What is the best theory for the rise in mass shootings?
In The Evolution of Everything, Matt Ridley writes,
Surely the explanation for most killing lies in the fact that natural selection has endowed human beings with the sort of instinct that means that (in [Martin] Daly and [Margot] Wilson’s words) ‘any creature that is recognizably on track towards complete reproductive failure must somehow expend effort, often at risk of death, to try to improve its present life trajectory’.
I would note that (a) the proportion of young men without fathers has gone up, and (b) I cannot recall any mass shooters who came from households where their father was present.
The problem with this explanation, from Tyler’s point of view, is that it should point to an increase in violence of all sorts, not just mass shooting. But overall violence is down.
Perhaps the decline in overall violence is due to high rates of incarceration? Not a very libertarian thing to say.
How much are mass shootings really up after taking out the jihadi-adjacent instances?
Kind of fitting in with that idea of low-status males with no hope of reproductive success, I liked this comment over at MR:
Forty years ago it was common for young men to be members of a gang. It didn’t really matter how socially maladjusted one was, a gang would typically take you on as a member based simply on your ethnicity, locality, class, or ability to own a motorbike. This was simply because each new recruit strengthened a gang in relation to other gangs. While a person might be low in a gang’s hierarchy, each and every member was useful and valued provided they were loyal to the gang and not cowards when it came to a fight. Provided a person had the ability to engage in violence there was a place for them. There were no losers in a gang.
Gang culture no longer exists for many American young males, particularly white ones. Instead of gangs vying for rep there is now an individualistic winner takes all culture where socially maladjusted males can end up as complete losers at the bottom of the social order with no gang membership to give them support or a place or make them feel valued. And when these individuals lash out violently the results can be horriffic.
From Wikipedia, it looks like Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Seung-Hui Cho, and Jared Lee Loughner all came from families where the father was present.
Tyler Cowen later linked to this article on school shootings by Malcolm Gladwell [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-violence]. Many of the shooters in the article also had present fathers. In some cases, the shooters killed their parents.
Mass shootings are on the whole quite low, aren’t they? Something like 100 people a year or less?
That may sound like a lot, but it’s way smaller than, say, people shot by police each year. It’s about the same as the number of *unarmed* people shot by police each year. It’s 10x less than pedestrians hit by automobiles.
With numbers this small it’s hard to make progress analytically. Among other issues, the exact prevalance of the problem depends very heavily on how you define it.
Supply side effect is simple: I think Tyler’s link answers this convincingly, as driven by the desire for fame, and the ease with which today’s culture (starting with our medias, mainstream as well as social) confers it.
The opportunities have also increased. Increases in wealth, population, and sociability (starting with urbanization, but with other forms of large scale community as well)have increased the targets to be preyed upon.
I’d like to see some legitimate data (not Mother Jones garbage) showing that we have had an increase in “mass shootings.”
Has there been a rise in mass shootings? Are you and Tyler just taking it for granted based on the availability of mass shooting stories in the media, or do you have data? What’s your definition of a mass shooting, anyway?
> Perhaps the decline in overall violence is due to high rates of incarceration?
Could one look at other countries to judge this? My impression (which could be wrong) is that other (developed) countries have much lower rates of incarceration, but have seen a similar decline in overall violence.
Steven Pinker provided the best description of the motivation of suicidal mass-killers:
https://goo.gl/lUhFsr
What this explanation would suggest is that the number of ‘amoks’ would increase when 1) there are more young men who perceive their situations being irretrievably hopeless, and 2) when mass notoriety gets easier to achieve. I’m not sure about #1, but #2 certainly seems to be the case with the Internet and 24×7 cable news coverage. Unfortunately, it seems that there’s never been a more opportune time to ‘go out with a bang’.
Hmmm . . . I was going to link to Pinker’s thesis that violence is going down both in the long and short terms. http://goo.gl/oItBoz
Both can be true, given your point 2 above. Violence overall can be going down, but that makes the amoks stand out even more hence the greater focus we give them.
“The problem with this explanation, from Tyler’s point of view, is that it should point to an increase in violence of all sorts, not just mass shooting. But overall violence is down.”
The decline is demographics.
