Guns, with their triggers, which are easy to pull, thereby unloading a lethal bullet, seem to be a way that a few people discharge their strong pent-up emotions very quickly. I have, thankfully, never heard a gun being shot. It must be horrible to hear it, see it, and feel that fear of the gunshot, when it happens near you. That is because death sadly comes so quickly and unexpectedly to the victims. And most of us fear death.
The power of the gunshot will be a happy experience for the shooter, since sound can communicate emotions. And these people who do the shooting have strong internal emotions and they like the communication of emotions. The strong sound from the shotgun can symbolically match the strength of the person’s internalized anger. Assuming they are intent on shooting and killing someone, because of the strength of their internalized anger, this sound would, I would imagine, feel very satisfying to the shooter. The shooter has likely carried internalized anger which has built up for a long time. If it is suppressed or repressed, it will not be readily in that person’s awareness but nevertheless the sound would be very gratifying to them emotionally, although they may not recognize it as such. Men are usually the shooters and they are not as good as identifying their emotions, so in these cases this may enable them to feel some kind of emotion through the feedback of the powerful noise. A powerful noise will give us an emotion, and when they know what it is, which they do of course since they are the shooter, it adds to the power.
This gives us a lead-in to the psychological, mental and emotional forces that underlay these shooting events. This is based on my clinical intuition not on research. My 50+ years as a psychologist practicing psychotherapy has given me a lot of psychological intuition which I am applying to these situations in this manner.
We have to understand what psychological, emotional, mental and social forces are at play that cause these shootings to happen in order to prevent them. The legal people take over after a shooting, but they are not looking at the event as a health issue, or a social issue, or a mental health issue. They are looking at it as a crime only. They are not looking at the reasons why it happened, unless they are looking for a legal loophole like a situation of possible insanity on the part of the shooter that would affect the conviction and sentence. These are all legal terms, and miss the prime causes of the event, the psychological, emotional. mental and social forces at play that affect the individual strongly.
This is not an argument for or against gun control, or for or against any changes to the justice system or the court system. There are serious issues in these areas to look at that need to be changed or improved to prevent these shootings from occurring. The causes are multi-factorial, that is, there is more than one cause. Each cause is important. This discussion is not designed to overlook these prime issues in their overall importance.
But this discussion needs to focus on areas that are often overlooked as important causes in these situations, since we can only discuss one aspect at a time, and these aspects are often overlooked: the psychological, emotional, mental and social issues involved that likely cause these situations to occur. This is not a competition to see which solution is best. That makes no sense. Competitions in situations like this solve nothing. Of course, not every shooting involves all these areas to the same extent, but there is one thing that is clear: Preventing these situations from happening requires examining the psychological, emotional, mental and social issues involved to see what can be learned form them, and then applying those lessons to make relevant changes as one important aspect that can prevent these horrible shootings. The legal system does little to prevent shootings. If it did more, they wouldn’t have been recurring for decades. Citizens should feel safe in their own country, in their stores, schools, offices, streets, theatres and everywhere.
Nothing I say here is meant to excuse, justify or forgive the shooter. The shooter does the shooting and if there was no shooting there would be no tragedy. The shooter is responsible. But there are ways to handle situations so as to prevent or minimize the numbers of shootings that occur. First of all, let us recognize and give our gratitude to the number of people who already work with people to prevent shootings and succeed at doing so. Congratulations to them. I know when I was a young psychologist working as a prison psychologist that no one would recognize or maybe even knew the important work we did in rehabilitating some prisoners so they would never commit crimes again. The police got most of the credit. They deserve it, again it is not a competition, but if we also corrected the psychological, emotional, mental and social issues involved we would not need as many police.
