I might have mentioned that I live in Chardon, Ohio. The other day, the boy who shot six of his classmates, killing three and wounding three others in differing degrees of severity, was up for arraignment. His defense attorney was able to gain a delay for the trial as they prepare an insanity defense. There was no real argument, judging from the video of the hearing. No one around here can imagine the young man committing the crime unless he is insane.
In contrast, in many of America’s cities young men shooting other young men barely attracts notice. In common, “Homicide victims usually are killed by people of their own race and ethnicity. The pattern goes back at least a generation.” In contrast, more black young men kill each other than white young men do. “Overall, more than half the nation’s homicide victims are African-American, though blacks make up only 13% of the population. Of those black murder victims, 85% were men, mostly young men.” So, we don’t pay attention because it is so common. These murders barely make the news. Isn’t it shocking that this is not shocking?
Why do they kill each other? Usually it is over matters the rest of us find inconsequential, which looks likely also true of the murders in my town. In my town, that means a boy would have to be crazy to murder anyone.
The Journal story has some portions that are questionable. “A 2009 study by Iowa State analyzing other data estimated that a single murder runs up more than $17 million in costs to the police, courts, prisons, social services and to the families of victims and suspects.” How is that figured? If just Chicago has recorded 337 murders this year that is $5, 729,000,000 going forward for that city alone. No wonder Chicago is going broke. The numbers seems inflated, but the crime statistics are solid and are shocking in themselves.
The stories cited in the article are sad and I’ll bet are a world away from anyone who reads my post here. Each case sounds like one of insanity to me, but I’m from Chardon.
August 21st, 2012 | 1:21 pm
“You know what I’ve noticed? Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan.’ Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all ‘part of the plan’.”
–The Joker
August 21st, 2012 | 6:53 pm
You should watch “The Wire”
“It’s all in the Game.”
August 21st, 2012 | 9:15 pm
Only a small percentage of homicides are perpetrated by the mentally ill, no more than 5-10%. Most homicides today are carried out for the very oldest of reasons – defense of one’s honor. You insulted me (or wronged me in some way) so now I have to kill you. The same motive that caused Aaron Burr to kill Alexander Hamilton. I am reasonably certain it has always been the #1 motivation for homicides.
Isn’t it shocking that this is not shocking?
It shows how much we have done to stop violence that you find it shocking that it is not shocking. (To untangle: no, I don’t believe it is shocking that we don’t find it shocking.) The U.S. homicide rate has been going down, not consistently, but very clearly and by a very great deal, for nearly 300 years. The long term trend is easy to miss because we had one of those periodic bumps in the road in the 1960-1980 period when the homicide rate rose and it’s taken the last 32 years to get us back to where we used to be – almost at a new historical low. (I expect we’ll get there in the next few years.)
As a whole, 20th century homicide rates were much lower than 19th century homicide rates which were much lower than 18th century homicide rates. The homicide rate in Europe in the 15th century was worse than the U.S. has ever been. What is amazing is not how many homicides there are today, but how few. We have come a very, very long way. It is still the case in certain cultures that honor is taken very seriously (urban young men, particularly African Americans, Southern whites) and in those cultures, homicide is much more common than in the rest of the country. But 90% of the murderers are not crazy. Almost always wrong and probably irrational at the time their anger caused them to kill, but not suffering from any psychosis.
August 22nd, 2012 | 3:33 am
Andrew Stevens, that is part of what I meant, that those homicide rates mean that for most Americans, life is very peaceful, so that when violence occurs it is a shocking aberration from the norm. Chardon’s local murder was probably all about honor, which may or may not come out in the trial. Here, that the honor motive may not be revealed is both because the defense is planning the insanity plea and because the public will pressure the prosecution not to besmirch the the memory of the maybe not so blameless young victims. No one here wishes to speak ill of the dead and the evil those children did will be interred with their bones if media, family and friends have anything to say about it.
I lived in New York City both in the 1970′s and then for a summer in 2002, the latter time in a neighborhood just north of Central Park that I had never seen in the 70′s because it was off-limits due to the random violence there. In 2002 it was a lovely place to live. I lauded Rudi Guiliani’s transformation of the social landscape, but a sociologist I spoke with at Columbia said that there was still violence in Harlem, much less and it was nearly all personal. No one really knew what had caused the change. The fear of the return of random violence is what makes the recent flash-mob phenomenon so distressing to Americans in an, “Oh, Lord, here we go again!” way. We will even tolerate those mobs if the violence is just about stuff; we have plenty of stuff. And we can tolerate the violence of those cultures in their own neighborhoods. If the violent slip those bounds — how will we respond? I’ve asked the question here before in a different form.
Which is to say that I am not arguing at all with what you write. Honor killings can seem from inconsequential causes to those outside of that culture. Nor is it anything new. What most immediately comes to my mind is Twain’s story about the Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons in Huckleberry Finn, or Samson and the Philistines, for that matter, which are merely my thoughts of the moment in the middle of the night. There is nothing new under the sun, but when mass culture and media would seem to homogenize society — it still doesn’t.
Noted in the article that spurred me to write about this is that government can do nothing about these killings, yes, because it is within culture. We can make random violence less likely by good policing, but this is like terrorism by cultural norm and what is anyone going to do about that? Cue Mitt Romney: culture matters.
