In the wake of a mass shooting, the dual outrage toward mental health and gun control floods the airways. Politicians make the obligatory statement: Fix the mental health system. Ban assault weapons. These things happen, our hearts and prayers go out to the victims.
The criticism flies, blaming the gun laws for ease of access allowing crazy young men to build a deadly stockpile. The critics bemoan lack of foresight: How couldn’t we have known that this disturbed, lonely young man might commit violence? We must find ways to distinguish the dangerous lonely and disturbed young men from the benign lonely and disturbed young men.
Obama made the most bipartisan statement after the Oregon shooting when he said, “anyone that does this has a sickness in their minds.”
Indeed, the most agreeable point in these contentious “what should we do” debates is that the individual perpetrators are bat shit crazy. They are complete aberrations. We place the maximum distance between normal and these killers who have defined themselves as criminally insane.
Sadly, though, mass shootings are becoming more and more normal. Rather than condemn and distance, we need to try to identify with the perpetrators. Empathize. What do they feel? Why do they turn to violence as their pressure release?
Their commonalities are striking. Is there any doubt in anyone’s mind, after reading the headlines, what the profile of the mass killer will be? White male from a broken home, doesn’t quite fit in, never had a girlfriend, plays violent video games, makes scary comments on social media, loves guns, and glorifies previous mass shootings.
How many young men in America feel out of place, out of touch. Frustrated and lacking an outlet. Lack of stability at home or school. Out of this subset, many turn to drugs for an escape, some turn inward and become depressed, others act out in rebellion. Out of this subset, others turn to violent outlets for an assertion of power. Some way to be in control. Finally someone will care. They will have to care. The whole world, finally feeling their pain.
In his book “Toward a Psychology of Being,” humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow defends his Hierarchy of Needs, among them the need for belonging and love, the need for respect and self-respect. These needs are the psychological equivalent to water and vitamins. To Maslow, “destructiveness, sadism, cruelty, malice, etc., seem so far to be not intrinsic but rather they seem to be violent reactions against frustration of our intrinsic needs, emotions and capacities.”
When someone is mal-adjusted, experiencing psychological problems, Maslow’s first response was not to look for a cure. Psychological problems might in fact be a healthy reaction to a psychologically damaging environment. First he investigated the situation this person was supposed to be “well-adjusted” toward.
Mass shootings are a relatively recent, primarily American phenomenon. We can band-aid the problem through gun control laws, and we should. We can improve our mental health system, and we should.
But the real illness is the breakdown of communities, the fragmentation of the modern world, and the lack of outlets for healthy masculine development. The violence we see, either in the inner-city or the outburst in the suburbs, is the symptom of a sick society. True healing will require collective triage.