Isegoria

The Assistant Village Idiot has worked for years in emergency psychiatric care:

People come to me because they have been dangerous due to mental illness. That can mean dangerous to themselves or to others, and sometimes “dangerousness” stretches as far as self-care: wandering in the street, not eating. But in both the first two categories, harming self or harming others, guns are often involved.

I’ve met a lot of people who have threatened to shoot someone, and some who actually have. It is sometimes part of my job to call family, police, or neighbors and try to figure out whether there was actually a gun to start with, whether someone has removed it, whether the police have taken custody of it. I am very familiar with that sickening feeling, hearing someone’s story and thinking “Oh crap. This person should absolutely never be allowed near guns.”

One category of people I work with are seldom gun-people. Social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, and the various rehab groups don’t hunt and don’t tend to have been in the military. They are more likely to come from urban or suburban backgrounds. Whether they got their deer this year never comes up. The other hospital staff, the nurses and psych techs, the environmental services and dietary folks, the medical records and administrative people are more like the general population, some hunters, some not. The professional staff think that gun ownership is itself a worrisome sign. They say they don’t, and many go out of their way to be understanding and recognising cultural differences and forcing themselves back from passing judgement. But it’s clear what they think. They say stuff that offends the others, but the others are pretty used to it by now and shrug it off.

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You should be more worried about what mentally ill people in crisis are going to do with their cars than their guns. A lot more. Some of that is greater availability, and that people spend many more hours holding a steering wheel than a pistol. But greater safety per minute used isn’t really the point, because that increased time is part of everyday life and isn’t going to change. Given that greater danger, what do you want to do about that? Remember that you want people who have been in crisis to be able to resume normal lives, going to work and visiting relatives, getting themselves to appointments, living where they like. So sketch out a mental-health, dangerous-driving statute if you can, just to see the possible obstacles and difficulties.

Now understand that it’s much the same for guns.

Second, there is a federal law that prohibits any person who has been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric institution from acquiring a firearm. Two problems. There is no enforcement mechanism set up, because no one wants to give gun sellers or local police access to confidential medical information, for good reasons of privacy. It gets sticky, and there is no national registry of the involuntarily committed. Next, that word “acquiring” looms large. What about guns already owned? What about borrowing your brother’s rifle to hunt or target shoot? What do you do when Sam says he wants to shoot someone and has access to a gun, but next day says he was lying, that he’s never owned one and has no friends who have them? Where do you search? How were you planning on wording that warrant when it’s not illegal to own that gun?

Third. People who had a suicidal crisis are often extremely willing to turn in their guns and have already done so by the time they talk to us. They are relieved. “I called my wife and told her to get both guns out of the house — give ‘em to anyone. I never want to go through that again.” People who were threatening others are less likely to do this.

Fourth, even with all those people who scare the bejeesus out of me, we have very little gun crime in NH — and a lot of what we do have is coming up out of Lynn, Lawrence, Lowell, and Haverhill, MA. That caught me by surprise when a friend who went to become one of the prison psychologists told me that a lot of our prison population were not NH residents. He said almost half, though I can’t back that up. So even our low rate of gun crime is inflated. Yet NH is a high gun-owning state. The words of Howard Dean come to mind, when he was explaining his state to national Democrats. “You have to understand that this is Vermont, where even liberals own 2-3 guns.” There’s some other reason — something other than legislative strictness and mere possession — that drives actual violence. I have my theories.

Fifth, some gun owners are yahoos. So what? Give me measurables. It does strike me as weird that people would want more advanced weaponry. I immediately grasp the argument that “they really don’t need that.” But you can also hear people say “They really don’t need those big SUV’s.” “They really don’t need…” those jetskis, more miles of hiking trails, expensive cars, hundred choices of shampoo, video games, free condoms — you get the picture. You have to be able to show, not just hypothesize or imagine, that there is some ill effect that requires intervention. As far as I know, that isn’t there. Gun laws don’t seem to move the dial much one way or the other.

Sixth, based on no knowledge other than history, I predict that the Obama administration will (perhaps already has) propose sweeping legislation that includes the entire wish-list of gun control advocates. He’s not an incrementalist. (Washington in general prefers comprehensive solutions for several reasons, all of them bad.) Using a crisis to manipulate people’s emotions is SOP.

What price multiculturalism?, Alexander Boot asks:

The proportion of Muslims in youth jails now stands at 21 percent, up from 13 percent two years ago. That’s more than five times the proportion of Muslims in the population, which raises all sorts of awkward questions, including the one in the title.

But the first question is why? Why are young Muslims in Britain criminalised to such an extent? Is there something in Islam that encourages bestial behaviour?

In fact, a fourth of Muslim offenders claim that by committing crimes they follow their faith. Not being an unequivocal admirer of Islam, I still have to say they are slandering their religion. There’s nothing there that promotes everyday criminality.

For example, Turkey’s crime rate is lower by orders of magnitude than that in the USA. Even Pakistan has a lower crime rate than most Western nations, this despite the 10 years of ‘war on terror’ and the resulting black market in guns, the biggest in the world.

Why then are young Muslims five times more likely than their white neighbours to commit crimes in Britain? For the same reason that thugs would be more likely to paint-spray an obscene graffito on someone else’s front door than on their own.

Or perhaps a better analogy would be to look at the behaviour of most youngsters at home and abroad. Observing them, one has to notice that they feel even less constrained on their foreign travels than in their own neighbourhoods. The moment they land on foreign soil, all bets are off and school’s out.

It’s as if the already thin veneer of civilisation has been rubbed off them. British stag parties seem to have no compunction against trashing a bar in, say, Prague (where many bars display ‘No British’ signs), something they’d think twice about doing to their local.

This is difficult to condone but easy to understand. Not just young louts but even a perfectly respectable middle-aged gentleman takes much better care of his home than of his hotel room. The problem with youth criminality in Britain stems from just that: they simply don’t regard Britain as their home. In a similar vein, Muslim rapist gangs target white girls but hardly ever Muslim ones — white girls are alien to them, and normal civilities just don’t apply.

Why then do Muslims, even those who are British born and bred, feel like strangers in their own land? One could write a whole book on this subject, but in a short piece it’s sufficient to observe that the drive for multiculturalism has predictably produced results exactly opposite to those intended.

Rather than making all cultures and religions equally welcome, promoting thereby good will among all, multiculturalism has effectively destroyed a single, dominant culture for which others could reach tropistically. Such a culture is a sine qua non of a truly integrated society, for without it the social fabric will remain a tissue-thin patchwork, soon to be torn to tatters.

If a denizen of Bradford were to feel English first, British second, Yorkshireman third and Muslim a distant forth, he’d be less likely to treat his home town with all the loving care of a conquering vandal. Surely this is self-evident?