I have
been an advocate for violence prevention including mass homicides and mass
shootings for many years now. It has involved
swimming upstream against politicians and the public in general who seem to
believe that violence prevention is not possible. A large part of that attitude is secondary to
politics involved with the Second Amendment and a strong lobby from firearm advocates. My position has been that you can study the
problem scientifically and come up with solutions independent of the firearms
issue based on the experience of psychiatrists who routinely treat people who
are potentially violent and aggressive.
I was
very interested to see the editorial in this week's Nature advocating the scientific study of mass homicides and
firearm violence. They make the interesting observation that one media story
referred to one of the recent perpetrators as being supported by the United States
National Institutes of Health and somehow implicating that agency in the
shooting spree and that:
"In this climate,
discussions of the multiple murders sounded all too often like descriptions of
the random and inevitable carnage caused by a tornado or earthquake".
Even
more interesting is the fact that the National Rifle Association began a
successful campaign to squash any scientific efforts to study the problem in
1996 when it shut down a gun violence research effort by the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention. The authors go on to list two New England
Journal of Medicine studies from that group that showed a 2.7 fold greater risk
of homicide in people living in homes where there was a firearm and a 4.8 fold
greater risk of suicide. Even worse:
"Congress
has included in annual spending laws the stipulation that none of the CDC's
injury prevention funds "may be used to advocate or promote gun
control"."
This
year the ban was extended to all agencies of the Department of Health and Human
Services including the NIH. There is
nothing like a gag order on science based on political ideology.
The
authors conclude by saying that rational decisions on firearms cannot occur in
a "scientific vacuum". That
is certainly accurate from both a psychiatric perspective and the firearms
licensing and registration perspective. Based on their responses to the most
recent incidents it should be clear that politicians are not thoughtful about
this problem and they certainly have no solutions. We are well past time to
study this problem scientifically and start to design approaches to make mass
shootings a problem of the past rather than a frequently recurring problem.
George
Dawson, MD, DFAPA
Who
calls the shots? Nature. 2012 Aug 9;488(7410):129. doi: 10.1038/488129a. PubMed
PMID: 22874927.
