Should mental health evaluations be required before the purchase of a fire-arm?

EDIT: This post was written hastily in response to something inflammatory posted on Facebook (isn't it always the case?) about the Aurora shootings. Please excuse errors and the gradual deterioration of my argument into a general anti-guns rant.

Regarding whether psych evaluations are necessary or indeed useful, I think we first have a to dispel a few myths and look at some data.

First of all is the way in which we psychologise extreme and disturbing acts that involve firearms, like mass murder. There's a great article here by a Cambridge Professor discussing how we tend to see Western murderers as lone, deranged individuals, but see non-Western murderers as acting on cultural influences (Islam, dictatorships, social deprivation etc.).
The reality in all cases West and East is it's a combination of many factors that we tend to ignore in favour of a simplistic analysis of motivations which helps us make some sense out of the chaos.

A recent Fox News article actually tried to blame failings in Psychiatry for not being able to properly understand and pre-emptively catch the aforementioned "lone deranged killers". Dr. Allen Frances, Chair of the Psychiatry department at Duke University and contributor to the upcoming DSM5 (the American bible of psychiatric illnesses) wrote an eloquent but pithy response to this kind of article explaining that we will never be able to find the needles in the haystack and we either need to accept Mass Murder as part of the American Way of Life, or we need to get in line with other industrialised nations and accept reasonable gun control laws.

Does that mean psych evaluations are useless? Not exactly. Up until now I've only been talking about mass shootings, which by default represent extreme exceptions in society, and sadly contribute to stigma and the false association between mental illness and violence.

The majority of murders in the US are overwhelmingly represented by firearms and are not carried out by mass murderers. Again, all these gun-related homicides aren't all caused by one type of person. It's certainly clear that most gun deaths happen in poor urban areas, and black teenagers appear to be most highly affected in terms of gun deaths, so that does help narrow down some of the social factors.
But from a purely psychological point of view, what lines can be drawn? We do know that a significant section of the criminal population may be suffering from mental illness (sometimes as a consequence of prison!). Furthermore, there is evidence that 64% of males and 50% of females in prison suffer from one form of personality disorder or another (in the UK), although the exact relationship between type of personality disorder and type of offence is unclear.

Additionally, we know that there is an association between violent offences and this narrow sub-set of psychiatric illness called personality disorders. Antisocial personality disorder is a fairly robust construct that can account for a lot of violent offending, and a recent large-scale study in Baltimore found that early disruptive behaviour and anti-social personality was predictive of later criminality (on the plus side, this was tempered by the introduction of a behaviour management program; remember season 4 of the The Wire?).

What I'm saying is that we're already well aware of some of the early signs and causal factors and there are (often under-funded) prevention programs in place to help avoid high-risk individuals from becoming violent, but again, it's a very complicated, multi-layered problem, and honestly, guns shouldn't have to be part of the equation.

Let's not forget though that guns don't just contribute to homicide rates; ready availability of guns in the household increase the risk of suicide in the home. Most states in the US actually ban the purchase of firearms for individuals who have a diagnosis of mental illness or have ever been hospitalised, but clearly it's not enough.

I don't know if mandatory psych evaluations would help or not, I do know that police have to take them before entering the force, and their gun is seen as an enormous responsibility, something that contrasts with my experience of walking into a Bass Pro shop in Oklahoma and seeing a large sign saying "Glock Giveaway!! 2 for 1!!".

I guess debates over mandatory screenings, and gun ownership in general relate to the wider notion of Isaiah Berlin's Positive and Negative Liberty.

Without going into too much detail, positive liberty represents the degree to which we have social representation (in other words, how democratic our society is), and negative liberty represents our ability to be left alone and do what we want, while still being held individually responsible for our actions (agency). Sir Berlin was more focused on negative liberty, as at the time the cold war had left the Western world feeling that any form of de-individualised mass movement could only lead to violent revolution.

I completely understand this concept and can largely agree, but in America the cultural history has strangely tied the notion of gun ownership tightly to this core principle of the Liberal conception of Freedom.

What provides a sense of agency about having a gun? Provided you're not a member of the Crips or the Bloods, you're probably a homeowner who feels that owning a weapon is a necessary part of home protection, leaving you and your family free to enjoy the fruits of liberty:

It's a well-known finding that, rather than confer protection, gun ownership increases the risk of homicide.

We don't have guns in the UK, or rather, we do have illegal guns in certain gangland areas near Manchester and London, but I've never seen one or been in a situation where I thought a gun might be necessary. Illegal guns are very difficult to come by as they are simply not manufactured and sold in a way that benefits the criminal underworld in Europe.

The police advise people in my neighbourhood that if someone breaks into your home, you should barricade yourself in one of the rooms of the house; intruders are mostly looking for stuff to steal, and that's covered by insurance. The best way to effectively deal with a violent situation is to get out of it. Charles Bronson most of us are not.

So as you can tell, I'm pro gun-control. I'm really anti-guns full stop, but I'm willing to meet halfway. Here's a study from Austria where guns are legal, comparing the homicide and suicide rates before and after the introduction of restrictive firearm legislation. The results speak for themselves.

And this cultural myth that America is simply a more historically violent nation and you simply can't compare it with other civilised nations? Need I remind you of Austria's history?

Ziz la France! Riots & Choice (or lackthereof)

I know it's too late to comment on the London riots, as the Summer is over and people have moved on to more pressing issues (Cher's transgender son Chaz Bono is going to be on Dancing With the Stars! zOMG!), but I thought I'd still put my thoughts out there, or rather those of notoriously handsome continental philosopher Slavoj Zizek:

The George Clooney of Slovenia

Cheap cracks at his appearance aside, he's a genuinely engaging presence during talks, where he's never above telling a few filthy jokes, and his many, many books are extremely well written and intuitively engaging, if you like Marxist-Lacanin-Hegelian dialectical analysis...

