Loughner, dangerousness, and the collective gut feeling
It seems that nearly everyone who came into contact with Jared Loughner during the past year or two sensed that he was weird, perhaps even crazy. Nor did the form his oddity took seem harmless, although as far as we know he never directly threatened anyone.
Nevertheless, scads of people perceived him as a threat and as imminently very very dangerous. Of all those who had encountered this guy recently in daily life—and especially his teachers and classmate, and the former friends with whom he broke off relations (we don’t know much yet about his parents)—there seems to have hardly been a dissenting voice to the view that this guy was going to do something frightening and destructive to others.
But our justice system is act-oriented, not person-oriented. You can’t put someone in jail for being crazy and giving people a very uneasy feeling, especially in the absence of threats, although you used to be able to put that same someone into a mental institution for that very reason—sometimes for a short while, sometimes for a long while. We are now far more libertarian and restrictive about such things, and perhaps we should be; I’m a moderate libertarian (is that an oxymoron?) myself.
But something about a situation in which the consensus is so powerful makes one pause and wonder what could, would, and should have been done with a Jared Loughner, and who should have done it.
His parents seem to have had the highest responsibility, but maybe they tried and failed; after all, he was not a minor, although he still lived with them and one would think they had some leverage there.
His friends? The college? The police who escorted him out of school? It is unclear whether anyone had the power and inclination to change this although many were able to foresee it or at least something like it—if not in its details (who, what, where, how), then certainly in its general outlines.
The following is not a digression, although it may sound like it: about twenty years ago, when my husband and I were married and our child was small, we had a smallish dog. What a wonderful dog he was—friendly to all creatures, and usually very quiet. No yappy little dog was he. He never met a person he didn’t like—until one day, an old acquaintance of my husband’s came to visit.
My husband hadn’t seen him since high school, which had been a long time earlier. He called to tell us he was in town, and when he came to the door and we opened it, our dog growled.
I mean really growled. Snarled and bared his teeth and barked and barked and never let up. We had to put the dog in another room and close the door, and only then did he calm down. But it soon became apparent what had been going on with the dog, because it soon became apparent that our guest was unhinged.
Our visitor wasn’t dangerous. At least, he didn’t seem so to us; I’m not sure the dog, who clearly had methods beyond ours, shared our perception.
Who knows what it was the dog was picking up on? The whiff of madness? I think of the collective response to Jared Loughner as the equivalent of hundreds or even thousands of those dogs, all too polite to bark and snarl, but all sensing the same dangerous offness and the skewed mind that alerted them to the presence of danger.
[ADDENDUM: I didn’t read yesterday’s excellent post of Dr. Sanity’s until just now, but it’s highly relevant and well worth reading. Dr. Sanity has been in the trenches for decades, trying to predict the dangerousness of troubled and/or insane people, and she’s got a lot to say about how difficult it is.]
Studying psych in the Sixties, we were shown how mean the institution staff people could be. They trained dogs to sniff out schizophrenics. Boy, can’t get much worse than that.
You’d think that having the permanent stress of being schizo would cause adrenal abnormalities that would be obvious to a dog, or that schizophrenia might be organic, susceptible to drugs.
But, nooooo. Three to five years’ psycho therapy would do the trick. Hate to lose patients to the pharmacist. Clients, I mean. Clients.
Some of these medical service dogs are being trained to alert to an oncoming seizure, for example. You’d think…. Could a state-run office for involuntary institutionalization be allowed to run on a dog’s say-so?
very interesting story, Neo, thanks.
We have to find a way of getting information about drug use, mental health issues, and weird behavior that come to the attention of the authorities gets passed on to the FBI gun check list. This guy hit on at least two of these categories as did the Virginia Tech shooter.
We had a dog who was unfriendly but never bit anyone. The only person he bit was a crooked realtor who cheated my parents out of a lot of money. I was a kid at the time and the dog and I both told my parents the lady was no good, but they did not listen to us as we were only a dog and a child.
Interesting theory. I have noticed my dog too has a refined taste in people.
http://libertyatstake.blogspot.com
“Because the Only Good Progressive is a Failed Progressive”
It’s probably no coincidence that the persons dogs despise most, single handedly coined the phrase “going postal”.
