A headline in The Guardian newspaper (London) today struck me by its reference to “paranoia.” People in America who are afraid of gun violence coming to a neighborhood near them were accused of being paranoid. The news peg for this journalistic venture into psychoanalysis was the recent spate of perfectly innocent people being shot, and sometimes shot to death, when they knocked on the wrong door, mistakenly drove into a stranger’s driveway, or got into the wrong car in a parking lot by mistake. I know I once tried to open a Honda Accord with my key fob and was momentarily frustrated because the car door wouldn’t unlock. It wasn’t my Accord, but there must be a million or two of the same model, all painted in the same silver gray. I guess I was lucky the real owner wasn’t nearby – he might have thought I was trying to steal his car, and if he had a gun I might not be here, writing this post now.
This is not to be cavalier about the threat of gun violence, nor am I paranoid, but I have to object to the politicization of the word “paranoid” by The Guardian. The gist of the article was that the gun industry and allegedly rabid Conservatives have whipped up such a hysteria (another psychological term) about danger in the streets that people are now “paranoid.”
Well, here’s some data about gun violence that leads to homicide in this country: According to the Pewresearch.org, citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 20,958 gun murders in America in 2021. The total number of murders, including by lethal methods other than guns, was 26,031. Additionally, there were 26,328 gun deaths classified as “suicide” that year, but I want to say without fear of refutation that some murders simply are classified as suicides – I know this from my years as a newspaper reporter, and even one incident in graduate school where a mysterious death was classified as a suicide by the campus police but was widely believed by the international student population to be a homicide.
And then there is the fate of “missing persons.” Some of those people have been murdered and their remains will never be found. They are not among the counted, but we know a certain percentage of missing persons will have been murdered. Every once in a while, a body turns up, then there may be a cold case investigation, even a story on “Dateline” or “48 Hours.”
I want to say something else about the murder rate before getting back to the misuse of the psychiatric term “paranoia” by The Guardian. Trauma centers in major metropolitan areas are much better than in years past in saving gunshot victims. We routinely hear about events where “multiple” people are shot at a party or other gathering yet no one may have died.
Hospitals have learned from war how to increase the chances of survival if shot by a gun or rifle. Without these improvements in trauma care the murder rate would be much higher. Indeed, it would be far more instructive to learn how many people are shot each year compared to years past; I have not yet found such data but will continue looking.
Now, back to the article in The Guardian. It included data that certainly alarmed me. There are reportedly 400 million guns and rifles in the hands of a country with 332 million residents, a population figure that includes infants in nurseries and the infirm in nursing homes or hospice. That’s a lot of guns, and it’s certainly doubtful that every gun owner means well or even knows how to handle his or her weapon properly.
But the data gets more dicey when The Guardian argues that, statistically, most people will never be confronted by someone with a gun or rifle who means harm. That’s apparently the reason to think they’re “paranoid.” But consider the “pot odds,” a term I’m drawing from poker, even the way some people play lotteries. People make big bets if they think the payoff (the size of the pot) warrants the bet, even if the odds of winning are very, very long. Worrying about gun violence, which the headline and content of the article treats dismissively, parallels pot odds, except in this case the pot spells death. Sure, any one of us is unlikely to meet a person who’s going to try to kill us, but the outcome would be so terrible (the worst thing that can happen to a person, most people believe) that plenty of people do not want to take any chance of it ever happening. So, people buy a gun for safety or they move to a town or neighborhood that they think is safe.
But are people who buy guns for self-defense, or move to safe neighborhoods, “paranoid.” The threat is real, not imaginary. And though statistically improbable, the outcome is considered so horrible that no one should be called “paranoid” just because they are afraid. Maybe some people, if they’re frightened by every knock on the door or look suspiciously at any strange face, are paranoid. Maybe the recent spate of shootings, which themselves are statistically rare events, reflect paranoia by the specific shooters, people who are not otherwise career criminals. But to imply that all or most Americans who buy guns for personal safety are paranoid is just The Guardian writers exploiting and abusing an important psychiatric diagnosis.
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Before you go. My latest collection of short stories, “Don’t Go,” has received a very positive review from the respected Midwest Book Review, and has been named a Finalist in the Foreword Reviews INDIES awards for 2022. Read more about it here.