Gun Violence: Where We Ought To Intervene

It's taken me over a month to get to this post. Scared, I guess.

Donella Meadows said that every model is a simplification, but the shooter-weapon model is too simplified to give us enough leverage to reduce the carnage of mass shootings.

On the other hand, if I'm going to broaden the model to the point where we can make a difference,

* Somebody's going to think I'm nuts;

* I'm going to talk about an area in which my understanding is shallow;

* What it will take might be harder than rounding up all the ARs and forty-round clips in the US.

I just wrote a profile of Heinrich Himmler for Zenith City (semi-) Weekly, because Himmler, the 3rd Reich's top cop, was the all-time world-champ mass shooter. And he was raised according to an idiotic pedagogy in which, for the sake of his soul, "the child should be permeated by the impossibility of locking something in his heart."

They gave children enemas before bed, and ice baths, both to keep them from masturbating. They tied them to their beds for the same reason, and to keep them from curling up and getting comfortable.

There were other insanities, and when little Heinrich and his contemporaries grew up, they thought it was okay to murder millions.

For contrast I included information about James W. Prescott's 1975 Body Pleasure and the Origin of Violence. Prescott did a cross cultural survey of pre-literate societies. Societies which were physically affectionate with their children were usually peaceful. If a society was neglectful, they could still avoid violence by being sexually permissive. Cuddle babies, and let teenagers cuddle each other, and everybody got along. Prescott said that violence and pleasure are inversely related. If you had one, you didn't have the other.

Put that in your peace pipe and smoke it.

There's another couple or three things I want to throw into the mix.

* The shooters are usually young and aggrieved; they're seeking some warped version of justice.

* Researchers believe that schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, autism, ADHD, and major depression are genetically linked.

* Autism, schizophrenia, and depression seem to be common among mass shooters.

* Gregory Bateson's double-bind theory of schizophrenia says that what's happening with schizophrenics is that they got paradoxical communication ("Come here and give me some sugar, why are you always so clingy?") from somebody important when they were little. Consequently, they tend to mistake direct statements for metaphor, and vice versa. Their own conversation can be bizarrely metaphorical. In my sample of one schizophrenic acquaintance, this has been true. It's also true that this friend will perceive himself as attacked or slighted by surprising things, and acts out in what he calls "street theater" -- usually over environmental issues -- but which can look like the threat or beginning of violence.

Maybe what happens is that a baby's genetic tendency is shaped into one form of confusion or another by a welcome to the world that's contrary to what this individual organism -- who is smarter than we are, albeit entirely ignorant -- needs.

Bottom line: cuddle your kids, and don't jerk their chains. Make sure they understand about sexually transmitted diseases and contraception, and let them go.

Mass Shootings And Regulating Negative Feedback Loops

Donella Meadows writes, "Now we're beginning to move from the physical part of the system to the information and control parts, where more leverage can be found."

In the few times I've heard the phrase "negative feedback" spoken, the speakers have usually meant criticism or psychology's negative reinforcement. Meadows is using the phrase to mean that something a system does has a slowing effect on itself. Think of foxes as negative feedback for field mice. The more the mice breed, the more food there is for the foxes, making more foxes, which reduce the mouse population.

What Meadows was saying was that we can get better results from a kind of system jiu jitsu than from concentrating on a problem's hardware.

She uses the thermostat example to illustrate negative feedback. You want a certain temperature, and you set the thermostat. There's a furnace in the basement that comes on when the house temperature drops below the setting. The fire in the furnace would keep heating the house until it became uncomfortable, except for the thermostat's also being an off switch. The negative feedback is that the more heat the furnace puts out, the more likely it is to turn itself off.

Meadow' other examples include:

Emergency cooling in nuclear power plants,
Sweating and shivering,
Rest,
Recreation,
Meditation,
Socializing,
Markets (provided they get accurate information).

She says that the real leverage related to markets is in ways of getting them accurate, unambiguous information.

One paragraph that I took to be encouraging, in thinking about gun violence, says, "The strength of a negative feedback loop is important relative to the impact it is designed to correct. If the impact increases in strength, the feedbacks have to be strengthened too.

"A thermostat system may work fine on a cold winter day -- but open all the windows and its corrective power will fail."

The reason this is hopeful is that the phenomenon of mass shootings -- even gun violence in total -- is a minor blip in the system of our society. Horrific as it is.

