Closure to Mental Health Facilities: Beginning in 1955 the US and individual states began closing down their large mental institutions throughout the next 10 years. People with dangerous mental conditions had no place to go. In 1955 there were over 500,000 patients in hospitals with mental conditions; by 1974 there were only 72,000 mental patients institutionalized even though the population had increased by 96 million people during that time. If the rate of mental illness had stayed the same then by 1974 there would have been a population of 885,000 severely mentally ill people in the US but yet only 72,000 of them were institutionalized by then. Now, there are many solid reasons why the mental institutions began to be closed by their supporting government agencies. Many of them were merely storage facilities for those with mental problems and did not possess long track records of successful treatment. Also the advent of Thorazine provided doctors with a medication program that allowed them to treat the mentally ill on an outpatient basis. I think you all know how this program evolved. Its first weakness is that it relied on the mentally ill patient to take his or her medication as prescribed and we have all conducted threat assessments and developed threat management plans around people who, for a variety of reasons, were off their medication. The second fly in the ointment is that social programs for the mentally ill eventually became underfunded and over burdened under the weight of a growing number of patients for whom the system could not keep track of and adequately treat.
Family Instability: Fewer families have two parents, more families have the entire parental structure away from home at work, children spend less time at home, when they are home they spend most of their time in solitary activities without family involvement. This results in fewer opportunities for the development of inter-family role models and also results in it being less likely that mental illness or disturbing or anti-social behavior will be noticed by the family or noted to the point of realizing the severity of the behavior.
Life Stresses: Fears caused by the Vietnam war which continued through the Cold War and the threat of increased wars and terrorism emanating from the Middle East , air pollution, population density, unemployment or underemployment, economic disability, family instability etc. have all increased over the last 50 years.
Violent Media: From the Vietnam War forward the population has been presented with more images of brutal violence. News reports from Vietnam frequently came with disclaimers that children should leave the room before the footage from the front lines was shown. There were advances in the TV and film making industries that allowed producers to make more realistic scenes of violence—and those movies sold.
Creating A Culture That Does Not Value Human Life: During the 1980’s a segment evolved in popular music (and their subsequent music videos) that glorified gang violence, violence toward women, and violence toward social authority figures. The youth that was drawn into that culture received a triple dose of violent messaging through watching the videos on television and listening to the music on their car stereos and their personal music players. The amount of daily time that they were exposed to the violent imagery increased as never before.
Addiction to Violent First Person Shooter Video Games: Lt. Colonel David Grossman, who taught psychology at West Point, relates that the military has long kept records on a soldier’s marksman ship both during training as well as battle; additionally they measure the soldier’s moral hesitation to shoot, or shoot accurately, at a human target. With the advent of more violent media from post WWII forward the military noted a gradual increase in marksmanship with a corresponding gradual decrease in the moral hesitation of shooting at another human. However, in the early 1990’s the recruits who entered the military possessed greatly increased marksmanship skills with little hesitation in accurately shooting someone. As they interviewed these recruits, most of them who had never fired an actual firearm, they found that their skills had been honed by playing a particular “first person shooter” video game. The Army went out and bought scores of copies of the game and the US Military’s Virtual Scenario Training Program was born.
Psychologists have determined that violent video games pose more of a danger than violent TV and Movies as those forms of media are passive while in the “first-person” shooter games the user is not passively watching, they are actively participating in the violence. Further the game rewards the player for engaging in anti-social behavior; the more people they kill the bigger their virtual rewards. Psychological research has also revealed medical factors that explain the danger to video players under the age of 26. The World Health Organization defines adolescence as ranging from 12 years of age to age 25. This differs from our legal definition of 12 to 18 and is due to the fact that the portion of the brain that controls Judgment and the person’s perception of reality does not attain the majority of its development until age 25 (it does not reach full development until age 35). Additionally the Indiana University School of Medicine has found that violent video games stimulate the brain’s production of dopamine which can physically alter the brain’s function in as little one week of addictive play.
In all mass homicides since Columbine (Columbine, Virginia Tech, Oslo, Tucson, Aurora, and Sandy Hook Elementary) addiction to violent video games has been a prominent pre-incident indicator. Anders Breivik who killed 77 people in Oslo, Norway on July 22, 2011 told psychologists that he routinely spent 16 hours a day playing World of War Craft and Call of Duty. Adam Lanza’s mother worried that he spent too much time playing violent video games and she wanted him to get out of the house and meet people. I wonder if lives could have been saved if she had recognized his addiction and intervened. All of these shooters since Columbine have also been between 20 and 24 years of age at the time of their crimes with the exception of Breivik who was 33 but had become addicted to violent video many years earlier.
