OK, so that guy from the NRA thinks the solution is twofold. First, make a registry of the mentally ill and deny them gun ownership. Second, get more guns into the schools, in the form of armed men (good guys) whom they will train and outfit to stop other armed men (bad guys), in the unlikely event that they escape detection by the guns ‘n nuts police.

The second part makes perfect sense to me. I mean, if my kid gets killed in school, I’m sure it will feel much better if he was killed by a good guy’s bullet than by a bad guy’s. But where are they gonna get the guards?

Which brings us back to the first part. The whole mentally ill roundup thing is very promising, but there is one glitch. In any given year something like 25 or 30 percent of us are going to qualify for a DSM diagnosis, and about 50 percent of us are going to qualify at some point in our lifetimes. And that’s before the DSM-5, with its expanded diagnoses, goes into effect. Not to mention that fully eleven percent of us are on antidepressants, many of whom have psychiatric diagnoses that they probably aren’t even aware of. Ditto for people in therapy who use insurance to pay for it.. My guess is that the officially mentally disordered are underrepresented in the NRA, but they are not nonexistent, so even some current gunowners will turn out to be disqualified. Which will be bad for the NRA, and, according to the NRA, the fewer gun owners out there, the sicker the society.

And there’s an even worse problem: as the bleeding hearts keep reminding us, the mentally ill aren’t all that prone to violence. I know it’s become a reflex to attribute all bad behavior to mental disorder, but that’s more of an aspiration than anything else. Not everyone who smashes someone’s head in or shoots up a schoolyard is mentally ill, at least not technically. The DSM actually leaves room (perhaps unintentionally) for the possibility that a heinous act might be the result of evil rather than illness.

A diagnostic manual with 300 diagnoses covering everything from the cradle to the grave, from bad penmanship to hoarding, from smoking weed to eating dirt, surely ought to have a place in it for mass murderers. It’s a disgrace that it does not. But this problem is easily solved. Psychiatric diagnoses are no more or less than descriptions of symptoms that group together. People who experience anxiety when they try to throw away their stuff (or when someone else does) are different from people who experience anxiety when they have to go into a shopping mall. and they are in turn different from people who are anxious and depressed. Loosely speaking, these clusters of symptoms separate the hoarding disordered from the agoraphobic from the dysthymic. So all that is needed to bring mass shooters in out of the diagnostic cold is to figure out what characteristics they have in common, list them as criteria, and give it a name.

Here’s my suggestion, as it might look in DSM 5.1

XXX.xx Mass Shooter Disorder

Criterion A: On at least one occasion, kills more than four people in a period of less than ten minutes.

Criterion B: Three or more of the following:

1. On at least 27 occasions each year, doesn’t like Mondays
2. Prefers videos games in which humans are killed (e.g., Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty) to games in which other life forms are killed (e.g., Angry Birds).
3. According to at least three neighbors, was a quiet boy
4. Was given at least one negative superlative (“geekiest,” “least likely to get laid,” “most likely to commit mass murder”) in high school yearbook
5. Owns at least two semi-automatic (or one fully automatic) weapon, or three weapons capable of firing more than 25 rounds without reloading
6. Has gone at least three years without a sexual partner
7. On at least three occasions in the last six months, has expressed desire to be famous

Criterion C: Is not an active duty soldier on assignment in a war zone

Specify if suicidal subtype

Specify if preferred targets are coworkers, children, or random citizens
Specify if locale is shopping mall, theater, or school

Severity specifier: 1–Between 5 & 8 victims
2–Between 9 and 15 victims
3–15 or more victims

And, back to the armed guard idea, maybe these could be the people the NRA trains and arms to work in the schools.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 23rd, 2012 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.