I'm providing links here to two excerpts of a commentary he made on the subject of the Paris riots from 2005; I think they're still very relevant and it's fucking depressing how little anybody has learned from recent episodes of civil unrest throughout the world.

• Read the first two paragraphs of the first page here. Quote:

The first conclusion to be drawn is thus that both conservative and liberal reactions to the unrests clearly fail. The conservatives emphasize the Clash of Civilizations and, predictably, Law and Order: immigrants should not abuse our hospitality, they are our guests, so they should respect our customs, our society has the right to safeguard its unique culture and way of life; plus there is no excuse for crimes and violent behavior, what the young immigrants need is not more social help, but discipline and hard work... Leftist liberals, no less predictably, stuck to their old mantra about neglected social programs and integration-efforts which are depriving the younger generation of immigrants of any clear economic and social prospect, thus leaving them violent outbursts as they only way to articulate their dissatisfaction... As Stalin would have put it, it is meaningless to debate which reaction is worse: they are BOTH worse, inclusive of the warning, formulated by both sides, about the real danger of these outbursts residing in the easily predictable racist REACTION of the French populist crowd to them.

• Then read the whole of this. Quote:

The recent outbursts in Paris bear witness to the same Wall in Europe itself. The thing to resist, when we are faced with shocking reports and images of cars burning in Paris suburbs, is the "hermeneutic temptation": the search for some deeper meaning or message hidden in these outbursts. What is most difficult to accept is precisely their utmost meaninglessness: more than a form of protest, they are a passage à l'acte which bears witness not only to the impotence of the perpetrators, but, even more, to the lack of what Fredric Jameson called "cognitive mapping", to their inability to locate the experience of their situation into a meaningful Whole. The true question is thus: which are the roots of this disorientation?

Social theorists like to repeat that today's society is thoroughly "reflexive": there is no Nature or Tradition that would provide the firm foundation on which one can rely, even our innermost impetuses (sexual orientation) are more and more experienced as something to be chosen. How to feed and educate a child, how to proceed in sexual seduction, how and what to eat, how to relax and amuse oneself, all these spheres are more and more "colonized" by reflexivity, experienced as something to be learned and decided upon. However, the ultimate deadlock of the risk society resides in the gap between knowledge and decision: there is no one who "really knows" what to do, the situation is radically "undecidable", but we nonetheless HAVE TO DECIDE. The problem is thus not that of the forced choice (I am free to choose - on condition that I make the right choice), but the opposite one: the choice is effectively free and, for this very reason, is experienced as utterly more frustrating.

Admittedly, I doubt any of the philosophical jargon used will enter into the House of Commons: "I urge the Prime Minister to resist the Hermeneutic temptation!", "Would the right honourable gentleman please look beyond subjective violence!".

Speaking of which, did you see the so-called riot debates in August? It's basically a real-life version of the generic Tough on Crime speech Carcetti makes at the end of season 3 of The Wire, performed by a less charismatic actor.

What's so terrible is that famously, while the Bunny Colvin character emphasises that using war-like language in political discourse effectively makes it a drug WAR, Carcetti's tough-sounding speech had a lot of viewers utterly won over (possibly in part 'cos Aiden Gillen is a sexy man).

Speaking of discourse and how it's used to fuck things upinfluence people, as an academic nothing pisses me off more than when ideological agendas are legitimised using psuedo-scientific academic jargon, lending their argument the air of objectivity.

A recent article in the Guardian raised this point by condeming one of its own articles (!) for using the outdated social psychology term de-individuation, implying a mindless rabble bent on destruction. Sure enough, a nice article in Scientific American points out that

"group identity is a precondition for a riot: people will only riot when they think their actions are aligned with the worldview of the group as a whole".

The Guardian more or less reflects this point, indicating that ignoring the group identity of the rioters obscures the very real social ills underlying the outbursts.

But here the Guardian is guilty once more of employing research findings to push an ideological agenda, as by imbuing the rioters with minds capable of identifying with a group united by socio-economic deprivation this too obscures the tragic fact that these social ills are expressed precisely in the absolute mindlessness of their acts, lacking the intellectual and educational tools to articulate their frustrations in a meaningful manner.

As Zizek explains in the article I linked to earlier,

"if the commonplace that "we live in a post-ideological era" has any sense, it is here"".

Without understanding the ideological mechanisms that make their oppression possible, they are reduced to desperate and ultimately self-destructive outbursts of violence, which inevitably lead to popular backlashes in the press (and legal system!) confirming their status as barbaric enemies of society, like a tragic self-perpetuating, self-fulfilling prophecy.

And don't get me started on liberals defending the rioters' faux jamaican as legitimate expression. Yes, I know that language is a moveable feast, and yes, I understand that it's supposed to be the "patois of the streets" (here's a great post about the non-existence of Jafaican), especially after seeing the wonderful street argot represented in The Wire, but I must point out again that this obscures the fact that many of these kids are so educationally impoverished that they don't just speak a different language, they don't have much of a language at all. Many are utterly incapable of expressing a single coherent, meaningful idea because they literally lack the words with which to do so.

While we're on the topic, I fucking hate it when people try to expurgate their middle-class guilt by painting council-estates with subtle palettes to show the quiet beauty and dignity of the lost teenage souls that populate these cryptic wastelands... (I'm thinking Andrea Arnold). We know the people live there are human and have souls, but it is fucking miserable living in a council estate, and saying that it isn't shit to live there is some bizarre form of reverse-snobbery. There, I said it.

References worth checking out in relation to all of this nonsense:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu#Symbolic_capital_and_symbolic_violence

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard#Mimetic_desire

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish