Stochastic

You can't stop the unpredictable, but you can play with its probability

Pentheus torn by Maenads, in a fresco in the Casa dei Vettii, Pompeii, via Wikipedia.

I wonder if Trump’s bizarre initial response to the killing of Rob and Michele Reiner could be considered an incitement to stochastic violence, when he made up the story that their deaths were “reportedly”

due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump

—the theory that the killer was a Trump fan maddened by Reiner’s criticism of Trump, like he’s accepting it as a tribute to himself, the way the angry god Dionysus accepts it and indeed instigates it when his crazed followers the Maenads tear King Pentheus to pieces in the tragedy by Euripides. You feel Trump would love it if a wild Maga crowd did something like that to one of his many enemies.

Now that we’re getting an idea of what actually happened to the Reiners it certainly seems tragic in the Aristotelian sense—inspiring pity and terror—but with no roles for Trumps. That human drama is not what the press will focus on, naturally; they’ll be doing the courtroom drama, with close analysis of the lawyers’ strategy on either side. I don’t want to write about it myself, at least not yet.

Nor about the shooting deaths at Brown University, unless it’s addressing the dysfunction of the FBI under its incompetent Trumpy leadership, which may have let the shooter escape even as Patel was issuing premature announcements of success, which will have to wait until we know a lot more than we do now. As we heard last night that the law enforcement agencies had solved the crime and the murderer, a former physics student from Portugal, had shot himself dead in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, the question arose whether Trump would issue a ban on all Portuguese nationals or maybe all STEM grad students.

Today we learn he’s gone for the Portuguese, or what you might call Portuguese-Plus—suspending the Diversity Lottery green card program, which issues up to 50,000 immigrant visas with a path to permanent residence every year to people from countries that aren’t well represented in the US immigrant population, including Portugal, which sent 38 immigrants under the program last year, according to NPR, apparently because that’s how this killer came, in 2017. NPR adds, coyly, that many of the countries in the program are in Africa, which is what I mean by Portuguese-Plus: the move serves both as a kind of Trumpy response to the shooting and as a fresh blow against diversity-equity-inclusion. Also, of course, it’s illegal, another presidential violation of the Impoundment Control Act and slap in the face to Congress, which no doubt makes it more fun for him and his henchmen.

The Australian government response to the awful Hanukkah massacre on Bondi Beach, as you might imagine, seems more relevant: planning for new hate speech laws in a campaign against antisemitism, and improving gun controls. You might have supposed there isn’t much left to do on the latter, as Australia is always held up as a model for its response to the Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania in 1996, but the fact is mass shootings didn’t really come to a two-decade halt, and the number has been inching up in recent years, and there are just a lot more guns in the country than there were after the massive buybacks of 1996. There will be new restrictions on gun ownership, and another big buyback, and efforts to create a national gun registry will be renewed (one of the problems Australia shares with the US, is federalism leaving firearms regulation largely in the hands of the states, which was supposed to be overcome but wasn’t, really, after Port Arthur). Then there are problems that didn’t exist then, like the proliferation of 3D printing as a way of making untraceable weapons. So yes, there are things.

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In this connection, it may be useful to think about the concepts of stochastic violence and stochastic terrorism. Not so much in the current sense of the terms, as used in arguments focusing on the moral responsibility of the hate speaker, who transmits the message without knowing where it’s going, like the Hutu Rwandan radio broadcasters of 1993-94, and the question of whether they are the effective perpetrators of the genocide, not that there’s anything wrong with such arguments, but the original idea was about something different: about violence that couldn’t have been predicted, in the field of risk assessment; when there’s a random element in the time and place of the violence and the identity of the immediate perpetrators and victims. Can you estimate the probability of violence that to some extent randomly determined (that’s what “stochastic” means)?

In that, the incitement speech is just one factor, and not necessarily the most important the way it clearly was in Rwanda, or there at all. Other factors include potential perpetrators, usually men fitting the “lone wolf” profile, not necessarily ideologically aligned with the inciting party, often not at all well informed, and the proximity of a victim or victims—which might be a celebrity political figure or a whole congregation of people the attacker hates or envies. Those attacks on Trump or Charlie Kirk took place because the attacker knew where they were going to be and were able to get there, and the same goes for the Pulse nightclub or the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school or the Tree of Life Synagogue. You can to some extent predict the possibility that someone could be a victim; for individuals, there are the usual security measures which are generally in place for celebrities, not so much for congregate victims, for whom we (rightly) don’t want to keep them in fear, like schoolkids forced to do terrorism drills, or compromise their freedom of movement. One way of controlling for the existence of potential terrorists would be the fairly obvious (but difficult) things like providing young men with social and educational opportunities, hope for a future, psychotherapeutic support where needed, etc.

And then the other necessary element is the weaponry, preferably assault rifles. Whatever the terrorist is going to use has to be available. It’s well understood on a statistical basis that the number of guns per household in a given community is a contributing factor in the number of gun homicides,

After peaking in 1993, gun homicides in the United States dropped 36 percent by 1998, while non-gun homicides declined only 18 percent. In that same period, the fraction of households with at least one gun fell from more than 42 percent to less than 35 percent. [Mark] Duggan finds that about one-third of the gun-homicide decline... is explained by the fall in gun ownership

(note the overlap with the period of the assault weapons ban from 1994 to 2004). and the reasons are fairly obvious:

Firearms are used in a minority of violent crimes but are of special concern because more than 60 percent of the most serious crimes-criminal homicides-are committed with firearms.... the widespread availability of firearms contributes to the criminal homicide rate and influences violent crime patterns in several other respects as well. A gun is usually superior to other weapons readily available for use in violent crime; even in the hands of a weak and unskilled assailant, a gun poses a credible threat and can be used to kill quickly, from a distance, and in a relatively “impersonal” fashion. Guns are particularly valuable against relatively invulnerable targets. Hence, gun availability facilitates robbery of commercial places and lethal assaults on people who would ordinarily be able to defend themselves against other weapons. Some of the patterns of gun use in violent crime can be readily interpreted in terms of relative vulnerability of different types of victims.

In crimes such as armed robbery the likelihood of a lethal assault is mitigated by the fact that the robber would rather not kill anybody; in a mass killing, where the shooter wants to kill, it’s clearly not mitigated at all.

Thus, from the risk assessment standpoint, it’s clear that the cheapest and most effective way of decreasing the probability of a mass killing is by decreasing the availability of assault rifles—or would be, if not for the right-wing fantasies about the Second Amendment (and the First Amendment too, which makes them unwilling even the mildest social pressure to avoid hate speech, to say nothing of getting the government involved, as Australia seems to be doing) and their embrace by the Supreme Court. It’s a pity.