Yesterday, on the second day after a mass shooter killed 18 persons and wounded 13, but before the suspect was found dead, I drove through Lewiston, Maine. I was trying to find a place to sit down with my laptop and have lunch, and more generally to observe. Nearly everything was closed in the town. At McDonald’s, only the drive-through remained open.
The local shelter-in-place order must have had something to do with this, although I don’t think it was very strict. It is also easy to understand why ordinary people in small-town peaceful Maine would be in shock. Lewiston, the second largest city in Maine, has only 35,000 inhabitants. I find it a bit more difficult to understand why people would still be scared, though. There were many cops searching the Lewiston surrounding area, although I saw only a few in town. More surprisingly, in Portland, the progressive city 50 miles away, some businesses closed on the morrow of the killing. Note that contrary to ordinary individuals in nearly all other advanced countries, Mainers don’t have to shake in terror and impotence if they think a killer is in the neighborhood: they can have guns too.
Unfortunately, on Wednesday night in Lewiston, there was no Elisjsha Dicken at the right time and place. Dicken is the young man who, on July 17, 2022, was shopping with his girlfriend in an Indianapolis mall and saw a mass shooter in action. The criminal had already killed three persons and wounded two. Just fifteen seconds into the killing, Dicken, an ordinary citizen, drew his Glock 19 and, at 40 yards, shot 10 rounds, of which 8 hit the killer, a marksman’s exploit with a handgun. The killer was only able to shoot back once before he tried to retreat and died. (See the Wikipedia entry and the Wall Street Journal editorial of a few days after the event.)
Tragedies must fit into the theories, explicit or (more often) implicit, with which one interprets what happens in the world. In the case of social tragedies—as opposed to, say, quantum events—just about anybody entertains theories whose validity he is certain of. When a mass shooting occurs (never in Maine until now, just like it was unknown in the country just six decades ago) every non-student of society tries to explain it with his homemade intuitive theories. Those who believe that guns are the problem (while they were more legally accessible, except for legal carry, when mass shootings were unknown) will see such an event as confirmation. So did Joe Biden who called on Congress (“Manhunt Drags On After Maine Shootings Leave 18 Dead,” Wall Steet Journal, October 26, 2023) to act:
Work with us to pass a bill banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, to enact universal background checks, to require safe storage of guns, and end immunity from liability for gun manufacturers.
We can imagine the killer, just about to leave his apartment to go on his rampage, thinking “Oh my God, I can’t do it, my gun is safely stored in my gun cabinet.” Somebody opposed to a standing army, or persuaded by former president Trump that the army is training “our boys to be killing machines,” could as well explain the Maine killing by the fact that the killer was an Army reservist. Many claim that mental disease is the cause of everything now going wrong in the world, perhaps like the early-20th-century Progressives blamed alcohol or the hereditary defectives.
I am not sure how to explain random mass killings, but I have proposed some hypotheses. Rapid change, to which many people cannot easily adapt, would be a complementary one, although there have been many such periods in the past two or three centuries. At any rate, one should make sure that one’s theories about society are well grounded in logic and evidence before using them to explain something like mass shootings. Epistemologically, a theory is necessary to determine which facts are significant. It’s probably not going to be news to most readers of this blog that economics or political economy generally provides the best analytical tools for thinking about what happens in society.
READER COMMENTS
Thomas L Hutcheson
Oct 28 2023 at 12:56pm
I have no idea what caused the mass murder. I do wish that the news reports would report on when he acquired the weapons he used. Should he have been allowed to purchase the weapons he purchased when he purchased them? It seems to me there are ways to reduce the risks of being harmed by a person using a gun at minimal inconvenience to law abiding gun owners.
Peter
Oct 28 2023 at 3:02pm
The problem Tom here is generally speaking it doesn’t matter. Anti-liberty people are going to find fault with whatever the reason no matter what it is. If they were acquired illegally, and they weren’t because in reality that almost never happens outside legal pedantry, then no law matters hence irrelevant so they will blame the manufacturers or racism; if they were acquired legally then the law is bad no matter how restrictive it is already. Countries without guns have mass stabbings, mass poisonings, machetes, etc. Tools aren’t the problem, they are easily substituted.
steve
Oct 28 2023 at 3:53pm
No. Guns are the best, convenient force multiplier we have found. It’s pretty hard to stab 18 people to death. You have to get up close and personal. Ever been on knife fight? If you see the knife coming you have a chance to grab it or at least accept getting stabbed int eh hand (what I did). You cant se a bullet coming for you. With a gun you can do it from 100 yards. It’s why I have guns in the house. I also collect knives but if I want to do harm to someone it’s going to be a gun. (See Indiana Jones.)
