economics is the study of scarcity. It’s about positive and negative externalities. It’s about opportunity costs.

Having an open debate on how to structure and model what to do is the way to attack the problem.

We live in a free society. We are guaranteed rights by our Creator and in the last two hundred some odd years, the United States and the rest of the world have been positively impacted by the free society existence.

Living in a free society means that things won’t be perfect. Nothing invented by man is ever perfect. Perfection is the wrong metric to think about.

With freedom comes a corresponding responsibility. The solutions to these problems will not be pleasant. The solutions might be counterintuitive and go against everything you have been told. The solutions need to correspond to our free society culture, while at the same time helping people make the right decisions so they don’t get into a bad situation in the first place.

We could ban guns. We could ban types of guns. We could pass laws against gun ownership. We can have background checks. We can do all of that, and this still would happen. Montreal has a lot of shootings. Canada has tougher gun laws and heavier ownership restrictions than the United States.

The real problem here is the negative externality (mass shooting) is so huge and the statistical probability of it happening is so low.

There are short-term fixes to this problem but they won’t stop the underlying reasons of why it is happening.

• Harden schools so there is one way in and out.

• Maybe have an armed guard there, or maybe not.

• Arming the teachers is not a solution because a lot of people aren’t comfortable physically, emotionally, or mentally with a gun in their hands. You can’t force it. If a teacher wants to arm themselves, fine. But, they should have to attend a gun safety and concealed carry class and do it often enough so that they are current and prepared. Other teachers and people in the school ought to know who is armed and who isn’t. So should parents.

• Parents ought to ask their school boards what preventative measures the district is taking. Is there a list of blue-ribbon preventative measures schools can take? I don’t know.

But, long term this problem isn’t going away until we confront what is actually the root cause of it.