After the Virginia Tech massacre

America's tragedy

Apr 19th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Its politicians are still running away from a debate about guns

IN THE aftermath of the massacre at Virginia Tech university on April 16th, as the nation mourned a fresh springtime crop of young lives cut short by a psychopath's bullets, President George Bush and those vying for his job offered their prayers and condolences. They spoke eloquently of their shock and sadness and horror at the tragedy. The Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives called for a “moment of silence”. Only two candidates said anything about guns, and that was to support the right to have them.

Cho Seung-hui does not stand for America's students, any more than Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris did when they slaughtered 13 of their fellow high-school students at Columbine in 1999. Such disturbed people exist in every society. The difference, as everyone knows but no one in authority was saying this week, is that in America such individuals have easy access to weapons of terrible destructive power. Cho killed his victims with two guns, one of them a Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol, a rapid-fire weapon that is available only to police in virtually every other country, but which can legally be bought over the counter in thousands of gun-shops in America. There are estimated to be some 240m guns in America, considerably more than there are adults, and around a third of them are handguns, easy to conceal and use. Had powerful guns not been available to him, the deranged Cho would have killed fewer people, and perhaps none at all.

But the tragedies of Virginia Tech—and Columbine, and Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, where five girls were shot at an Amish school last year—are not the full measure of the curse of guns. More bleakly terrible is America's annual harvest of gun deaths that are not mass murders: some 14,000 routine killings committed in 2005 with guns, to which must be added 16,000 suicides by firearm and 650 fatal accidents (2004 figures). Many of these, especially the suicides, would have happened anyway: but guns make them much easier. Since the killing of John Kennedy in 1963, more Americans have died by American gunfire than perished on foreign battlefields in the whole of the 20th century. In 2005 more than 400 children were murdered with guns.

The trigger and the damage done

The news is not uniformly bad: gun crime fell steadily throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. But it is still at dreadful levels, and it rose sharply again in 2005. Police report that in many cities it rose even faster in 2006. William Bratton, the police chief of Los Angeles (and formerly of New York), speaks of a “gathering storm of crime”. Politicians on both sides, he says, have been “captured” by the vocal National Rifle Association (NRA). The silence over Virginia Tech shows he has a point.

The Democrats have been the most disappointing, because until recently they had been the party of gun control. In 1994 President Bill Clinton approved a bill banning assault weapons (covering semi-automatic rifles plus high-capacity magazines for handguns) and the year before that a bill imposing a requirement for background checks. But Democrats believe they paid a high price for their courage: losing the House of Representatives in 1994 shortly after the assault-weapons ban, and then losing the presidency in 2000. Had Al Gore held Arkansas or West Virginia or his own Tennessee, all strongly pro-gun, he would have won the election. These days, with hopes for a victory in 2008 dependent on the South and the mountain West, it is a brave Democrat who will talk about gun control. Some of them dismiss the very idea as “insensitive”.

Mr Bush however, has done active damage. On his watch the assault-weapons ban was allowed to lapse in 2004. New laws make it much harder to trace illegal weapons and require the destruction after 24 hours of information gathered during checks of would-be gun-buyers. The administration has also reopened debate on the second amendment, which enshrines the right to bear arms. Last month an appeals court in Washington, DC, overturned the capital's prohibition on handguns, declaring that it violates the second amendment. The case will probably go to the newly conservative Supreme Court, which might end most state and local efforts at gun control.

Freedom yes, but which one?

No phrase is bandied around more in the gun debate than “freedom of the individual”. When it comes to most dangerous products—be they drugs, cigarettes or fast cars—this newspaper advocates a more liberal approach than the American government does. But when it comes to handguns, automatic weapons and other things specifically designed to kill people, we believe control is necessary, not least because the failure to deal with such violent devices often means that other freedoms must be curtailed. Instead of a debate about guns, America is now having a debate about campus security.

Americans are in fact queasier about guns than the national debate might suggest. Only a third of households now have guns, down from 54% in 1977. In poll after poll a clear majority has supported tightening controls. Very few Americans support a complete ban, even of handguns—there are too many out there already, and many people reasonably feel that they need to be able to protect themselves. But much could still be done without really infringing that right.

The assault-weapons ban should be renewed, with its egregious loopholes removed. No civilian needs an AK-47 for a legitimate purpose, but you can buy one online for $379.99. Guns could be made much safer, with the mandatory fitting of child-proof locks. A system of registration for guns and gun-owners, as exists in all other rich countries, threatens no one but the criminal. Cooling-off periods, a much more open flow of intelligence, tighter rules on the trading of guns and a wider blacklist of those ineligible to buy them would all help.

Many of these things are being done by cities or states, and have worked fairly well. But jurisdictions with tough rules are undermined by neighbours with weak ones. Only an effort at the federal level will work. Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York, has put together a coalition of no fewer than 180 mayors to fight for just that. Good luck to him.