August 22nd, 2012 | 8:28 am
Owen, I can’t know if Geo Smiley looked up that title from “The Wire” but I did, Googled, anyway, and saw a bit on YouTube. At both of you, Hollywood trivializes everything through irony. Maybe that does make something that would be tragic becomes bearable that way. I mentioned this to one person who suggested that those (insert racial expletive) could kill themselves off and the world would be a better place for it. That’s ironic, too, isn’t it? Then I wonder if members of the black underclass are watching portrayals of themselves on television and doing what they can to rise (?) to the occasion.
August 22nd, 2012 | 8:29 am
We are changing the culture though. We all descend from cultures where that sort of violence was relatively common. In some places, that culture has all but disappeared. In other places, it persists, though at a lower level than it once was. Such cultures are not entirely a bad thing, either. Our military volunteers come disproportionately from such cultures.
Anyway, I personally disapprove of the medicalization of moral differences. Assuming that anyone who acts wrongly must have been insane does much to stigmatize and isolate the genuinely mentally ill (who are much more likely to be the victims of violence than its perpetrators, though I grant they are more likely to perpetrate violence than the average person) and it makes us lose sight of the real causes of violence. It may even cause violence by making people less likely to engage with the mentally ill, causing them to become socially isolated and such social isolation does seem to be strongly related to violent outbursts.
August 22nd, 2012 | 10:24 am
I take your point. I am simply struck by how the same act in two different types of community can be seen so differently. I know the grandparents of the local shooter, both sides; it’s that kind of town. Schizophrenia is likely in this case, though I don’t know what the actual diagnosis will be. Yet motive is similar or the same in both settings. What are the real causes of violence?
August 22nd, 2012 | 11:19 am
“Such cultures are not entirely a bad thing, either. Our military volunteers come disproportionately from such cultures.”
Please, praytell, which “cultures” are you talking about? Don’t be so vague. Specify what you mean.
August 22nd, 2012 | 12:51 pm
I would say A) honor culture and B) social isolation are a couple of major causes. (The second is not the cause of a great many murders, but is, I believe, the major factor in most mass murders.) The War on Drugs is probably another major factor, but that one’s controversial and I don’t want to press it here. There’s also the usual: greed, sexual jealousy, rage, etc., but I’m not sure there’s anything we can do to eliminate those.
I do believe we can make a lot of progress on the first two though. We have already done a lot to reduce A and progress is ongoing on that front (though there are costs to this and it’s not necessarily the case that these changes will be a net positive). As for B, I would recommend encouraging people, particularly men, to engage with loners and losers (some of whom are mentally ill and some of whom aren’t). Those schizophrenics who become mass murderers are almost invariably socially isolated, same as the mass murderers who are not schizophrenics. It is almost certainly the social isolation, not the schizophrenia, which drives them to homicide. A lot of mass murderers may never have killed anybody if they just had someone to talk to in order to redirect their thinking. Most loners and losers are not nearly as dangerous or as “weird” as people think, not even the schizophrenics.
I admit there are some risks involved. I once had to deal with death threats and had to call the police on one such outreach which went disastrously wrong when we had a philosophical disagreement (over denotative and connotative meanings, of all things). Fortunately I was clearly more than a match for him physically and he was unarmed, so he restricted himself to cursing me out at the top of his lungs. But this was just one of many, many such acquaintances I’ve had over the course of my life and was atypical. It wasn’t even typical of him as we had had literally dozens of long philosophical conversations prior to that incident which were very civil.
I should stress that personally I have never done these sorts of outreaches as a sort of community service, like I am recommending here, but simply because I am fascinated by and very comfortable with losers and loners and enjoy their company. I’d been doing it for a long time before I really considered that it might actually be doing some good as well. I believe not only are there fewer risks in such relationships than is generally believed, but I also believe there are more rewards than is generally believed.
August 22nd, 2012 | 12:52 pm
Brian, I did. African-Americans and Southern white. Those two groups have the highest homicide rates in the U.S. and are disproportionately represented in our volunteer military.
August 22nd, 2012 | 12:57 pm
The Southern honor culture, presumably. In a war zone being willing to kill or die for reasons other than personal gain or insanity is a good thing. Personally I’ll take the South and it’s honor over the North – and I was born and bred in NYC.
August 22nd, 2012 | 1:38 pm
Steven, I certainly sympathize. If you’ve read any of James Bowman’s arguments on honor, I’m with him on almost all of it. The decline of honor culture is also a problem and we should take it seriously.
Ideally we could achieve a synthesis where the good things about the culture are preserved, while eliminating as much as possible of the senseless violence. Most murders in these cultures aren’t vigilante justice of people who “needed killing,” but over petty arguments about nothing much. I don’t know if such a synthesis is possible. Certainly the decline of honor culture in the North and in Europe both reduced the levels of violence and seems to have vitiated the capacity for self-defense. It’s not clear this is a good trade-off. (So far it’s working out, but there’s good reason to believe that the North and Europe are being propped up by the American South and West.)
August 22nd, 2012 | 8:47 pm
Frankly, there are just some people who need a good killing.
The South always knew that.
August 23rd, 2012 | 10:53 am
Unfortunately, that often meant people like Leo Frank.
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