Let’s realize that if we let our anger at the shooter be part of what goes into determining the solution, we will be using an irrational emotion. Irrational emotions do not work when we are making calculations about possible solutions. They will only get in the way, because emotions don’t think. There is no logic and no correctional influence in revenge. But we can let our anger motivate and direct us into making wise, smart decisions, knowing that those are the ones that will work. We want them to work. Just like when people develop vaccines to make up the inoculation that kill the virus, they realize the crucial importance of doing so, but they do not angrily mix different components together in a rush to see what works because of their anger at the virus. And people are angry at the virus. No one would accept such a vaccination because it would be prone to error. They think it through, use their knowledge, calculate which ingredients are needed, the amount of each ingredient, based on various scientific and pharmacological factors beyond the scope of this discussion, and apply their knowledge. That is what we have to do in this situation, determining the causes of a shooting, so we can take some action to stop them. We need to think it through patiently and logically.
Let’s especially look at the emotions that are involved in shooting someone. As we said earlier, the power, noise and force that comes from the bullet leaving the gun’s barrel seems to somehow provide a rewarding emotional experience for those thankfully very few people who pull the trigger to shoot someone.[1] Noise will trigger emotions. Noise can escalate emotions. And the suddenness and the short duration of the “bang” will deliver the emotional equivalent of the potency and capability of what the gun is doing. The power of a shot will move and shake a gun in the shooter’s hands to provide proof of the force. And if there is a silencer, so that the gun makes little noise, that adds to the power the shooter is likely to feel, and seems to feel, as they probably have heard the power of the noise before, which confirms to them the strength of the power they need to feel inside from committing the shooting and the killing. The silencing gives them a stronger feeling of power and revenge. And even the victim is random, it may be what the act represents that motivates him, to get some power over society, as represented by the victim, in his mind.
We may already know this, but remembering that the psychological, emotional, mental and social forces are major factors in triggering these episodes will tell us what is likely going on. Just knowing it as a fact is not enough, we need to appreciate the emotional impact of it, and we do that by describing the sensory impact. All these aspects are present in the sensory input described in the above paragraphs. They depict power, strength, lethality and demonstrate this to the observers around, which is the social part.
Those people likely have severe psychological maladjustment, as seen in serious emotional issues, mental illness and/or character problems. They are then likely to experience such feelings and emotions when they pull the trigger, and a bullet enters an unsuspecting victim’s body. The gun and its bullets provide these. Because their need to have this powerful experience is so strong, coming from deep inside, where they have felt little if any power in life, they search out the gun and the bullet to provide themselves with this emotional experience.
I am a clinical psychologist who is aware that the emotions people experience in life, whatever they may be, are very meaningful to them. People often strive for an emotional experience and that is often one of the primary motivations for their acts, including the act of shooting a gun. There are many causes. Some people kill with knives or other methods. We need to understand what is going on inside the person who is the potential killer and what the emotional reward is in order to prevent the killing.
Again, this is not a competition to seek out the major cause of shootings. These factors are important causative factors that have been ignored. You can’t just look at one factor, which is what emotional thinking does. If this is indeed a search for emotional power and domination, we need to treat the powerlessness that these people, mostly men, seem to feel. Why do they have this feeling and why do they have a hard time with feeling that way? It is not a desirable or pleasant feeling to have, and they do not deserve this feeling, but their motive would seem to be to achieve the powerful feeling they have sought and missed out on in life.
This is not a way to point fingers or to blame anyone, but to provide my psychological take on the matter of the many shootings. We need to determine where the powerlessness came from and how to help them get the power they want in a healthier way.
We could take an approach similar to handling the virus. We studied the virus and came up with an injection, based on the chemical composition of the virus. So why don’t we study the nature of the killers and come up with a therapy for them, based on the findings of the study, and then apply aspects of that therapy to people who are identified as having tendencies to kill, before they actually kill others? It makes no sense to wait for them to kill an innocent victim before we take action.
So how do we help people achieve a feeling of emotional and social power and recognition? First we have to allow ourselves to do so, and drop the ultra-competitive nature going on among many people these days. Many may be reluctant to undertake these steps because they fear relinquishing power. The emotional force inside many people may take over and infect the mind so that they may see this as a continuation of a competition, so that if we help others achieve emotional and social power, they may feel they will lose some. Nonsense. This is called empowerment and we can all have empowerment.
[1] Please note here that this is psychological intuition on my part and has not been researched.