Geoffrey W. Sutton PhD, Psychology and Culture

  What makes for a safe space anymore?   Three mass shootings have recently made news—Buffalo, Uvalde, Tulsa. Yesterday, we made a rare trip to our local mall where we ate our evening meal. As we were leaving, my wife said she found herself looking around to see where she could hide if there was a shooter. We began to analyze her idea. ***** As usual, there are a lot of opinions about how to stop gun violence. Our elected representatives debate. Gun control keeps popping up like a virus that won’t go away. Yesterday (2 June 2022), the American Medical Association injected their ideas. They focus on the means to quickly kill a lot of people. See what they wrote.   increasing the purchasing age for semi-automatic rifles from 18 to 21; banning the importation, sale, manufacture, transfer or possession of high-capacity ammunition magazines and bump stocks and related devices; closing the “ghost-gun loophole;” and creating federal requirements for safe gun stora...

 In today's Washington Post, there's a story about the Texas shooter who entered an elementary school--19 children are dead. Could you predict that the Texas shooter was at high risk? Possibly. The first paragraph of the WP article caught my attention. "The gunman in Tuesday’s elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment, suffered from a fraught home life and lashed out violently against peers and strangers recently and over the years, friends and relatives said." How is that helpful? Peterson and Densley have studied mass shooters. A large number of shooters had a history of childhood trauma and most were in a state of crisis close to the time of the shooting. Here's a quote from their book, The Violence Project . Almost 70% of the mass shooters in schools had a history of childhood trauma  and they killed more people than shooters who did not have trauma. And there's something else about the Texas sh...