The median age of the USA is on the rise. And the violent crime declined as the population aged. Violent crime is largely committed by males aged 16 to 25.
median age of US population:http://www.statista.com/statistics/241494/median-age-of-the-us-population/
violent crime per thousand:http://www.familyfacts.org/charts/830/violent-crime-has-declined
FBI statistics on age of violent crime offenders:
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/additional-ucr-publications/age_race_arrest93-01.pdf
Chart: US population distribution by age, 1900 through 2060:
http://www.aei.org/publication/chart-us-population-distribution-by-age-1900-through-2060/
The changes in median age and violent crime rates don’t seem to correlate particularly well other than both were in trends. It does not look like a casual relationship from that data.
Incarceration is a significant explanatory variable: http://politicsandprosperity.com/2014/11/11/crime-revisited/
Given that the CA shooters just had a baby, and the male held what appeared to be a respectable and stable job, and thus had good prospects for more babies, the “poor desparate male who can’t get reproduce” theory seems to have a serious flaw.
Out with a bang, in High Glamour Style, regardless of reproductive prospects, seems more likely.
One wonders if say the NFL, motorsports, extreme sports, all serve a “take a shot at some kind of glory” role, and quiet that need to do “something big” that if left unresolved leads to serious misdrama?
“Perhaps the decline in overall violence is due to high rates of incarceration? Not a very libertarian thing to say”
A plausible explanation, but this account is inconsistent with state level data. Some states (e.g. NY, NJ and CA) have reduced their prison populations (>10%) over the last 15-20 years through various criminal justice reforms and sentencing measures and have still continued to see significant decreases in violent crimes and property crimes – the opposite of what you’d expect if incarceration was the primary factor behind the decline.
While I don’t believe I’m prisoners are the main cause of the secular trend in crime, it wouldn’t be anti-libertarian to say imprisoning too many people would reduce crime outside prison. It would be a hypothesis that petty crimes correlate to violent crimes.
You know, guys do a lot of crazy, show-off things in part so they can tell the story later. That’s because everyone loves a good storyteller with a dramatic personal tale. Great personal stories appeal to both men and women – and that’s hard to do.
They also do things like joint the military or become cops or join other socially exciting professions so they can maximize the odds that they will have some kind of exciting adventure, and that, entirely unprovoked, people will ask them to tell stories about those experiences later.
Their brains are aware of the shared social salience, consciousness, awareness, and exposure to certain icons, symbols, and plot patterns, and so they are likely to mimic the scripts that they know get lots of fame and attention.
It seems to me that a lot of these incidents are kind of extreme-end-of-the-distribution cases what is a very ordinary phenomenon.
On the one hand, we need to know whether there is a pattern and profile to the kind of individuals most likely to manifest these tendencies in these extreme, violent ways. What to do about those individuals, both natives and aspirational-immigrants, however, is an extremely hard question.
But if my guess is right, then just as troubling is the obviously enormous role of conventional, entertainment, and social media in broadcasting and repeating these incidents in the most sensational way possible, so that every bad apple “knows that everybody knows” about them, and that they are perfect fodder for instant fame, or infamy, as the case may be. One can hope for some sense of responsibility and restraint, but the norm is unstable in practice since defectors stand to gain and there is no effective punitive mechanism to deter them.
I have not come across any good Libertarian suggestions for dealing with this very real problem.
However, it does raise the question of which liberty-reducing policy – gun control, immigration selectivity, and media censorship – might optimize liberty overall.
Cowen hinted that even more gun control was the right bet, since, if you believe his theory, an incidental benefit from a Libertarian perspective would be the reduction of support for American military interventionism abroad. I can think of a lot of people who would really want something like that to be true, and it has the appeal of an air of sophistication, and so it would be a very seductive argument for them. But it’s too clever by half, and I think the purported result is pretty unlikely. Also, if the bad apples can’t get guns, they will just adapt to use other easy-to-make weapons like improvised bombs.
But of course one could make the same style of argument for immigration restriction, that, yes, it is a liberty-reducing policy, but that it would have the incidental benefit, from a Libertarian perspective, of preventing the electorate from changing in a direction of generating more support for socialist policies.
Notice that despite the symmetry, the former argument gets some fair consideration, because it’s also something the progressives want, whereas the latter argument is dead in the water, because it’s something they don’t.
What could possibly be the mechanism?
France bans guns They get massive massacre. They bomb the sh*t out of Syria. The obvious answer is legalizing ground marshals and a reasonable sidearm.
We are here because of Obama and Hilary.
Even GW Bush couldnt create something literally named Islamic State. Liberals don’t want to ban guns. They want to have government employees control all of them. A good compromise is to certify a million civilian ground marshals. Before we had terrorist attacks we could pretend gun control would work. That horse left the barn.