At least two-thirds of the perpetrators who commit gun homicides are males under the age of 30.  What else do these shooters have in common?  They live in neighborhoods with overall high crime rates and low family income, they had previous contact with their victim, all facts that are well known. But there’s another commonality these shooters share which, as far as I can tell, isn’t mentioned in the discussions about gun violence and crime.

The commonality has to do with certain neurological and developmental factors shared by males under the age of 30.  It turns out that the part of the brain that controls processing of information about impulse, desire, goals, self-interest, rules and risk develops latest and probably isn’t fully formed until the mid-20’s or later.  And while adolescents and young adults both perceive and balance ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ as well as older adults, they tend to let peer pressures rather than expected outcomes guide their behavior when they have to choose between risks and rewards.

Now take this neurological-behavioral profile of males between ages 15 to 30 and stick a gun in their hands. The brain research clearly demonstrates that kids and young adults walking around with guns understand the risks involved. Whether it’s the NSSF’s new Project ChildSafe, the NRA’s Eddie Eagle or the community-specific gun safety programs that have expanded since Sandy Hook, nobody’s telling the kids something they don’t already know.

So what can we do to mitigate what President Obama calls this ‘epidemic’ of gun violence when the population most at risk consciously chooses to ignore the risk?  I think the simplest answer would be to look at what communities have done to protect themselves from other kinds of epidemics that threatened public health in the past.  And the most effective method has been to quarantine, or isolate the area or population where the threat is most extreme.  It worked in 14^th-century Italy, according to Boccaccio in The Decameron.  Why wouldn’t it work now?

Last month the city of Springfield, Mass., recorded its 12^th gun homicide.  If the killing rate continues, the city might hit 15 shooting fatalities this year, a number it actually surpassed  in 2010.  This gives the city a homicide rate of 10.2 per 100,000 residents, nearly three times the national rate.  But the city’s overall rate hides the fact that virtually all the violence takes place in two specific neighborhoods bounded on the north by Interstate 291 and on the south by State Route 83.  There two neighborhoods contain less than 40,000 residents which means that the homicide rates here are 40 per 100,000, more than 10 times the national rate.  This isn’t an epidemic?

Springfield Homicides 2010                                                                                                                                                    Springfield Homicides 2013

In 2010, not a single victim was older than 35 and 5 were not yet 20, the average age of all victims was 22.  This year there have been three older victims (+35 y/o) but otherwise the 2010 average age remains about the same in 2013.  If I had room to show the data for 2011 and 2012, the map would be the same.  Why can’t this area be designated a quarantine zone?  Following the designation, the police would behave like public health workers and conduct a residence-by-residence contact with everyone in the quarantine zone.  Ask every resident if they have seen any guns, ask permission to conduct a premise search, create a “watch list” of persons or residences that appear to be particularly high risk.  There’s no Constitutional issues here, you’re not kicking down any doors.  But you are telling people that there is one thing that must be done to curb the epidemic: the epidemic known as violence is carried by a virus known as guns and they must be eliminated in order to reduce the risk.

Related articles

• How Do We Reduce Gun Violence? (dish.andrewsullivan.com)
• Obama: ‘Epidemic of gun violence’ tearing US apart (itv.com)