A slightly off topic dog meets un-friend story. A new hire met my boss’s dog. After the dog had been rescued from an abusive kennel, it had been rehabilitated to a friendly dog. The new hire was from a big city in the Third World, where dogs often ran in packs, so she didn’t like dogs.
When the new hire stepped inside, she stayed right inside the door, about 15′ from the dog. The dog could sense that the stranger didn’t like the dog, and after barking, peed on the floor. My interpretation is that the dog was upset at meeting someone who didn’t like it.
Fortunately the new hire was a telecommuter, so that was the only time she and the dog interacted.
This was not a case of dog meets psycho. It was a case of dog meets someone who doesn’t like dogs. Both cases show a dog being able to more quickly perceive things than people.
I’ve had two thoughts about the Tucson tragedy: one, we’d better not get too involved in our “social media” to the exclusion of actual socializing, lest we lose our in-person intuition about people (or, more likely, as evolution doesn’t move so fast as all THAT, we might lose our TRUST in our in-person intuition).
And two, like stranger-abduction of children, it seems to me that there’s no foolproof way to avoid spree crimes. Even if we took everyone’s guns away with no pretext whatsoever, there’s fertilizer and fuel oil, you know? And there’d be no foolproof way to ensure that those WITH legal access to guns (police, military) would not inadvertently harbor the occasional viper in the bosom. But on the plus side, these events are so rare that they’ll never approach the danger you put yourself in by commuting to work. Or taking a shower.
It’s a terrible tragedy, and we should of course do everything possible, within a legal and appropriately civil-rights-oriented framework, to ensure that it can’t be repeated. But we may find that there’s little we CAN do.
Jamie,
Nobody wants to think there’s nothing to be done. That’s why we must do something and the questions as to whether it will work and whether it will have unfortunate unintended consequences are dismissed, usually with sneering.
The idea that we don’t and can’t have control is hard to swallow.
One just need look at the overall body count involving schizos compared with Obama supporters. I’ll take my chances with the guy that talks to himself.
We’ve always had the whackos. But when we lived in communities-more-than-name-only, folks often dealt with them themselves. We cannot do that anymore. Everything is a community this and community that…the black comm, the muslim comm, the gay comm, blah blah. But community as a functioning social entity instead of a demographic hardly exists anymore except in super-rural settings.
My sweet dog thinks everyone loves her and she loves every one, except my son in law who is very mentally unstable with PTSD. She growls and hides when she sees him. I think she is picking up on some very bad vibes. She will sometimes be friendly to him but most of the time she is very afraid. As the Do Whisperer says they sense our energy. I have had that feeling with a few people who turned out to be bad apples.
that would be the Dog Whisperer, Cesar Milan.
One of the unintended consequences of an omnipotent government perhaps. There are far too many, myself included, content to sit back and let “them” take care of the problem.
Muslims regard dogs as unclean, because Mohammad told them so.
Many people have speculated that dogs may have had a negative reaction to old Mo.
“something about a situation in which the consensus is so powerful makes one pause and wonder what could, would, and should have been done…and who should have done it.”
Well, I think the answer is obvious. All those people should have denounced him. Perhaps we can employ some form of social media (Snitch-face?).
Seriously, the real answer is that there is no answer that’s going to satisfy all the time. One of the costs of your freedom is the danger associated with being free. If you push the balance toward security, the scale tips away from freedom. Perfect solutions do not exist in an imperfect world.
So, belts AND suspenders, and get a dog, too. (I would have said a gun AND a knife, but you know….)
The dog story was interesting..reminded me of another one. During WWII, the British underground organization called Special Operations Executive had an operative who was probably a double agent for the Germans, though this was never conclusively proven.
Another SOE agent noted that when this man visited him, his dog…who had never behaved with hostility to anyone…began growling immediately.
How many people out there are like Jared Loughner? If dogs, fellow students, police, etc identify thousands they think are like him in, say, Arizona, that information would be almost completely useless. There wouldn’t be enough resources (hospitals, psychologists) available to properly evaluate them all. And of course there is the problem of false positives – people that are actually harmless, they just appear to be weird. Too many false negatives also render the method useless. On the other hand, if the number identified is quite small, then it might make sense to evaluate these people professionally and more thoroughly. So was Mr. Loughner the only person his instructors at the College noticed, or was the behavior somewhat common?
