Author’s note: I had planned to send this out later this month, but then Odessa and Midland Texas happened yesterday.

– Marlow

Alternate Thoughts on America’s Mass Shootings

Guns for sale at Walmart

Editor’s note: Now that the media has moved onto the next bright shiny new toy, it’s time to share these random thoughts that were penned while this issue was still white hot during the past month.

American gun culture, gun numbers and their availability do not explain the shift from shooting in the course of a crime to shooting large quantities of innocents being THE crime. How did we go during the past 50 years from shooting at rival gangs to shooting at random crowds?

Six decades ago certain Catholic high schools in my hometown had rifle clubs –- one had a range under the parish rectory’s chapel in the cellar. Some public schools had competition rifle teams. There were more kids on the rifle team than the basketball team. Now kids bring guns to school for attacks of mass destruction and death.

What might be other possible societal factors that have brought us to this unique to American gun violence moment?

Firearms have been widely available in the US for centuries. There were brief periods where their use in the public eye reached higher levels (e.g., Wild West days, the Prohibition era, 1950s and 60s urban gang wars), but by and large this was crime-on-crime violence.

There are some theories that the crack down on cheap guns (e.g. Saturday Night Specials) a half century ago drove criminals to more lethal weapons (actual handguns), and that increased the death rates per incident there, somewhat tamping down handgun use and driving, perhaps, the rise of drive-by shootings, with that image now popular in the media (even though that was a routine tactic during Prohibition era violence).

So, with that as prologue, let’s list some odd things that may/may not be germane to alternative theories of why we are seeing what we are seeing:

· As a society, we have ever increasing numbers of people on anti-depressants and other mood-altering drugs. Use of Ritalin and its successors has risen over 500% in less than 20 years. Drugs like these mimic and/or confuse our hormones with unsuspected results.
· We have rising suicide rates, especially among teenagers.

· Obesity is increasing — this isn’t necessarily just a nutrition issue — food, chemicals, drugs, sedentary life — all have an impact on mental wellbeing. There’s research that shows that the same activity/caloric intake by a person today results in weight gain compared to the same person in the 1980s. If there are enough changes as a population for that sort of physical impact, is it unreasonable to expect similar for mental/psych issues?

· We believe that 15 second public service announcements and PBS educational TV shows an hour a day have positive impacts on our kids but dismiss the impact of hours of ads and social media designed by professionals to be addictive.

· Researchers have suggested that the spike in violence that started in the late 60s and tailed off by the 90s was a delayed result of the amount of lead in gasoline (see charts). The increased societal presence of guns has not correlated to these sudden choices to shoot at masses of people.

Cause and effect aren’t always immediately obvious, and correlation does not imply causation; but, isn’t it clear with these mass shootings that something fundamental is broken here?

Instead of passing more laws that wouldn’t prevent the past half dozen or so mass shootings, why not start a crash program to start screening for root causes as the down payment to a better, long-term solution? Yes, that would mean overturning a 1990s law that banned federal dollars for such research.

Perhaps we should look for side effects of America’s changing diet and drug treatments. Things like Accutane might possibly cause mental health issues. Pesticides like drugs can mimic hormones. Fetal exposure to chemicals changes behavior. Lots of work could be done here.

We should look at these issues to see if they are associated with defects in the brain where we differentiate right from wrong when it has to do with a very specific types of crime like mass shootings. Maybe America’s evolving diet and resulting bodies and brains are connected with a new lack of impulse control (and/or a peculiar sense of paranoia)?

We should not assume that a lack of empathy is the only damage — the concurrent increase in suicide rates might be pointing to a similar lack of social attachment or lack of perception. Perhaps what we are seeing is akin to American footballers’ CTE which doesn’t manifest until years and decades later. Maybe mass shootings are caused by long term but very small degradations of the physical and/or biochemical structures of the brain that we have yet to tease out of the available data.

I understand this sounds insane just as the long ago “fluoride in the water is a communist Russian plot” mania. But generational shifts are how nutrition changes work. 50 years ago, considering these now scientific facts as possibly good ideas would have caused one to be labeled as loony:

· bacteria cause ulcers
· fecal transplants
· microbiomes

The possible connections I’m suggesting we consider drawing from this stuff sound crazy, yes. But I’m not connecting shooting and obesity. I’m connecting the fact that if there can be such a significant shift in American biochemistry in a generation that obesity is more likely (cause unknown — there are a lot of candidates and it may be multi-factor), and that if lead in the environment was apparently a major driver of violence 20 years after the people were exposed to it, is it that farfetched to imagine a shift in mental health could be due in large part to environmental factors?

Many of the chemicals we’re exposed to daily change how our bodies react to hormones. And it’s not just industrial chemicals. There are enough drugs in the waterways that aquatic life is showing signs of the exposure. Look at how many chemicals and new prescription drug ads list aggression, anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts as side effects.

One last random observation about what’s broken in America’s larger culture is an anecdote from Washington Post about the El Paso shooting: ”A video posted Saturday after the shooting, with more than 250,000 views on Facebook, appears to begin outside a Walmart in El Paso, the area where an attacker killed 20 people and wounded dozens more. A man, whose Facebook name matches that of a witness to the shooting quoted by media outlets, walks inside the store while filming on his phone. He approaches a body, face down in the entrance, in a pool of blood. Another bystander is already there, phone also pointed toward the body. The two nearly collide, both watching their phones. The camera lingers on the body for minutes, even as a handful of women attempt to exit the store, shielding the eyes of their children to protect them from the carnage.

More than 4,000 people had shared this video at the time of the press report, which was streamed live and now carries a graphic content warning from Facebook.”

Sheesh. Is America’s 24-7 attachment to everything electronic making us asocial. Are we addled by some goofy PTSD-dopamine addiction? Are the shooters so afflicted? If so, does it constitute one of these events’ root causes?
I look back at our shock to the 1990’s Columbine school and Waco restaurant mass shootings as rather quaint. They were pretty rare events and years could pass between incidents. Now we seem to be getting them on a monthly or weekly basis. I would stipulate that guns are part of the problem at least in terms of the sizeable number of deaths per incident, but I would remind you that if one wanted to pick up a firearm and kill a bunch of people, it wasn’t any more difficult in the 90’s than it is today. In fact, it was easier then.

Politicians in this country are always wrapped up in root causes of every issue save for this. Maybe it’s time.

But that would mean an open admission that what we know or suspect is suspect . . .

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