“they will blame the manufacturers or racism”
It was reported that he was involuntarily committed for having homicidal thoughts and fantasies this summer. I doing know Maine law but in some states you have to engage in behavior that endangers others to get committed IIRC. Are you suggesting the manufacturer caused his psychosis or that racism did?
Steve
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 28 2023 at 5:00pm
Steve: You write:
Yes, but only for defense. For aggression, close substitutes exist. One is explosives (see Boston). The other one is motorized vehicles, especially trucks. In Nice, in July 2016, one killed 86 people and injured 434.
steve
Oct 28 2023 at 10:28pm
Explosives take some expertise that most people dont have and they arent always reliable. Cars and trucks are expensive and are limited to being effective in certain places. Note that i said convenient. Guns are cheap, very portable and easy to lear to use. Easy to conceal. Not so much a truck. It’s why the large majority of homicides are with guns. They are also the leading method for suicide. Guns work.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9712777/
Steve
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 29 2023 at 1:02am
Steve: You just need a credit card to rent a truck or you can steal or hijack one. The Nice terrorist rented it. To make a bomb, you basically need a connection to the internet. (At any rate, a substitute does not necessarily mean a perfect substitute.)
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 29 2023 at 1:09am
Steve: As for suicides (the topic of the article you linked to, which is not the topic of my post), substitutes also exist. From the article:
Howard Hamilton
Oct 29 2023 at 10:05pm
Steve, the last mass murder in Saskatchewan was at the James Creek First Nation, where a man stabbed and killed 13 people and injured another 18.
Thomas L Hutcheson
Oct 28 2023 at 6:12pm
You seem to start from the assumption that nothing can be done (or maybe that what could be done would be worse than nothing.) Maybe there is some intervention point between manufacture and criminal use of some product that would be cost effective.
In this case perhaps he should not have been able to purchase a weapon that fires rapidly. In the case of street crimes would it not be helpful to be able to trace exactly how the weapon got in the hand s the criminal. That is not the manufacturer’ intent, where might the chain of provenance be broken?
Dylan
Oct 28 2023 at 1:44pm
I watched a movie a few years back, it wasn’t very good and I no longer remember the name, but I thought the premise was interesting. People suddenly developed the ability to spontaneously explode. Explosions varied in size, from small enough where the only casualty was the person exploding, to big enough to take out a few blocks of a densely packed city. In the movie these were presumed to be always accidental, and happened when the person had extreme emotions. But I thought it was even more interesting if it was by choice. What would happen to society if any person on a whim could become a suicide bomber? What should happen? I don’t even have a good hunch about the answer to either of those questions, but I find it interesting to ponder.
I find this analogous to mass shootings, because one thing that guns do is they lower the marginal cost of taking an extra life. There are mass stabbings, but for the most part, they have lower body counts than mass shootings. It makes intuitive sense that in areas where the cost of having access to guns are lower, that you would see more mass killings than in places where the cost was higher.
I say this as someone who is a supporter of the 2nd amendment. Partially for reasons you mention in your linked piece from 2017. But, it may be higher frequency of these kinds of events is a tragic cost we pay for that right.
Thomas L Hutcheson
Oct 28 2023 at 2:15pm
Although I think SCOTUS was in error to interpret the 2nd Amendment as an individual right to possess at least some kinds of firearms, it nevertheless should have reassured potential gun owners enough to develop cost effective regulations that would reduce use of guns for criminal activity with little inconvenience to most gun owners. So far that has not happened, but I think we can eventually get there.
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 28 2023 at 3:29pm
Thomas: The opinion of the Court in Heller v. District of Columbia, recognizing an individual 2nd-Amendment right to own ordinary weapons, summarized half a century of constitutional scholarship on this matter. I am surprised that you are not persuaded. No article in the Bill of Rights recognizes anything else than individual rights. (The 9th Amendment does mention the powers of the states, but only to limit the federal government to its delegated powers.) Is the sort of regulation you propose similar to what they did in Canada (or for that matter in England) regarding the traditional right to keep and bear arms? Do you propose the same sort of regulation for, say, the 1st Amendment? Many Americans who don’t own guns don’t actually know what are the current gun regulations in the United States (ask Hunter Biden).
steve
Oct 28 2023 at 3:54pm
SCOTUS is just politicians wearing long robes.
Steve
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 28 2023 at 5:13pm
Steve: When that will be the case, we’ll really live under tyranny and EconLog will not exist anymore. On the importance of independent judges to maintain the rule of law, you will find some strong historical arguments in Jouvenel’s On Power (a non-technical book); for what must be the best discussion of socialist “judges” as a contradiction in terms, see Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty (Volume 1, Chapter 5).
