Column: Understanding the minds of mass killers like Stephen Paddock can’t be blocked by politics

Garen Wintemute, an emergency room doctor in Davis, Calif., knows there’s only so much he can do to prevent a gunshot victim from dying.

“To be good doctors, we have to prevent people from being shot in the first place,” said Wintemute, who runs the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis. “Once they’re shot, our options are really limited.”

In the 1980s, Wintemute began studying gun violence as a national public health crisis. Who were the victims and were there demographic patterns? What could be learned about the shooters, and were there risk factors that might help predict — and prevent — violence?

Once upon a time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention did just that kind of research, and Wintemute was one of the docs on the team. But when one CDC study suggested that having firearms in the home increased the risk of homicide, the National Rifle Assn. took aim. Funding for violence research was eliminated, and subsequent legislation forbade the CDC from spending money to “advocate or promote gun control.”

Today, after countless mass killings and a daily toll of about 90 deaths from firearms, many involving suicide, the CDC is still out of the game.

“I’m a scientist, and I believe knowledge is power, and I believe sound public policy should be based on sound scientific evidence,” Wintemute said. “Because the research was shut down, we don’t know more than we knew 20 years ago.”

That’s because over the course of those two decades, the NRA’s grip on Washington has only tightened.

To be honest about it, as much as we’d like to believe there’s a way to peer into the mind of every potential killer, no amount of research will make it possible to intervene in every instance.

We’d all like to know if it was rage, or revenge, or mental illness that motivated the Las Vegas shooter, Stephen Paddock, to take aim at a crowd of innocent people. We’d like to believe there’s a truth to be learned, something about the human psyche that can be added to the watch list, so we can send our kids to school or go to a concert without fear.

Unfortunately, it’s complicated stuff because the mind is so mysterious and no two shooter profiles are the same.

“I still think these are almost impossible to predict,” said Dr. Jeffrey Swanson, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University. “Mass shooters are all different, but they’re usually young men, which was not the case here, who tend to be alienated and isolated and maybe emotionally troubled. They have access to guns and they get access to the cultural script that if you go out and do a mass shooting, you will be a notorious antihero.”

The problem with profiling, Swanson said, is that there are “tens of thousands of angry, alienated, screwed-up young men who are never going to do this.”

Swanson said his research indicates that just 4% of violence in the United States is attributable to mental illness. Although there’s a need for more mental health service, Swanson said, untreated mental illness and gun violence are two different issues that get conflated when there’s a mass shooting.

We also tend to forget that despite a disturbing number of mass shootings, the vast majority of firearm deaths occur daily, usually without much attention. If the goal is to reduce gun violence, Swanson said, a keener understanding of behavior patterns and risk factors can help build a case for smarter gun laws.

“We know that violence is the best predictor of future violence — a better predictor than mental illness,” Swanson said. But in many states, he said, you can purchase a gun even if you have a violent misdemeanor conviction or a temporary restraining order against you.

Swanson lauded California’s response to the 2014 rampage in Isla Vista, where six people were killed and a dozen injured by a shooter who then killed himself. A new law allowed family members or police to seek a court order to temporarily remove weapons from someone exhibiting risky, unstable behavior.

UC Davis’ Wintemute said he is not studying the mind, but combinations of risk factors. Although mental illness alone is not a big predictor of violence, he said, it’s worth knowing if the likelihood rises among people who have a history of alcohol or drug addiction and some form of mental illness along with a history of violence.

More than three dozen weapons were found in the Vegas shooter’s hotel room and home, which poses another possible research question.

“If someone has a large amount of guns, or purchases several in a short time span, is there an increased risk for violence?” Wintemute asked.

In the absence of national leadership, the UC Davis program — formed over the last year or so — became the first state-funded violence research center in the country. Wintemute said he wants to compile basic statistics on firearm violence and better understand who owns guns, who doesn’t, and what the effect of violence is on individuals and communities.

His team is now working with state and federal justice departments on a program involving people who legally purchased firearms in California but then became prohibited from possession because of crimes, restraining orders or psychiatric emergencies. The guns are being confiscated, and the UC Davis center is studying the effect on future crimes, as compared with communities where there is no such gun-confiscation program.

Additional research is underway on the effectiveness of background checks and restraining orders in preventing violence. Wintemute said he has personally donated $2 million to the cause. But this issue has to be studied in depth at the national level, he argued, because the federal government has “resources the states simply don’t have.”

We have more than 300 million guns in civilian hands, he said, with firearms taking more than 90 lives daily. No one would have suggested we stop researching heart disease or cancer or motor vehicle injuries.

“I ran a research study in the ’90s that was shut down when the CDC took funding away,” Wintemute said. “My personal belief is that thousands of preventable deaths have occurred over the last 20 years because the science didn’t get done.”

To read the article in Spanish, click here

Get more of Steve Lopez’s work and follow him on Twitter @LATstevelopez

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