I’m baffled by the mix of cynicism and naïve faith in the gun-rights argument that the United States guarantees its citizens the right to take arms against itself. Seriously? Do you guarantee your kids the right to take over your household by force? Would you let your employees kick you out of your own company? The Founders liked self-determination, but they set up many mechanisms for redress short of armed revolt, and from the earliest years of the Republic, put down violent rebellions with decisive force. 

The United States has an Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, National Guard, and the Marines. It has missiles, tanks, and submarines. It has nuclear weapons. A hundred guys with AR-15s are not going to defeat it. If the Constitution were meant to protect your right to wage war against your own government, it would have to guarantee some kind of armaments parity program in which every Whiskey Rebellion received equipment and materiel comparable to that held by the government. Speaking of whiskey, November foxtrot.

But even more ironic is that some gun-rights advocates think the way to secure domestic liberty is to keep the military-style weapons widely available to all (or almost all) and send the regulators after something called “mental illness” instead. 

I get the impulse. Whenever there’s a mass shooting, it’s human nature to say, “Wow, that motherfucker was crazy.” And obviously, anybody would be able to spot that kind of crazy from 10 miles and 10 years away, and just, you know, “stop” them. 

But in real life, if there were a foolproof way to identify those crazy motherfuckers in advance, it would already be a part of the system. Nobody is in favor of mass shootings except other potential mass shooters. If it were easy to pick them out and stop them, we would.

Even in the case of Nikolas Cruz, who sent a lot of warning signals, it wasn’t obvious enough. The family he was living with in February, decent enough to take in their son’s friend when he needed a home, careful enough to demand he use a gun safe, caring enough to seek mental health treatment for him, didn’t identify him as a potential killer. The Uber driver who dropped him off at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School didn’t turn him in. 

The sad fact is that plenty of young men are troubled and troublesome. We do not have accurate tools to predict which ones are also murderous.

In the absence of such foreknowledge, our system avoids rounding up people just for giving us the creeps. The laws that most powerfully protect freedom say you can’t arrest people for what they think, what they say, or how they dress; and you can’t arrest them for what you think they might do. You can’t arrest someone for being creepy; you can only arrest them for doing something illegal.

This is, in fact, one of the cornerstones of liberty and the rule of law as they have been understood since before the Constitution of the United States was drafted. 

Rounding up and “stopping” the people who make us uncomfortable is how you get things like the Salem witch trials, in which eccentric old ladies were hanged for being unable to prove a negative. In the ensuing years – indeed, within the lifetimes of some of the judges – we decided as a society that this was a bad idea, tending, as it does, to the persecution of the innocent.

Over time, in fits and starts, the United States has established itself as a country where weirdos – outliers, nonconformists, the marginalized – can be left alone, make their way, even prosper, so long as they are weird within the bounds of law. 

And if anybody is dependent upon the general freedom to let their freak flag fly, it’s white supremacists, neo-Nazis, militia members, and the whole right-wing fringe that many other self-respecting democracies would lock up for advocating treason, hate, and violence.

Yet in the face of the Parkland shooting and the outpouring of anti-gun activism it unleashed, Trump, the NRA, and the many legislators in its pockets point to “mental illness” as the “real” problem. To preserve their own access to military-style weapons, Second Amendment enthusiasts are throwing the First and Fourth under the bus. 

Because Martin Niemöller is always relevant: You never think they’re going to come for you. Until they do.

“Mental illness” as an excuse to forget due process is spectacularly vulnerable to political abuse. 

Throughout the 20th century, totalitarian regimes, especially those in the Soviet bloc, used psychiatric diagnoses and psychiatric facilities to silence dissidents. They invented a diagnosis (“sluggish schizophrenia”) that defined political protest as a psychiatric disorder, one for which people could be committed involuntarily to special mental institutions. (Wikipedia has an adequate overview.)

If you’re going to develop a diagnosis on the order of “gun enthusiast who says racist things online and has recently suffered a significant loss” that justifies involuntary commitment, you’re very quickly going to infringe on the actual, everyday freedom of a number of people who pose little or no risk to the general public. That could easily include many of the folks who hope to deflect the blame for gun violence away from guns. You may not feel like a weirdo, but wearing camo, outfitting your cellar to withstand a siege, and planning armed rebellion against the government of the United States can come across as extreme in some circles. 

In the old days, when the U.S. took pride in not being a totalitarian regime, we made repeated conscious choices – through court rulings, policies, and laws – to err on the side of freedom for the mentally ill. Between 1964 and 1979, states passed laws limiting the use of involuntary commitment to people who were “a danger to themselves or others.” In 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that merely being diagnosed as mentally ill was not enough to deprive a person of liberty. 

Because on the rare occasions when mass shootings are not foremost in our minds, we are also afraid to give the government the power to lock us up for being weird.

Even if you did have a foolproof method to identify the kind of crazy that leads to rampages like the one at Stoneman Douglas, you would barely make a dent in the number of gun-related deaths in the U.S. 

According to research on the links between mental illness and violent crime, only 3 to 5% of violent incidents in the U.S. are committed by people with “mental disorders”, and around 2 to 3% of those involve firearms. 

Our sense that gun violence could be prevented by sweeping up “crazy people” is the result of a couple of things:

1) In about a third of mass killings, the shooter is seriously mentally ill, but statistics depend on what counts as a “mass killing” and how “mental illness” is defined, making this finding profoundly controversial; and

2) The intense media focus on mass shootings makes them appear more frequent and more important to the death toll than they are, by orders of magnitude. In fact, two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides. Of gun homicides, mass shootings account for less than half of 1% (0.5%). The press covers the hell out of mass shootings, because although they’ve become far too frequent, they’re still unusual events. But they are a drop in the bucket of blood.

