School Shooters and Broken Homes

February 28, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Suzanne Venker knows what’s wrong with America’s boys – broken homes.

A few days after the massacre at the  Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, she wrote at Fox News (here)

Broken homes, or homes without a physically and emotionally present mother and father, are the cause of most of society’s ills. “Unstable homes produce unstable children,” writes Peter Hasson at The Federalist. He adds, “On CNN’s list of the “27 Deadliest Mass Shootings In U.S. History,” seven of those shootings were committed by young males since 2005. Of the seven, only one—Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho — was raised by his biological father throughout childhood.”

I’ll get to the data in a minute. But I confess, my personal reaction was something resembling nostalgia. “Broken homes.” Reading that phrase was like turning on the radio and hearing The Mamas and the Papas — so popular back in the sixties, and then . . . What ever did become of them? To see if it was just my selective attention, I checked Google n-grams.

I don’t know why broken homes descended the charts so rapidly. Maybe because of its implicit moral condemnation. Broken things are no good. Either try to repair them or toss them out. Also, it was no longer just the poor who were vulnerable to having the finger of blame pointed at them. More middle-class people were getting divorced and breaking their homes. Or maybe the rising wave of feminism raised consciousness that the phrase blamed women. It was a slightly more subtle way of saying that a woman alone would raise children that were a menace to society.

Conservatives at Fox, The Federalist, and elsewhere were not swept up in this revisionist thinking. For them, broken homes remain the eternal bad guy.

As for those mass shootings, Philip Cohen tweeted this chart of the top ten – the most deadly.

Only Paddock and Huberty grew up in fatherless homes.

But what about the boys like Nikolas Cruz, the ones who are angry or resentful at their schools – the teachers who put them down, the students who bullied or rejected them – and come back armed with guns? It turns out we have some data, though it’s not up-to-date. After the Columbine shooting of 1999, the Secret Service and the Department of Education did an extensive study of school shooters. Their report covered 41 shooters involved in 37 school shootings from December 1974 to May 2000. There was a summary recently in The Conversation (here):

While most attackers – 96 percent – were male, the report found that there “is no accurate or useful ‘profile’ of students who engaged in targeted school violence.” . . . Most came from intact families, were doing well in school and were not loners. [emphasis added]

   
One problem with all these studies is sample size. Mass killing and school shootings are rare events. With Cohen’s sample of 10 or Hasson’s 27 or the Secret Services’s 41, only the widest differences (e.g, between males and females) gives us any ability to generalize. For other comparisons  (e.g., broken vs. unbroken homes), the sample, even in the US, is too small. This is one case where a too-small sample is, on the whole, a good thing. Let’s hope it stays that way.

Trump Gets One Right (Partly)

February 26, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s easy to make fun of Trump’s claim to heroism, and Andy Borowitz in the New Yorker does it very well.  Trump, speaking to a group of governors today, was criticizing the deputy who did not enter the Marjory Stoneman school during the shooting. Then Trump went on to say,

You don’t know until you're tested, but I really believe I’d run in there even if I didn’t have a weapon – and I think most of the people in this room would have done that, too, ’cause I know most of you.

This was remarkably similar to what Pam Bondi, the Florida Attorney General, had said on Fox News just a few hours earlier: “When you have a school full of students, and your duty is to protect those students, even if I didn’t have a firearm I would have gone into that scene.” Heroic minds think alike, I guess.

What’s ignored in most of the discussion about Trump’s comment is that he said something that was correct: “You don’t know until you’re tested.”

It’s pointless to argue whether Trump would or would not have charged weaponless into the building to confront the shooter. We don’t know. Neither does Trump.

If we’re asked what we would do, and the hypothetical situation is a familiar one, we can make a pretty good guess. Of course, we’d all like to think that we’ll do the right thing. But we can also look at how we’ve behaved in similar situations in the past, and guess that we’ll do something similar the next time. But when it comes to novel situations, our powers of prediction are just not very good, especially when that situation is stressful. When I show students the Milgram film, I ask if they would continue shocking the victim all the way to the end. Nobody ever raises their hand. Yet we can be fairly sure that about half of them are wrong. They’re not lying – saying something they know to be untrue. Neither is Trump.

The TV show “What Would You Do?” frequently concocts some morally questionable behavior and then focuses its hidden camera on a naive person who happens to be present. A shopper in a store sees a clerk being rude to a Black/overweight/transgender/whatever customer. Someone in a bar overhears two women planning to steal the money of man at the bar. What will the shopper or bargoer do? What would you do?

To the list of episodes we can now add: sounds of shooting coming from inside a school. What would you do?

For all these, the most accurate answer is, “I don’t know.”

Path Dependency and the Road Not Taken

February 23, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

In my Superbowl post earlier this month (“The Social Construction of Brutality”), I said, “We now have an institution that is seemingly unchangeable. Any other way of doing things is unimaginable.” Reality is constructed by people, but once constructed, it develops its own momentum, its own seemingly inevitable logic.

So now we have the President of the United States endorsing the idea that the solution to the problem of school shootings is to pay teachers to carry guns. It’s part of the strategy of “target hardening” – more guns, more guards, more metal detectors, more locks, more secure doors – basically making schools resemble prisons. Conservatives from the NRA to the National Review love this idea. It’s realistic. It makes sense given the reality that we have created.