If we can figure out what's happening, we ought to be able to correct for this painful phenomenon without strong negative feedback.

Systems Within Systems

In Environment, Power, and Society, Howard Odum wrote something to the effect that systems are limited in what they can do by what the larger systems of which they are parts will allow, and by what their own subsystems can provide for.

Thinking about gun violence, particularly inane mass shootings, in terms of systems, can be frustrating because the system is much larger and more detailed than individual, weapon, and victims. Where do you draw the line?

Adam Lanza, the reported Sandy Hook killer, was an un-photogenic twenty-year old Aspergers sufferer, with another learning disability, and divorced, affluent parents. That's somebody who had to have been part of a bullying system, who didn't have the internal system that would let him understand, cope, or avoid. He may have been alienated from his parents, or they from him. "Who knows what's going on in the kid's head. I don't know what to do with him. Listen, the child support's late again. When are you going to realize that you have a responsibility here too."

And yet, there are a million kids that fit that description.

Mass Shootings and Systems Theory: Materials Stocks And Flows

Material stocks and flows have to do with how things are arranged. Meadows uses her bath tub analogy, the idea being that the faucet's adding water at the same rate to a huge tub doesn't make the same difference as it does to a small tub. It's the same with the drain. If you don't have the drain stopped, you can probably get a bath in a big tub before the water runs out. If you're sitting in two inches of water, you'd better hurry.

Other examples are:

The effect of Hungarian road system, in which you have to go through Budapest to get from one side of the country to the other, on pollution and congestion;

Large commercial inventories, which allow for supply interruptions, and just-in-time inventories which make a business more flexible;

The baby-boom swell in US population;

The rates at which the environment removes pollutants (CFCs, acid rain, sewage, etc.);

Flooding in rivers, as opposed to lakes.

Meadows refers to large stocks as "buffers," and notes that correcting problems may be difficult because of the investment that went into the stocks, and what it would take to replace it. She says a dam (or a Hungarian highway)  is literally "cast in concrete."

In terms of mass shootings, the stocks and flows are:

The inventory of firearms in the American private arsenal;

The inventory of ammunition in the American private arsenal;

Industrial capacity for producing weapons and ammo;

The population that is likely to murder groups of strangers.

There have been buy-back programs, but these have been few in relation to the size of the arsenal.

Gun control advocates have suggested that cities, universities and pension funds divest their investment portfolios of weapons manufacturers' stocks, a la the anti-Arpartheid movement of twenty years ago. I think there are candidates for this kind of campaign that will save more lives, and I'd like to keep my powder dry. Also, I'd like to preserve the firearms industry.

Who knows why people kill strangers. From the Associated Press: "Oakdale police said Tuesday they are still trying to determine why a 34-year-old man apparently began randomly shooting at vehicles, killing a 9-year-old boy and injuring two women." This was a couple of weeks ago in the suburban Twin Cities. The guy has a Hmong name, and at 34, he might have been born in Laos. My imagination cooks up a story for him, pretty quickly: Family disoriented and dysfunctional because of circumstances, kid picked on for being a "slope" or a "gook." Wishes he could have stayed in Indochina, sees his people as betrayed by their allies (the US) during the Vietnam War. Can't get a date, loses his job, sees his suburban neighbors as privileged, smug, and ignorant. Decides to teach them a lesson. Note that I'm pulling this stuff out of my ass. Tran's story could be entierly different. The thing is that it describes dozens of other guys in this one's milieu, and only one goes on a rampage.

The Aurora Batman-movie shooter sounds like a schizophrenic to me, but I've known two schizophrenics, and I've never known a murderer.

Same thing for bullying victims, and kids with stupid parents. There are millions of us.

I feel like the answer to this kind of violence probably lies in the human part of the system. "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." But, you know, we're stuck with each other, and we can't say, "I think it's the nuts. Let's lock 'em all up, and medicate the shit out of 'em."

Next post will be about systems within systems.

Gun Violence And Numbers As A System Levrage Point

I put off writing this post, worried that I might be missing something. This one's supposed to be about Donella Meadows' least effective leverage point for intervening in a system, numbers, and numbers as a way of reducing mass shootings.