Let’s review: By the available professional estimates, crazy motherfuckers shooting up public places are responsible for 0.165% of deaths by gun in the U.S. in any given year. 

Don’t get me wrong: The mental health system failed Nikolas Cruz, and it failed the 17 dead at Stoneman Douglas. 

For one thing, in the absence of adequate community mental health services, law enforcement is the de facto front line in identifying and controlling people who exhibit signs of mental crisis. Watch a couple of episodes of Live PD if you don’t believe me. America needs roving patrols of psychotherapists to deal with the countless domestic disputes, substance abuse problems, and psychotic episodes that police encounter. (Another Live PD observation: Once recreational marijuana is legal everywhere, cops are going to have a lot less to do.) 

People who noticed Cruz’s deteriorating mental condition reported his threats of violence to the FBI and local law enforcement, because that’s what you do. But the cops and the Feds failed to follow through, most likely because authorities didn’t connect the multiple reports to a single individual until after the shooting, and failed to see the mounting danger Cruz posed. After all, if crazy people don’t usually become school shooters – and they don’t – police had no reason, statistically speaking, to regard the complaints about Cruz as urgent. 

Law enforcement is still behind the curve in dealing with threats expressed in social media, too. Some of the statements Cruz made online may well have fallen under the definition of “criminal threat” or “terrorist threat”, and YouTube video blogger Ben Bennight reported them to the FBI. But the investigation fell by the wayside when Bennight couldn’t provide agents with enough information for them to identify Cruz. The FBI should definitely consider showing a little more initiative in the future. 

Cruz might have been hospitalized in 2016, when he was evaluated following an episode of self-mutilation and suicide threats. 

But parents, schools, courts, and doctors all try hard to keep the adolescent excesses of upper-middle-class kids from becoming permanent marks against them. When society has invested a certain level of its resources in a young person, it also grants them a chance to outgrow bad behavior and repay the investment by becoming a productive adult. (Not so much with poor children, in which society invests way too little.) So despite an investigation by the Florida Department of Children and Families and an evaluation by Henderson Behavioral Health, “authorities chose not to commit Cruz,” as USA Today put it. 

Cruz’s adoptive father left an estate valued at more than $1 million when he died in 2004. That net family wealth probably contributed to the decision against committing him as a minor. His mother was, by all reports, concerned and loving, if ineffectual, and her presence probably played a significant role in the decision as well.

After his mother died last November, though, it was clear to both of the families who took him in that Cruz was in trouble. One family called the cops and threw him out, but even so, they didn’t press charges because they could see that Cruz was suffering. The other tried to lock up his guns and steer him into counseling, but didn’t understand how far off the rails Cruz already was. (Both these families are candidates for the “no good deed goes unpunished” hall of fame.) 

But up until the moment that he pulled the trigger at Stoneman Douglas, Nikolas Cruz was a troubled young man, not a killer. As obvious as it is after the fact that he was the kind of crazy motherfucker who would shoot up a school, up until that moment, he was just another strange teenager talking shit, like dozens of other young men who will never escalate to killing, who will maybe find treatment or figure themselves out and grow into somebody who can live in the world without doing significant harm to themselves or others. 

And even if you could set up a system that would round up all those shit-talking bad boys, you wouldn’t cut down on the number of gun homicides all that much. 1.6 per thousand. Even crazy motherfuckers mostly kill themselves.

But there would also have been no killer if Cruz had not had access to guns. And as several others have written, the indisputable universal common denominator in gun killings is … guns. 

Two-thirds of mass shootings appear not to involve mental illness. But a gun designed to kill many people quickly is essential. Military-style weapons are what put the “mass” in “mass shootings.” That’s what they’re made for.

Honestly, the freedom to own such a weapon is far less useful than the freedom to wake up in your own bed, walk your dog, drive to the grocery store, wear what you choose, read what you like, or call up an old friend – freedoms you may enjoy every day if you are not incarcerated. Those freedoms are, you know, actual freedom.

Access to an assault rifle, on the other hand, is at best a much more abstract kind of freedom. Maybe someday there will be a zombie outbreak or an invasion by space aliens or a military uprising against the government … but probably not. Our nation has a pretty solid history with the peaceful transfer of power. Congress repealed the whiskey tax in 1802. Zombies don’t exist. Space aliens, well, if they can get here, they’ve probably got a solid answer for your AK-47.

So if you’re not planning a mass shooting – whether motivated by demons private or political – the “freedom” such a gun gives you is mostly a fantasy. 

And surrendering your real, everyday freedom to preserve a fantasy? That kind of makes you the crazy motherfucker.

4/11/2018

Update 4/14/2018: Still think you can spot a potential shooter? Try your luck with the home game! Mountain View, CA, police release tape of their encounter with YouTube shooter Nasim Aghdam. 

Update 12/31/2021: Much of this seems naīve in the aftermath of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, which very nearly ended the U.S. tradition of peaceful transfer of power. The ongoing revelations about members of the police and military who may, in fact, support the violent overthrow of the U.S. government also raises the possibility that the nation's arsenal could be mobilized in favor of armed rebellion, rather than against it. I still believe we should endeavour to reduce the number of guns and rifles in circulation, but that horse is so far out of the barn that we will need to do more than close the door.