Change in America’s Gun Culture: Notice that I said “Changes in America’s Gun Culture” not the “Development of a Gun Culture”. We have always had a gun culture in the United States. Since the “Shot Heard Around The World” in Lexington and Concord in 1775 guns and the right to keep and bear them has been a part of our culture. There have not been any studies that I have seen covering the evolution of attitudes and the social deployment over significant time periods so my observations here are purely personal opinion. As I grew up I was unaware of many firearms in the metropolitan area where we lived. They were plentiful in the rural area where my Grandparents and Aunt & Uncle lived. For most of the 1960’s there were three things in the back seat of my grandfather’s car: his fishing pole, his Winchester Model 1897 12 gauge shotgun, and his Remington bolt action caliber .222 scoped hunting rifle. The firearms were loaded and he never locked the car or removed the key from the ignition. The thought of someone stealing his firearms or the car was unthinkable. Both my grandfather and uncle kept several of them loaded in their garages. This behavior would be considered reckless and negligent by today’s standards but me, my sister, and my six cousins never touched them. That was unthinkable on our part as well.
During the 1960’s the ownership of military patterned weapons was certainly legal but, outside of committed WWII collectors, their ownership was not wide spread because the manufacturers were no longer making them. While the government did sell some of them off as surplus but most of the U.S Stockpiles were sold to emerging allies such as Israel, the Philippines, Cuba (pre-Castro), and other Latin American nations. In the 1980’s these countries upgraded from our 40 year old surplus arms and sold these military relics from WWI and WWII to U.S. arms importers and they came flooding back into U.S. gun shops.
In the late 1960’s and into the 1970’s America changed. There was violent civil unrest in our larger cities related to racial injustices and the continuing War in Vietnam. In 1966 Richard Speck tortured, raped, and murdered 8 student nurses in Chicago gaining national attention. The country went into collective shock in 1968 when Robert F. Kennedy (brother of assassinated President John F, Kennedy) , then a Presidential candidate himself, and Martin Luther King, the nation’s foremost civil rights leader, were assassinated within 2 months of each other. The following year the nation was again shaken when a series of gruesome murders committed by the Manson family occurred in Southern California while in Northern California 7 men and women were killed between December 1968 and October 1969 by a murderer dubbed the Zodiac killer. The fear that these incidents invoked continued with the Son of Sam murders in New York which took the lives of six people and left seven others wounded in 1976, John Wayne Gacy killed 33 teenage boys between 1972 and 1978 in the Chicago area, Richard Ramirez was convicted in California of 13 murders, 5 attempted murders, and 11 sexual assaults in 1984-85, and Gary Leon Ridgway went on a murder spree in the 1980’s and 90’s before he was caught and convicted of 48 murders while confessing to almost double that amount. Faith in the government, the police, and our justice system had been shaken. The wave of economic growth that America had ridden since WWII began to hit some speed bumps in the mid-1970s. These were horrific events and we were reminded of them nightly due to TV news coverage. Is it any wonder that, during this time period of 1972 to the late 1980’s, I began to notice that the advertisements and media surrounding firearms began to shift from hunting and competition to their use for self protection?
It is certainly not a stretch to conclude that the increase in mass violence is impacted by untreated mental illness, increased stress factors, decreased diagnosis of mental illness & intervention by family members, and the bombardment of violent media that has desensitized a generation from the horrors of violence, glorified a violent culture, and honed their skills at killing. So what, as a society, do we do?
1. Everyone (parents, family members, friends, teachers, students, employers, co-workers, etc.) needs to be educated on the symptoms of mental illness and recognize their duty to intervene and get the person to the professionals who can help them.
2. As parents, we need to protect our children from addiction and over exposure to violent media. We must be involved in their lives, know who they are associating with and what they are doing on their computers. We must demonstrate to them that real, in-person social relationships are much more valuable than virtual relationships developed online.
3. As gun owners we must ensure that our firearms are securely locked up when they are not in our immediate possession. They need to be locked in heavy duty safes or containers designed to restrict unauthorized access. Hiding them or locking them in plastic document safes is irresponsible.
I do not expect that everyone is going to agree with my preceding examination of modern violence in our culture. I do hope that it does stimulate you to think about the situation and determine what you can do to make our society just a little bit safer.
