I’m very disturbed over the violent events of the past few weeks, as many people are, but it seems for different reasons. As a psychotherapist, I get to see issues through many different lenses as clients come in and work through their own distress. I also have many first responders among my clients, who bring different perspectives than the public at large. Finally there are my own views, colored by my own life experiences and education.

What does all that mean?

For starters, it means I’m exhausted after last week. While the public eye has been fixed on San Bernardino, I’ve been helping clients work through fear, shock, and grief over the shooting death of a local teen. Thus the hobbit reference in the title…I’ve been longing for a Samwise Gamgee to tell me “There’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for!”

Beyond that, it means that I’m disturbed by the outcry, once again, for gun control. Certainly, if guns were less readily available, then the frequency and breadth of the mass killings might decrease. But have we learned nothing from prohibition and the war on drugs? When people want something illegal, they find a way to get it. There isn’t much research to help us understand why people plan and execute mass killings, but I have an educated guess. It has to do with impulse control.

Everyone has emotions, and at different times of life most people have at least a thought about throwing a temper tantrum or getting revenge. Usually, those people exercise impulse control and don’t go on killing sprees. Two factors seem to be changing that. One is the belief that “more is better” and everyone needs to express feelings. The second is the constant bombardment of our brains with violent images and the ability to kill people whenever we want to virtually. It’s just not as taboo to shoot up a place if you’ve already done it thousands of times in video games and watched/heard/felt it in movies. The neural pathways that know how to do this already have a foundation.

To go back to the first piece about “more is better,” I’m remembering a lecture I heard years ago. (I wish I could remember the woman’s name so I could give her proper credit.) She spoke about emotional expression and how Freud started something that is now run amok. Freud worked with a limited set of upper-middle class Caucasians who had been taught to repress all strong emotion. Thus he introduced us to the idea of full expression. However, we now have a few generations of people who have grown up with the idea that they not only “should” freely express emotion, but that they also have the right to. Emotional expression, when it has been repressed, is a first step towards health, not the end-product.

There’s the tie-in to buying flour and baking a cake. Our society seems to be caught in a young developmental phase of wanting things to be fast, easy, and painless. Impulse control is something that is learned over time, and the parts of the brain that say “you don’t have to buy that big-screen TV today in order to be happy” are the same parts that say “you don’t have to pick up assault rifles and murder people in order to manage your anger.” Fixing this problem is more about teaching accountability and self-control than it is about restricting access to weapons.

All of the people who stake out their positions about gun control and then demonize the other side without proposing and actually implementing viable answers are simply adding to the frenzy. The fact that it seems to happen each time one of these incidents occurs is very disturbing, because all of the outcry has not brought any change.