PS: Legal reasoning (I am not speaking of the issuance of diktats) is like economic reasoning: one needs a basic understanding of it to understand its conclusions. Hayek would be the reference, but not an easy reference.
Thomas L Hutcheson
Oct 29 2023 at 8:47am
Ok it is an “individual: right to participate in s state militia. The point is that it is a right for States to have militias.
I’m not proposing anything specific, I have never owned or wanted to own a gun and really know nothing about them, but I cannot see why some sort of registration process that allow police to trace the provenance of weapons used in crime would be a) an infringement on the right to “bear arms” (even with the SCOTUS interpretation) or b) much of an inconvenience to arms bearers. Background checks are already done so presumably are not infringements of any rights but they do not work very well. Can they be improved cost effectively? Some kinds of “arms” are constitutionally restricted, where is the best place to draw the line? [Again, I do not know enough to even see the issues of the costs to gun owners of not being able to purchase “assault rifles” versus the benefit of making “assault rifles,” clips, whatever, less easily available to people who want to do mass murder.
I also think that many of these cost benefit calculation would depend on local conditions — I make sense to me to restrict carry a gun in public in DC than on the ranch of Matt Yglesias’s father-in-law, so national legislation is not involved in some of them. Traceability would, however, seem to require a national system.
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 29 2023 at 12:53pm
Thomas: Under a perfectly benevolent, omniscient, and efficient state with citizens who all have the same preferences and values, that would undoubtedly be a good approach.
Craig
Oct 29 2023 at 3:32pm
“Ok it is an “individual: right to participate in s state militia. The point is that it is a right for States to have militias.”
Interestingly the Miller case regarding the militia interpretation of the 2nd Amendment actually stands for the proposition that the federal government CAN’T regulate weapons that have a MILITARY purpose.
“In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a ‘shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length’ at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument. Certainly it is not within judicial notice that this weapon is any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense. Aymette v. State of Tennessee, 2 Humph., Tenn., 154, 158.” — https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/307/174
The Constitution is a delegation of authority, the Bill of Rights an emphatic restriction on that delegated authority. It is an express limitation on federal authority; if you read the Constitution such that you think the federal government can regulate firearms, then you would be mistaken about the scope of federal authority, because if the federal government were to be able to regulate firearms it would be able to defang the state militias. Bottom line, the 2nd Amendment is not the definition of a right at all.
Pierre Lemieux
Oct 29 2023 at 8:29pm
Craig: From the Supreme Court decision in Heller:
Richard W Fulmer
Oct 28 2023 at 1:49pm
As technology advances, the ability for one person to commit mass murder increases, and the ability to stop such acts declines. People acting in response to voices in their heads adds a randomness factor to the equation. Often in hindsight, people detect the warning signs that “someone” should have seen and acted upon, but we’ve been schooled to view aberrant behavior as little more than an “acceptable alternative lifestyle.” Reporting such behavior to authorities is to risk being labeled as <fill in the blank>phobic.
An armed populace potentially has the ability to stop mass killings that are in progress. It might also have a deterrent effect, at least on would be killers rational enough to be deterred.
The welfare state may have contributed to the problem by crowding out the “little platoons” that were once ubiquitous across the nation (see Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion). People on the ground are far better equipped to deal with individuals and individual problems than are distant bureaucracies that deal, not with individuals, but with the labels that they’ve applied to categories of individuals.
Also, the welfare state and the expanding government in general have fostered the mindset that aberrant behavior is a problem for the authorities and not for citizens in the community. Far better to let “the professionals” handle such matters than to get personally involved – especially given that the professionals are likely to see such involvement as unwanted interference.
steve
Oct 28 2023 at 10:34pm
Actually, people behaving aberrantly get reported all of the time. If they have family they are almost always concerned and have reported it. I was a mental health worker before med school and helped fill out hundreds of applications for commitment papers.There isn’t much concern about being called names. The issue is that we arent that good at predicting who will be come violent. People have civil liberties so you cant just lock them up or commit them because they might get violent. Also, if people report stuff outside of the mental health system they are reporting it to the police. Most fo them dont have the training to know how to handle these kinds of problems.
Steve
Craig
Oct 29 2023 at 12:05am
How to deter somebody willing to sacrifice their life for their 15 minutes of infamy?
Roger McKinney
Oct 30 2023 at 10:21am
Good analysis! Alsi, I don’t think enough consideration has been given to the effects of depression drugs.
And, Thomas Sowell suggests in Black Rednecks and White Liberals that the US is a more violent society than that of Europe.
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