Meadows uses her bathtub analogy to illustrate the effect of numbers -- or parameters -- on systems. How far do you have to turn the handle to get how much water. Is the drain open or stopped. Then she switches to the national debt, which despite changes in taxation and spending, continues to rise. She includes personnel changes under the jheading "Numbers," as well. Bill Clinton had a slightly different effect from George Bush, but only slightly. (Meadows was writing during the Clinton administration, and much concerned with the effects of overshoot on the economy.)

In the case of mass shootings, proposed changes in the debate seem to be about numbers. How fast can a gun shoot, and how many rounds can it hold? Can we get more honest people to carry concealed weapons, and hire police to patrol all schools? Can we eliminate fire arms sales to criminals and the delusional?

Meadows writes, "If the system is chronically stagnant, parameter changes rarely kick start it. If it's wildly variable, they don't usually stabilize it. If it's growing out of control, they don't brake it." She uses the phrase "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic."

Prohibiting all firearms except, say, black-powder muzzle-loaders might have reduced the heartbreak at Sandy Hook by 96%, but that would have been twenty-five lives saved. The president says we can't eliminate the danger, but we shouldn't let that stop us from eliminating some.

Maybe we can do better, if we move up the list. The next post will be Daonella Meadows' eight-most effective leverage point, "Material stocks and flows."

Gun Control And Systems Theory

Meadows says that she isn't trying to give us recipes for finding and using leverage points, but to encourage more widespread thinking in systems.

I guess I'm guilty of wanting recipes. this series of posts is supposed to get me thinking in a specific subject -- mass shootings -- in terms of numbers, stocks and flows, negative feedback, etc. Maybe I'll also spread the word about Thinking in Systems a little further. (I think that that would come under the heading, "1. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises.")

My next post will be based on "9. Numbers."

Donella Meadows And Leverage Points

Donella Meadows begins her famous essay, Places to Intervene in a System, by defining leverage points as "places within a complex system (a corporation, and economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything."

She quotes her teacher, Jay Forrester, as saying that people intuitively know what the leverage points are, and consistently push them in the wrong direction. The classic example of this is economic growth, with people always wanting to remedy the problems cause by growth with more growth.

The nine leverage points she discusses in the essay came out of a meeting about NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO at which she impulsively, and out of frustration, listed them on the easel on the dais.

Gun Violence And Systems Theory: Thermostats and Bathtubs

The standard example of a "system" is a house thermostat. It's a heater on-off switch connected to a themometer. Somebody decides that the house should be at 68 degrees -- the "goal" -- and sets thermostat to turn the heater on if the temperature falls below that, and off when the temperature goes above. The heater is only either off or on. You can't really crank it up; it's just on more if you make the goal 75, and less if you set the thermostat at 60.

Donella Meadows uses a bathtub as her system example. There's water going into the tub from the faucet, and leaving by the drain. (Let's say there's a leaky plug.) The bather decides the goal of the system is six inches of water and adjusts the flow from the faucet to keep it at that level. The flow down the drain is "negative feedback," and the flow from the faucet is the "positive feedback."

The bather also has a goal for water temperature, and has a hot water valve (positive feedback) and a cold water valve (negative feedback), and a water heater, with a thermostat, in the basement.

A tub containing more water will hold its temperature longer. It will drain at the same rate, but be useful longer than a tub with less water to begin with. The capacity for water and the amount of heat in the water are both examples of "material stocks."

Meadows also mentions other systems connected to the bather and plumbing. There's the well or municipal water utility, the hydrological cycle, the bather's checking account, and the economy. This is interesting to me as an analogy for the system that includes gun violence.

I really don't have an agenda for or against gun control. (Alright, I'm tepidly pro-gun.) But I have a sneaking suspicion that the system that includes mass shootings is complex enough that the place where society can intervene is remote from gun ownership.

Gun Control, Disappointment, And Systems Theory

President Obama was in Minneapolis today, launching his initiative to limit shootings like the Sandy Hook Elementary slayings.

Everybody has an idea about gun control. Expect to be disappointed.

And not just the people who expect to forestall tragedy by limiting the kinds of arms citizens can own. I had a boss -- kind of an overbearing guy, and one who was two or three inches taller than I -- who gave me a lecture, with harrowing anecdote, on his Second Amendment rights. I hadn't expressed an opinion and he mistook what that opinion was.

What a dick. I hope I'm never in a crowded theater, with him, when some maniac pulls out a weapon. Caught in the crossfire.

Let's think about mass shootings like systems analyst Donella Meadows would have. Meadows wrote an essay, "Places to Intervene in a System."

