The slaughter which took place in Tucson has shocked, outraged, fascinated and repelled people the world over. It has also raised a number of questions. Sadly, these are mainly the same questions such events always raise and for which answers seem never to be found. Many of the questions focus on the availability of guns, and in a nation that holds about 250,000,000 privately owned firearms one has to wonder what it will take to guarantee peace and security for the law-abiding majority. But as events in Oklahoma demonstrated, a truck load of commercial fertilizer and fuel oil can wipe out hundreds of lives if only the mind behind the truck is sufficiently evil. Guns just make it a lot easier.
The question, then, which inevitably comes to the fore in the aftermath of such tragedies is, if the evil mind, the mind filled with savage inspiration, is indeed the critical element, why are not such fiends systematically ferreted out from their hiding places among their harmless neighbors and locked away someplace safe? In retrospect it is obvious to all that Jared Loughner was a nut, right? A raving lunatic who alienated and terrified all around him, a cherisher of violent fantasies, a loner. It all adds up.
But, of course, it doesn’t.
Fact is, it is exceedingly difficult to accurately identify those persons who will commit statistically rare acts such as murder and suicide. Psychologists are aware of the reasons for this, but most people, groping in the dark for comprehension of the Tucson horror are not. It goes something like this:
In western industrial society as a whole roughly one person in ten-thousand is a murderer. Obviously, the incidence of monsters like Loughner can be reasonably estimated at thousands of times more rare, maybe one in ten million, but I will stick with the smaller figure for purposes of this illustration. If someone produced a test for identifying murderers, it would seem to be possible, by employing admittedly rather Orwellian means, to identify the really dangerous folks and, well, put them away. Right? Sorry. Consider the following:
Suppose that Smith’s Practically Perfect Test of Homicidal Potential is 95% accurate. That is, it correctly identifies 95% of the murderers it tests, and it only falsely labels 5% of harmless persons as murderers. Bear in mind that, within the field of psychology at its present state there is no test for anything which is even remotely so precise. The MMPI, by a wide margin the most thoroughly researched and scientifically normed instrument in the psychological arsenal, cannot even distinguish male from female to anything approaching this level of accuracy. Bear also in mind the difficulty of constructing such an instrument given the fact that, by the time the Loughners of the world have identified themselves to our scientific curiosity, they are usually dead and therefore of no use in the development of test norms. But even granted the possibility of constructing so phenomenally accurate a test, our problems, far from being over, are just beginning.
Let us say that Smith’s imaginary test is administered to 1 million people chosen at random from the population. If one in 10,000 is a future murderer, that means our sample contains 100 will-be killers. Smith’s test accurately identifies 95 of these and we haul them away to some humane but secure environment to live out their lives in confinement where, presumably, they won’t kill anyone. True, 5 of the 100 escape detection, but surely we are now a great deal better off than we were, right? Well, it depends on your point of view because, as you will recall, Smith’s test also incorrectly identifies 5% of harmless subjects as killers-to-be. Our sample, therefore, contains 999,900 benign individuals, of whom 5% or 49,995 will be wrongly labeled homicidal, and these, too, will be isolated from society and confined. Thus, even with Smith’s near-miraculous test (which is, of course, a fiction), in order to preempt the murderous destiny of one “real” killer we must essentially destroy the lives of nearly 500 innocents. This seems to defeat our original purpose, which was to protect the innocent from unwarranted harm.
What this means, for the benefit of those who feel that the government (or somebody) should identify all these dangerous people before they strike, and get rid of them, is that it cannot be done. Not within anything approximating a free and humane society.
Unfortunately, no one can reliably identify the Jared Loughners of the world except they themselves. Only they are privy to the diabolical fantasy world in which they live and evolve their ghastly masterpieces. They usually end up killing themselves anyway. If only, one thinks, they would recognize the monsters they have become and kill themselves before they pollute the innocent world with terror and grief.
Probably some of them do.
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