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.

Gun Violence And Positive Feedback

Positive feedback is a cycle in which something's happening makes its happening again more likely.

Example: Compound interest. When you put a dollar in the bank, the bank is renting your money to invest by loaning it out at interest. So the first year, they put another penny with your dollar. You leave it there, and the second year the bank adds one and one hundredth pennies. In seventy years, you have two bucks, courtesy of positive feedback.

Donella Meadows offers several other examples:

Eroded soil increases erosion because the thinner, poorer soil supports fewer erosion-stopping plants;

"The more high-energy neutrons in the critical mass, they more they knock into nuclei and generate more;"

The more flu sufferers, the more the flu spreads;

The larger the population, the more offspring, which in turn produce even more offspring;

Income from production and trade invested in building more capital to allow the production of more goods for trade.

There are a couple of examples I like, and that Meadows didn't include in this section.

There's methane, a greenhouse gas, frozen in the arctic tundra. As the climate warms, the tundra thaws and releases the mathane, accelerating warming.

The other is the Tom Baker Dr. Who, trying to explain positive feedback to an evil, giant spider that is running some kind of power through some science fiction gadget to get more, more, more, mwahahahaha, unlimited power. Fortunately the Doctor wises up, and bails before the spider goes nova.

Usually a negative feedback loop kicks in, and slows the positive feedback, but Meadows says that we can get quicker results, less threatening to ourselves by slowing the positive loop. Back off the gas before you slam on the brakes. She says this give the existing negative loops time to work. (Meadows was probably thinking of her predictions from the Limits to Growth study.)

She tells us to "look for leverage points around birth rates, interest rates, erosion rates, 'success to the successful' loops, any place where the more you have of something, the more you have the possibility of having more."

What does this have to do with gun violence? It took me a while to get around to writing this, because I was hoping something would come to me. I don't think we get more guns because we have more guns, and I don't believe that conceal-carry laws are adequate or desirable negative feedback. You can't buy a gun in Chicago, but there are high schools there with multiple shootings every year. There was an armed guard at Columbine, and you know somebody in the audience was packing in the Aurora Batman shooting.

We have to intervene in some related system to end mass shootings. Meadows write about five more leverage points, but the next post will be me, going off about what I think is going on.

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 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

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/.

Tomorrow Is (Still) Our Permanent Address

A painting I did in the late-eighties. John Todd is one of my heroes. Donella Meadows expresses the same sentiment as Todd in her essay, Places to Intervene in a System, with a certain how-to exposition. Scroll past the editor's note. He gets the name of the source publication wrong, and he's afraid of scaring libertarian cranks.