The places (in increasing order of effectiveness) are:

Numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards)
Material stocks and flows
Regulating negative feedback loops
Driving positive feedback loops
Information flows
The rules of the system (incentives, punishments, constraints)
The power of self-organization
The goals of the system
The mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise.

I'll go through the essay, trying to define each intervention point in terms of gun control. My next post will be a recap of Meadows' sidebar explanation of systems theory.

Reading Environment, Power, and Society

I've been reading Howard Odum's Environment Power and Society. I don't read technical stuff well. Odum says that it's a work for popular consumption. I see how it could be more difficult, but a lot of new concepts come at you on each page.

Odum's goal for the book is to communicate a "macroscopic" -- as opposed to reductionist -- view of the world. He discusses the flows of power in ecosystems -- of which human economy is an example -- and suggests that human survival depends upon understanding the energetics of systems. He writes, "Since decisions on such matters in the arena of public affairs are ultimately made according to the beliefs of the citizens, it is the citizens who must somehow include the energetics of systems in their education."

I'll bite. I'm happy to be able to run my eyes over Odum's discussions of the power flows in various ecosystems. I'm grateful to him for providing a vocabulary of symbols used in network diagrams, such as the one above, which illustrates the flows of carbon in a microcosm. P=gross photosynthesis. R=respiration. Hexagons are self reproducing systems, either organisms or populations. The bulge on the left indicates plants as labeled. The things with roof are supposed to look like tanks, and stand for storage.

Donella Meadows

Your paradigm is so intrinsic to your mental process that you are hardly aware of its existence, until you try to communicate with someone with a different paradigm.

Donella Meadows

Donella Meadows lived from 1941 until 2001. She studied Chemistry as an undergraduate at Carleton College, and received a doctorate in Biophysics from Harvard. She went as a researcher to MIT, and worked there with Jay Forrester, the inventor of magnetic data storage, in the early days of computer modeling.

In 1972, Meadows published the book The Limits to Growth with her husband, Dennis Meadows, as well as Jorgen Randers and William Behrens. The book was a report to a private group, the Club of Rome, that is interested in challenges facing all of humanity. Limits modeled the consequences of a rapidly growing world population using finite resources, and predicted economic behavior.

Limits' conclusions indicated that humanity's situation is perilous. It has been criticized by commentators of widely ranging sincerity and understanding, and twenty- and thirty-year updates have been published.

The thing to take away from Limits and from Donella Meadows, though, is a way of thinking. For instance, predicting how long a resource, say oil, will last takes more than just dividing known reserves by barrels per year. Modelers need to predict discoveries of new reserves, relative difficulty of getting existing and predicted reserves, increases in population and industrialization, and changes in consumption due to new technologies. Good citizenship may not require fluency with modeling these variables, but it does demand that we know they are there and how they interact.

Meadows' Places to Intervene in a System is probably her best know paper (about two thousand words). It is available as a PDF at http://www.sustainer.org/?page_id=106,

As html at http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/places_intervene_system.html,

in the Winter, 1997 Whole Earth Review, in her posthumous book Thinking in Systems: A Primer, and outlined at Wikipedia. She wrote a syndicated column, Voice of a Global Citizen, which is archived at http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/.

Mark Dayton For Governor

In Minnesota's three-way race for governor, my candidate is Mark Dayton, the Democrat.

The Republican, Tom Emmer seems a little dim and thuggish.

Tom Horner, the Independent, is bright and fair-minded, but adamantly centrist. Born in 1950, his career has been as reporter for suburban shopper-stoppers, press flack for former Republican Senator Dave Durenberger, press agent, and university communications perfesser. Eschewing radical solutions, and groomed as somebody who could run for governor, he represents the discredited, square paradigm. I never got high with this guy.

Dayton, a department store heir, formerly married to a Pillsbury, is a child of privilege who wants to increase taxes on the privileged. He recognizes that the money -- and a lot of it -- has to come from somewhere, but the thing that persuades me is his privilege. This guy has had the leisure to think about something besides a political career. Usually, I'd be happy to send the richest candidate to Terra Haute for the Indiana hot shot, but if one of these characters understands the Whole Earth/CoEvolution take on intervening in the system we laughingly call our society, it's Mark Dayton. And he's been State Auditor.

Five gestures of Jill. I used a brush, which had the contrary effect of making these quick studies less elegant.