As a clinical psychologist I am aware that the emotions people experience in life, whatever they may be, are very meaningful to them, more meaningful than most people may realize. People often strive for an emotional experience and that is usually one of the primary motivations for their actions. If we can determine a motivation for an action we can work at reducing the likelihood of an action that is destructive, as shooting a gun usually is. Shooting a gun is often an emotional experience for the shooter.
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 witnessed a gun being shot. It must be horrible to 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 often 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. They would not admit or acknowledge this because it is beyond their awareness. Communicating by shooting a gun is a way for their emotion to get recognized, or to get retribution and have others realize their power, although it is artificial, it may be real to people in that particular sub-culture. 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, and need for retribution, 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. In actuality, the power lasts for a few seconds or minutes to be followed by a lifetime of agony, guilt, worry, despair, emptiness and loneliness. It is not worth it.
This gives us a lead-in to the psychological, mental and emotional forces that underlay the various shooting events. This essay is based on my clinical intuition; my 50+ years as a psychologist practicing psychotherapy has given me a lot of psychological intuition and acumen 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 psychological 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, or affiliation with a terror or crime gang. These are legal and police 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, cognitive and social issues involved that likely cause these situations to occur. These are the reasons crime occurs. 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, cognitive and social issues involved to see what can be learned from 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, and it worked, 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. The legal system and the media dramatize the whole thing for the public when they focus only on arresting the killer. Sure, but this misses the point: To prevent it from happening again.
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 and channel us into making wise, smart decisions, knowing that those are the ones that will work. We need to channel the anger, just like an angry football team channels their anger into making a smart play that scores a touchdown. We want our decisions to work to solve the problem of minimize or even eliminate shootings and killings. 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 concoct a potion for a vaccine right away 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. And we all know that. They think it through, use their knowledge, calculate which ingredients are needed, the amount of each ingredient, based on various scientific and pharmacological factors as to effectiveness well beyond the scope of this discussion, and apply their knowledge. That is what we have to do in this situation, preventing shootings. We need to determine the causes of a shooting, so we can take some action to stop them. People wouldn’t think of the noise coming from a gun when it is shot as a motivating factor, but it probably is. We need to approach the solution the same way we do to developing a vaccine to the virus. Slowly, logically, scientifically. Considering all alternatives rather than immediately rejecting it. Science doesn’t do that. We need to think it through patiently and objectively.
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. That’s how power gets its oomph. By showing others in a social surrounding.
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.
This is not the only cause. 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 in order to prevent the killing the next time. And then meet these needs in potential shooters. Many such people come to the attention of police, mental health workers, psychologists, social workers, and this gives the chance to meet their needs. And, of course, these are not the needs as described by the individual, these are the needs as evaluated by the professional.
Again, this is not a competition to seek out the major cause of shootings. These factors may or may not be major cause in a specific situation, but they are important causative factors that have been ignored. 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.
Again, 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. This will prevent the shooting.
You may say not to give power to a shooter. That’s true, but we are talking about getting personal empowerment to an individual who is not yet a shooter, in a socially healthy way, like a way to influence people, maybe to assist younger delinquent-prone people to prevent them from committing crimes, so that they may be looked up to. I have seen it happen and it can work. There may be similar ideas.
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, and then that action is only to toss them in prison forever.
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 to a potential criminal or a “low-life.” 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 just irrational fear. We are not giving power to a criminal to commit crimes. This is called empowerment and we can all have empowerment, in healthy ways.