STAND UP AND SAY NO TO VIOLENCE

I am writing this a day after an 18 year old killed 19 fourth grade children and 2 teachers. He had recently [after turning 18] purchased two AR-15 [assault] rifles and carried one into the elementary school. These rifles that the NRA calls "America's rifle"can rapidly fire 40 bullets and are easy to reload. They were banned in 1994 after they were used in mass schootings and they were labeled "assault rifles." However people who already had these weapons could keep them and keep their large capacity magazines [allows someone to shoot a lot of bullets rapidly and reload rapidly]. In 2004 the law ended because of congressional inaction and the number of mass shootings in the US dramatically increased. This increase was likely in part because of the availability of large capacity magazines that have contributed to the number of people killed in mass shootings. Data on mass shootings from the National Institute of Justice's Public Mass Shootings Database shows that assault rifles were used in 25.1% of mass shootings, while handguns were used 77.2% of the time. 77% of the shooters purchased at least some of their weapons legally. In K-12 school shootings over 80% of the time the weapons were stolen from family members. Mental health issues are common in mass shootings with psychosis being noted to have a minor role in nearly 1/3 of the shootings and a primary role in 10% of the shootings. 31% of shooters had experienced severe childhood trauma and 80% were in crisis. In addition, 30% of the shooters were suicidal before the schooting and 39% were suicidal during the shooting. 92% of college age and younger shooters were suicidal. 64.5% of the shooters had a prior criminal record and 62.8% had a history of violence. Frequently the response by people who are against any restriction on what weapons can be owned is that it is really a mental health issue. It is like the notion that guns don't kill people, it is people with guns that do. It is true that mental health issues are common and yet access to weapons plays a very significant role. This is seen clearly in suicides using guns as access to guns matters since the time between a decision to kill oneself and acting on this happened in less than 3 hours 73% of the time in a paper by Laura Paashaus et al. Clin Psychol Psychother. 2021 Nov. entitled: "From decision to action: Suicidal history and time between decision to die and actual suicide attempt." This is even more significant considering that more than 50% of deaths from guns are suicides. In 2020 45,000 Americans died from guns so over 22,500 were suicides. If a wait of more than 3 hours could prevent suicides then a wait for a background check is long enough to prevent a suicide. It seems very clear that restricting access to guns would save a lot of lives including a lot of children's lives, especially as suicides are increasing in children and adolescents.

So, background checks, limits or a ban on assault type weapons, limits or bans on large capacity magazines and so called "red flag" laws taking guns away from people who are a danger to themselves or others would save a lot of lives. So, why isn't this happening? Do gun advocates not care about all these deaths, including children killed in mass shootings. I don't believe that. Something else must be keeping gun advocates from supporting laws that would save many lives. I think that it must be related to fear. This fear may be connected to messages that many of us give our brains. The focus on rights to own guns and even to conceal them, gives our brains the message that it is ok to have and to use guns, otherwise we wouldn't have so many and they wouldn't be so easy to get hold of and it wouldn't be ok to conceal that we have them. Significantly, lies are being spread that people will try to take your right to own a gun away from you and take away other rights so that you will end up being like a slave. This fear is translated into messages to our brains that we must have the right to have and to use our guns to protect ourselves, our families and even our country. This message puts our brains on high alert and the amygdala part of our brains will constantly scan our surroundings for danger and we will respond to a percieved threat in a nanosecond when we feel threatened. That nanosecond [one billionth of a second] is the speed that the amygdala in our brain responds to a perceived threat to us. When this reponse is activated we are responding before we are even aware that we are. When we are responding out of fear that fear is the number one priority for us [and for our brains] and nothing else matters. This is one reason that intelligent and compassionate people can respond to mass shootings by denying that it is related to access to guns and denying that assault style weapons are not needed to protect ourselves because their fear tells them that they must have guns to protect themselves. For people with this type of fear it feels like a matter of life and death.

So how do we help each other not to be afraid? Listening to one another's fears can help reduce them as people then don't feel as alone and are less likely to believe that other people are out to get them. Also, it can help to openly talk about fears that people of color want to make whites become slaves. These fears are ungrounded and actually the more racism and income disparity can end, the better the world will be for everyone. Even the ultra rich will be better off as they will realize that they don't need to be afraid that they don't have enough money. We feel divided by fears and to let go of the fears will allow us to let go of the "us against them" way of coping.

What do you think?

REVISITING HOW TO CHANGE OUR AUTOMATIC BEHAVIOR AND THINKING PATTERNS

Over and over I witness people who come to me for help, struggling with stress that they can't stop or even limit.  They feel controlled by the stress that is usually in the form of worries and fears that they think about over and over.  They have frequently been diagnosed as having an obsessive compulsive disorder [OCD]. In reviewing their symptoms, it appears that they have some OCD type symptoms, but they are mostly focused on repetitive worries and some compulsive behaviors. However, these symptoms do not interfere significantly with their lives. For example, they are not stuck doing things over and over for hours.  So, it seems that their OCD symptoms are coping mechanisms helping them deal with the anxiety that they experience related to past traumatic events. If they can learn to not worry about past events then their OCD symptoms will stop.

Well, what about changing patterns of worry that can control our lives? I mention the worries and OCD type symptoms to emphasize that just as the symptoms are temporary [meant to temporarily help us manage anxiety related to past events] the worries are also temporary as a way of coping with past traumatic events. What is significant is that even though in the past we might have had to cope by worrying, as this helped us to feel more in control as by taking on responsibility when those who were supposed to be responsible weren't and we felt that we were preventing something worse from happening, we do not need to do that now. So how do we convince ourselves and our brains that we do not need to worry anymore.  

We humans modify patterns of behavior and memory patterns frequently without much apparent effort. We calmly tell our brains to change the pattern and why it is ok to do so. When we have experienced stressful events we are reluctant to recall these events as we fear a return of anxiety as if we were still at risk for something bad happening. This is one reason that the patterns remain even though we want relief from the anxiety. We also tend to react to new stresses as if they are the same kind of threat as in the past.  This tells our brain to keep worrying and being stressed and anxious. We seem to have difficulty recognizing that we now have better coping skills and self-awareness, and are not dependent on others as we were in the past. Therefore, new stresses are not threats to us as they were in the past and we can manage them. So, we need to calmly chose to recall stressful events and tell ourselves that we have nothing to fear.