The police, or sheriff, certainly had reason to detain him and probably have him psychologically evaluated with regard to numerous death threats. A record of mental illness would have disqualified him from purchasing a weapon legally. What’s Sheriff Dupnik’s excuse?
L. Greg: it is not at all common to be thrown out of college for behavior that frightens nearly everyone you meet.
I have read that one of the reasons the police were at Loughner’s home all those times was that Loughner made numerous death threats. Y’all pardon me for bein’ a pore dumb redneck but back before I retired making death threats was a crime.
Sorry, Loughner should have been arrested, probably more than once. In my old department we would have sent him before the judge to see if he should get an involuntary commitment for a psych eval.
Sorry, law enforcement dropped the ball here, probably because his mother was a medium high county employee. Ans so a nine year old girl was shot in the chest. I thank God that my old department we valued the lives of little girls more than protecting county workers from shame.
It is not the taste, it is the smell. Schizophrenics have different biochemistry, so they must smell differently. And dog’s sense of smell is hundred times more acute than that of humans. Dogs are experts in human emotions, this is the necessary survival skill for them. So they evolved into the best judges of human emotional instability and sanity, overperforming most shrinks in this crucial ability.
Sergey
Yeah. And if the bio is different, they need a pill, or if a pill won’t work, nothing else will, either. Imagine the pshrinks biting on that one forty-plus years ago.
So the fact that someone “feels” dangerous to to the feelee is enough to have them locked up?
what happens if two or three feelers of dangerous people pick up bad vibes about each other?
Lock them all three up!
Perhaps this is why the democrats “feel” returning Veterans might be easy to manipulate into terrorist acts because the Vets make the democrats “feel” endangered by their “skills” or their aquiered madness from war.
Dogs and feelings that’s what makes the locking up of alleged dangerous folks is going to come to.
OK who decides who is dangerous and who is not?
apachetears: that was exactly the point of my article. Just “feeling” that someone is dangerous–even if it’s a consensus opinion in everyone a person encounters–is not enough to lock a person up. In this case, however, Loughner might have been referred for psychiatric evaluation through someone petitioning the court, either his parents reporting or perhaps an authority involved in his dismissal from college for some very unusual behavior that indicated a psychiatric problem. This may not have helped even if it occurred, because (among other things) a person cannot be compelled to take medication against his/her will.
The linked article in the addendum, by Dr. Sanity, goes into some detail on exactly how a psychiatrist tries to make a determination of dangerousness once a person is referred by self or others.
How dogs pick up “smells” or “vibes” from those who are off-kilter is beyond my ability to determine. I do know the phenomenon is real. We have a family a few houses away that we call “The Aliens” for a number of reasons, chiefly that they just do not seem to be of this world. I used to allow their 2 little children to come to our house to play with our grandchildren. Our two sweet dogs always reacted with growling and frantic barking whenever the 2 Aliens were here. Out of fear that my dogs would eventually bite, (and because one of the Aliens broke a branch off of one of our specimen trees), I no longer let them come here to play. By the way, it isn’t because the Aliens don’t like dogs; they have one. Our dogs have never reacted around anyone, friends,strangers, workmen the way they did with the Alien children.
Peter: I had heard that too, but then I read it was a false report and that he never made death threats.
My German Shepherd’s body language goes on alert when we encounter a crazy person, and he always notices before I do. Unfortunately, this extends to emo kids and the developmentally disabled, and he gets downright hostile towards skate boarders.
Oddly, he is OK w/ the great majority of homeless unless they are begging.
Dog behavior is useful to his person(s), but a dog’s testimony would not be accepted by any tribunal, so is useless to the matter at hand.
cyclerider
Bit of snark here, but eyewitness evidence isn’t all that great, either. If we’re talking false positives, or false negatives, or reacting to somebody weird, crazy and off-center but not currently dangerous, maybe we shouldn’t actually do the numbers ref eyewitness vs. dogs. No telling what we’d find. Lie detector evidence isn’t allowed in court but…. Expert witnesses from time to time get busted for lying like a rug for a price. A reasonably good scifi writer could take this logically a long way. Be fun to read that.
apachetears is on to something. Stalin and his imitators frequently locked up political dissidents–if they were lucky–as being insane. We already know that various would-be pshrinks have claimed that conservativism is a pathology, in the literal sense.
My question is whether Loughner’s activities taken in sum should have been in a database which would be accessed by someone selling him a gun.