LITTLE ROCK — It’s tempting to react impulsively in the face of the incomprehensible slaughter at Sandy Hook Elementary School: The guy used an assault rifle, that’s the problem!
The sage voice of reason need not be so hasty or noisy, however.
It would sadly compound this unspeakable crime by refusing to confront its reality with genuine analysis including inconvenient facts, and to instead grandstand over a solution that solves nothing.
Newtown, Conn., was just ranked the fifth-safest city in America by NeighborhoodScout.com in terms of crime rates. It is a safe place in a safe state (for comparison, Arkansas didn’t place a single city in the safest-100 ratings; Connecticut had 10.)
The violent-crime rate in Connecticut in 1960 was a very low 928 incidents per 100,000 population (that’s half what Arkansas’ rate was at the time). Fifty years later, however, it was 10,083 crimes per 100,000 residents.
The growth in population would result in more crimes numerically, of course. But what possible reasons can account for the rate of violent crime increasing by nearly 11-fold?
It’s certainly not lax gun laws. Connecticut is ranked fifth in the nation for its stiff gun legislation, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
Clearly, the people of Connecticut changed during that time. They are more criminally violent, but why?
At least some part of the reason rests with changes in how mentally unstable people were treated in 1960, and the plain fact is that people like Adam Lanza were more often institutionalized in those days.
The deinstitutionalization movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s started a shift away from lunatic asylums designed to segregate the mentally ill, to community-care facilities designed to medicate and integrate patients back into society.
As states gradually implemented the policy, the population of asylums (renamed mental hospitals) decreased. Not so coincidentally, the prison population increased.
Mental illness is recognized as a significant factor in violent crime, but especially in rampage murders. A 2000 New York Times study of 102 rampage killers in 100 attacks turned up chilling findings: 47 had a history of mental illness, 49 expressed paranoid ideas, 23 displayed signs of serious depression and 20 had previously been hospitalized for mental disorders.
Red flags that would have landed mentally ill people in an institution 50 years ago are brushed aside today.
Lanza, like so many mass killers before him (Patrick Purdy took an AK-47-style assault rifle to a Cleveland elementary schoolyard in 1989, firing at least 106 rounds in just minutes and shooting 34 children before killing himself), planned his attack with diabolical detail and gave plenty of warning signs.
What happened in Newtown last Friday wasn’t regular crime, it was crazy evil. And part of the reason we are having trouble with rising rates of murder-suicides and mass shootings is because we keep confusing the two.
Crime in the traditional sense involves criminals seeking to exist outside the normal, legal framework of society. They may not want to work for their money, but rather steal it. They may prefer addiction to responsibility. They may be resentful of others. They may engage in illegal employment on the violent fringe.
There are lots of reasons people commit crimes, and crime policy by and large is aimed at curbing traditional criminals using law enforcement and the justice system to catch them and punish them.
But mass gunmen who also wind up shooting themselves aren’t criminals in the normal sense, they’re mentally ill. Thus they defy common criminal policies designed around deterrence.
Let’s not forget that the strict gun laws in Connecticut apparently worked. Lanza reportedly attempted to purchase his own weapon, but balked at the required waiting period. He then did what a lot of other criminals do: He stole guns, killing his mother with her own gun before heading to the school.
The best chance of keeping a monster like Adam Lanza out of a school like Sandy Hook is to intercept and institutionalize him earlier in his mental illness.
We know there are solutions to violent crime, because we had it solved 50 years ago. Gun laws are far more restrictive now than then, so that’s the least likely culprit in the rate escalation.
We need to examine other laws that have become less stringent, and policies where the pendulum may have swung too far toward dysfunctionality. Mental illness deinstitutionalization would be at the top of that list, and juvenile criminal policies that do not draw distinctions between violent and nonviolent crime wouldn’t be far behind.
Second-chance laws for minors were never meant to hide potentially violent predators behind sealed records.
We can’t afford to keep downplaying video-game violence, either. The government determined 40 years ago that cigarette ads scattered through television shows influenced kids’ behavior, and banned them. It’s lunacy to think that endless hours spent pretending to kill people on video screens has no influence on behavior.
The best way we as a country can honor the victims and grieving community at Newtown is to open up a truly candid discussion about controlling crime-which actually means controlling criminals.
———◊———
Dana Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial, Pages 18 on 12/21/2012