Mar 22nd 2007
From The Economist print edition

The neurology of morality is being explored

On the face of things, the outcomes are identical in both situations. Either one person dies or five do. But, whereas most people have no difficulty choosing which is better in the second case (to kill one rather than five), the first usually causes paroxysms of guilt. Moral philosophers have spent years discussing this paradox. It has, however, taken a team of neuroscientists, led by Michael Koenigs of the University of Iowa and Liane Young of Harvard University, to come up with at least part of the real answer.

Basic emotions, such as fear, are regulated in part of the brain called the limbic system. These emotions—along with the limbic system—are shared by all mammals. Social emotions such as compassion, shame and guilt, however, are confined to a small number of species, and are most strongly expressed in man. They are associated with a particular part of the prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain that is much bigger in humans than in other mammal species. Dr Koenigs, Ms Young and their colleagues suspected that the seat of the runaway-railway-wagon paradox lies in that specific part of the prefrontal cortex, known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC).

To test this idea, they looked at six people with damage to the VMPC on both sides of their brains. These people are known from other work to have poor social-emotional responses. The researchers compared the responses of these people to various moral dilemmas with those of a group whose brains were undamaged and a second group with equivalent damage in other parts of the cortex. All three groups were asked questions (including the runaway-railway-wagon paradox) that previous studies have shown fall either side of the divide between the obvious and the squirm-inducing. The researchers' hypothesis was that people with VMPC-damage would come to the utilitarian answer in difficult cases (push the guy in front of the wagon) more often than either of the other two groups. And that, as they describe in this week's Nature, was exactly what happened. In cases where the choice involved personally causing harm, even for good ends, destroying the centre of social emotion also destroyed what is regarded by most people as normal moral judgment.

Pinning down the location of this part of morality does not answer the more fundamental question of why it evolved the way it did. It does, however, assist the process of thinking about that question.

In these cases it seems that the decision on how to act is not a single, rational calculation of the sort that moral philosophers have generally assumed is going on, but a conflict between two processes, with one (the emotional) sometimes able to override the other (the utilitarian, the location of which this study does not address).

That fits with one of the tenets of evolutionary psychology—a field which, as its name suggests, seeks to explain, rather than merely describe, mental processes. This is that minds are composed of modules evolved for given purposes. Dr Koenigs and Ms Young have shown that the VMPC may be the site of a “moral-decision” module, linked to the social emotions, that either regulates or is regulated by an as-yet-unlocated utilitarian module.

This does not answer the question of what this module (what philosophers would call “moral sense”) is actually for. But it does suggest the question should be addressed functionally, rather than in the abstract. Time, perhaps, for philosophers to put away their copies of Kant and pull a dusty tome of Darwin off the bookshelf.

Using sex to sell a product does not work—particularly for women

Ellie Parker and Adrian Furnham of University College London devised an experiment to test three ideas. The first was to confirm that men and women alike would struggle to remember the brand of a product that was advertised during a break in a programme that contained sex. The second was that commercials that had an erotic element would be recalled more readily than those that did not. Finally they wanted to know whether people would remember the advertisement more easily if its theme contrasted with the programme into which it had been inserted.

They recruited 60 young adults and divided them into four groups. The first and third groups were treated to an episode of “Sex and the City” called “Was it good for you?” in which the four female characters try to ascertain whether they are good in bed. It includes kissing, foreplay, nudity and sex scenes, and a discussion of the merits of sex, sexual failings and homosexuality. The second and fourth groups were shown an episode of “Malcolm in the Middle”, about the second-eldest of three boys raised at home in a dysfunctional family. It contained no such titillating material.

During a commercial break in the screenings, the researchers showed the first and second groups a series of six advertisements for products including shampoo, perfume and beer, all of which played on sex. The third and fourth groups were also shown a series of six advertisements for the same type of products that did not employ eroticism. They then asked their subjects about what they had seen. The results are published in the March issue of Applied Cognitive Psychology.

Those who had watched “Sex in the City” could remember little other than the programme. They were less able to name which brands had been advertised than were the groups that had watched “Malcolm in the Middle”, whether or not the advertisement tried to be sexy. Even when the researchers prompted their recall, by naming the type of product that had been advertised, the viewers of “Sex in the City” failed to remember what they had seen, compared with the groups that had seen more mundane scenes.

To test the second hypothesis, the researchers compared the recollections of those who had seen the advertisements that used the promise of sexual allure with those of the people who saw advertisements that did not titillate. They found no significant difference between the two groups. There was, however, a difference between the sexes: men were more likely to remember sexual advertisements (albeit not the brand advertised) whereas women were more likely to remember non-sexual advertisements.

Finally the researchers tested to see whether the people who had watched “Sex in the City” combined with non-sexual commercials and those who had watched “Malcolm in the Middle” combined with sexual commercials remembered what was being advertised better than those shown more homogenous fare. Again, they found no significant difference between the two groups; this time, men and women reacted in the same way.

Earlier work has suggested that sex and violence in television programmes deter people from paying attention to advertisements, but speculated that this may be overcome by using sex in the commercials as well. The new work suggests that this view is mistaken. It would appear that sex does not sell anything other than itself.

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