In that Superbowl post, I asked readers to imagine a world with no football. Given what we now know about brain damage, would we introduce football – from levels starting in  grade school on up to the pros – into that world? I borrowed this idea from Lisa Wade (“Imagine a world of higher ed but with no fraternities . . . .”)

Now imagine a world where guns are tightly regulated. Semi-automatic rifles like the AR-15 are banned. So are most handguns. Let’s call this world the United Kingdom. Suppose someone – someone like Wayne LaPierre – goes to the UK and proposes that they do away with all these laws. Here’s the pitch:  If you just let gun manufacturers and dealers make and import these wonderful weapons and sell them to just about anybody, your country will reap the rewards of more safety and more freedom.

Of course, eventually you’ll have a few school massacres now and then, but you can hire school guards who you buy guns for, and you can instal metal detectors and buy guns for your teachers to carry at all times. Your police officers too will run a much greater risk of being shot and killed, but bullet-proof vests can help a little, and the police themselves will all carry guns so they can kill more people. Oh, and you’ll also have more civilians shooting each other or themselves. What do you say? This is your chance to make the UK great again. Have we got a deal?

The UK politely declines. (“The logic of the honourable gentleman’s proposal lacks a certain . . . .”  Which is a polite way of saying, “Are you out of your fucking mind?”)

Now imagine another world, a world where some people have guns, but the guns that most bad guys can get are cheap revolvers accurate only at very close range though useful to brandish in a robbery (they’re called “Saturday night specials”). More sophisticated handguns are relatively few; semi-automatic rifles for civilians are unknown. Let’s call this world United States 1965.  Imagine the same spokesman coming to the US and making the same proposal – more and better guns (by better, he means, more accurate and able to shoot more bullets that are more lethal; simply put, he means better at killing more people). Others protest. They want to put restrictions on what the gun merchants can manufacture, import, and sell and on who can buy these weapons. Don’t listen to those people says our spokesman. Get rid of those pesky restrictive laws. The future lies before you bright with semi-automatic assault rifles and handguns. That is path to safety and freedom. What do you say, US? Have we got a deal?

That is the path we chose.

What makes Trump’s proposal rational is “path dependency”

the continued use of a product or practice based on historical preference or use. This holds true even if newer, more efficient products or practices are available. (Wikipedia). 

In many ways path dependency is a fancy phrase for addiction – trying to solve a problem with larger doses of what caused the problem in the first place. To outsiders our president’s more-guns solution to the problem of school slaughter sounds crazy.  But Americans who have come down this path, even Americans who find the idea repugnant, have a hard time denying its logic.

We Still Don’t Need No Stinking Evidence

February 18, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sociology isn’t just “common sense,” we tell our students on day one of the intro course. First, one common sense proposition can contradict another. And in any case, the only way to find out if common sense is right is to look at systematic evidence rather than relying on intuition and experience. 

So here is Ross Douthat on Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast on Thursday, talking about his “Let’s Ban Porn” column in the Times (see this post from last week).  Asked about the negative effects of pornography, Douthat says,

I think we spend a lot of time in the media landscape today arguing about studies, and in certain ways in this case I’m appealing to cultural experience and moral intuition

Early in the discussion, Douthat had referred to the “experiment” we have conducted “in using not just pornography but hard core extreme obviously misogynistic pornography as a kind of broad based form of sexual education for young men.” He didn’t specify the outcome variables of this experiment, though the hosts of the show mentioned that at the same time that porn was spreading wildly, the subjects of the experiment (teenagers) were racking up lower rates of casual sex, pregnancy, abortion, and rape.

Nearly an hour into the podcast host David Plotz asks about evidence. Douthat referred to the relation between porn and “anti-social behavior writ large – depression, unhappiness.” I would have thought that unwanted pregnancy and rape were writ just a bit larger than unhappiness. But even with the variables he mentions, Douthat acknowledges that the studies showing a relationship between porn consumption and unhappiness come from a think tank that is hardly neutral (the Witherspoon Institute), and that these studies suffer from the problem of endogeneity, a word that here means that even if there’s a correlation, it’s hard to figure out which is causing which. (Douthat says nothing about the studies that contradict his desired result that porn makes kids unhappy.)

Douthat mentions other outcomes: “Young men are messed up. . . .Relationships just aren’t working that well. . . People seem really unhappy with the dating landscape.” If there’s evidence that all of these were different in some pre-porn paradise, Douthat doesn’t cite it.

For sex conservatives, the question of the evils of porn is just too important to be left to empirical evidence. Nearly ten years ago, I wrote a similar post (“Data? We Don’t Need No Stinking Data”). The names of the conservatives have changed (Kristol out, Douthat in) but the idea is the same.

Does watching porn or listening to make kids more promiscuous? Why waste time figuring out how to get data on the question? Just take it from Irving Kristol (William’s dad) from some years back writing in the Wall Street Journal: Is it not reasonable to think that there may also be such a connection between our popular culture and the plagues of sexual promiscuity among teenagers, teenage illegitimacy, and, yes, the increasing number of rapes committed by teenagers? Here again, we don’t really need social science to confirm what common sense and common observations tell us to be the case.     Can anyone really believe that soft porn in our Hollywood movies, hard porn in our cable movies, and violent porn in our “rap” music is without effect? [emphasis added] By “here again,” he apparently means that there are several other areas where we are better off not trying to get evidence.

In the years since Kristol wrote that, our popular culture became more sexual and more violent. But sexual promiscuity among teenagers, teenage illegitimacy, and, yes, the number of rapes committed by teenagers all decreased.