The Uncomfortable Truth about School Shooters | with Ragy Girgis M.D.

I used to think that there were only two sides to the debate on gun violence: the people who want to ban firearms and those that want to lay the blame for deaths on the people who pull the trigger. I’ve generally thought that the rise of mass shootings was directly tied to the number of guns in the environment. It was basic supply and demand. My assumption was all but confirmed when Congress actually cut funding to public health officials for studying the root causes of gun violence more than 20 years ago. I figured that gun lobby just wanted to keep the obvious truth hidden.

And then, a few years ago a democratic administration re-opened research funds and the data began to trickle in. Among the top researchers in the field of gun violence and mass murder is Ragy Girgis M.D., a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University Department of Psychiatry and the Columbia Mass Murder Database.

Our hour long conversation hasn’t completely changed my mind on the causes of gun violence—I’m still in the camp that guns kill people and not the other way around—but this conversation showed me that the actual data on mass murder is a much more complex story once you consider the motives of the shooters. In other words, while taking away everyone's guns might indeed reduce gun violence through brute force, it's just as important to understand WHY mass shooters take up arms in the first place.

That’s because for most mass murderers, the goal is not usually to score the largest body count, rather, it’s to provoke law enforcement into a gunfight. In other words, mass shooters aren’t (usually) out to murder people as much as they want to find someone else to take their lives.

Understanding that key fact—proven out by Girgis’s exhaustive data set—shows that there’s more that we can do to make America a safer place than only focusing on the Second Amendment

Ragy Girgis M.D: https://www.columbiapsychiatry.org/pr...

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