Can Technology Stop Mass Shootings?

The mass shooting at Umpqua Community College on Oct. 1 brought a violent end to the lives of nine victims (eight students and one professor), besides the death of the perpetrator, Christopher Harper-Mercer, at the hands of police called to the scene.  This tragedy has inspired a predictable chorus of editorials calling for something to be done about such things. 

Two voices heard on opposite sides of the political fence are E. J. Dionne, based at the Washington Post, and Charles Krauthammer, a familiar face on Fox TV.  In a recent column, Dionne decries the standard knee-jerk responses of his fellow liberals who call for gun control laws that they know won't pass Congress.  He rightly regards this as a futile gesture, especially now that Republicans control both houses of Congress and the National Rifle Association's influence is strengthened thereby.  Dionne's idea is to focus on gunmakers, who sell almost half their output to governments of various forms (federal, state, and local) and who might start making safer guns if that segment of the market demanded them. 

Safer how?  Dionne mentions two technologies that might mitigate unlawful gun use:  smart guns that can be used only by their owner, and microstamping of guns and bullets.  Several gunmakers have marketed various versions of smart guns, which typically use some add-on such as a magnetic ring or RFID chip worn by the owner to allow use of the gun.  These things are not popular with the gun lobby, and a sea change in attitudes would have to happen for any one of the smart-gun technologies to become common.  Microstamping is a patented technique of engraving a tiny serial number on the firing pin of a gun, which is then stamped into the cartridge when the gun fires.  If the cartridge is recovered, it can be matched with the microstamped gun.  Although California passed a law requiring microstamping of semi-automatic guns, it specifically exempted law-enforcement weapons (there goes the government tie-in), and two gun manufacturers have quit selling semi-automatic weapons in that state, citing the microstamping requirement as a major reason. 

The main weakness of Dionne's technological fixes has nothing to do with the virtues or flaws of a given new technology.  As Charles Krauthammer pointed out in his column last week, even if every new gun sold was smart enough to shoot only at truly bad guys, there were some 350 million guns in the U. S. as of last year (more than one for every man, woman, and child), and the only effective gun law that would stand a chance of reducing mass shootings would have to round up the ones out there already.  Krauthammer cites Australia's compulsory buy-back program as an example of this, but for a number of reasons it would never work in the U. S.  To stop such a program here, all that gun proponents would need to do is to cite the Second Amendment, which the U. S. Supreme Court has interpreted as granting citizens the right to bear arms.

And that gets to the tradeoff involved in this situation.  Australia decided that the risk of gun-related crime was so great that they sacrificed the freedom of average citizens to bear arms, by and large.  In this country, the right of private citizens to own guns is valued more highly, and the result is that we have to run the risk of unstable individuals now and then getting hold of a gun and shooting lots of people.

Is that problem any worse now than it has been?  Every mass shooting is a unique tragedy, but if we look at them in the same light as other unlikely but spectacularly awful ways to die such as airplane crashes, the problem takes on a different look.  According to the Stanford Mass Shootings in America Database, a comprehensive but not exhaustive study of mass shootings in the U. S. since 1966, 1011 people have died in mass shootings in the last 49 years.  To put that into perspective, more than 1300 passengers have died in commercial airline crashes in the U. S. since only 1996, although many of those fatalities happened in the 9/11 terrorist attack.  Graphing the Stanford data versus time produces a curve that has no clear upward or downward trend—just noticeable spikes that don't seem to be clustering toward the recent past. 

Maybe it's coldhearted to view these things as statistics, but one way to view this is that as a society, we have decided to tolerate a certain risk of a small number of unstable people getting hold of a gun as the price we pay for the freedom of the vast majority of well-behaved, law-abiding gun owners to keep their firearms.  Krauthammer speculates as to how you could stop the isolated mass shooters, but most of them prior to their flame-outs never do anything illegal enough to warrant taking their guns away before they come out shooting.  What has emerged about Christopher Harper-Mercer's background has eerie resonances with that of another mass shooter, Adam Lanza, who walked into a schoolroom in Sandy Hook, Connecticut and killed 26 people after shooting his mother, and then killed himself on Dec. 12, 2012.  Both were loners with absent fathers whose mothers struggled to socialize their autistic-spectrum sons.  But if having minor autistic tendencies is made a crime, we'll have to lock up a lot of engineers.

These matters come close to home here at my university, just down the road from Austin where Charles Whitman inaugurated the modern era of mass shootings in 1966 from the famed University of Texas tower.  In its most recent session, the Texas legislature passed a law making it legal for qualified concealed-weapons owners to carry their firearms into classrooms and other buildings at public and private universities.  The idea seems to be that if a nut case suspects that somebody besides himself may have a gun in the room, he'll at least hesitate before he starts anything.  Even if he does, maybe dead-eye Annie there in the back row will take him out before he gets too far. 

Needless to say, I don't look forward to the Shootout at the Mitte Engineering Building taking place in my classroom.  Fortunately, you have to be 21 to get a concealed-carry permit, and so only a small minority of our students would qualify. 

We can count on oceanic news coverage of any mass shooting, but it's hard to keep a sense of perspective while the media rattles on.  Unless the great majority of gun owners in the U. S. decide it's just not a good idea to have a gun around, those 350 million weapons are not going to go away any time soon.  And anybody without a serious criminal record (and even some with one) can still get one of them.  Current technological fixes for the problem simply don't seem to have the political traction to get very far.  Maybe smart, unobtrusive metal detectors with RFID chips for people authorized to carry concealed weapons could work, but that would be a lot of expense for an unlikely problem.  In the meantime, I'm going to act like nobody in my classroom has a gun.  But all the same, I'm glad my podium is close to the exit.

Sources:  E. J. Dionne's column "Let's focus on gun makers and smart-gun technology" was carried by the Austin American-Statesman on Oct. 9, 2015.  Charles Krauthammer's "Massacre begets charade with confiscation a no-go" appeared in the same publication on Oct. 10.  The Stanford Mass Shootings in America Database is available to anyone (after a check-in procedure) at https://library.stanford.edu/projects/mass-shootings-america.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on smart guns, microstamping, and airline fatality statistics. 

You Can't See the Doctor, He's Checking Boxes Right Now

Anyone who has seen a doctor in the U. S. in the last few years knows that a laptop or notebook computer is now as essential a piece of medical equipment as the old stethoscope used to be.  The reason is that as of the end of this year, health-care providers will be penalized in the form of reduced Medicare payments for failing to use, and to show that they are using, a certified electronic medical record (EMR) system.  As columnist Charles Krauthammer pointed out recently, this quasi-compulsory adoption of software, some of which at least is clearly not ready for prime time, has led to the creation of a new paramedical profession:  that of scribe.  A scribe is a person who follows the doctor around with the laptop or notebook, taking down information that the doctor would otherwise have to enter manually.  Of course, not all practices can afford scribes, but according to Krauthammer, those who can't have to deal directly with endless lists of checkboxes that attempt to fit each unique patient's case into a straitjacket of database characterizations.  And did I mention that many of these certified EMR systems use different words to describe the same conditions? 

Due purely to reasons of economy and efficiency, many doctors and hospitals were gradually converting to electronic medical records before 2009, when the federal government enacted the Health Information Technology For Economic and Clinical Health Act as part of that year's huge fiscal stimulus package.  Among other things, that bill created the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology, where one can go online and browse through some 700 or so EMR applications that qualify as certified by the government.  In a perverse way, I suppose this part of the stimulus worked if the real goal was to create jobs, namely those medical scribe positions.  But I thought that the reason to adopt computerized medical records was to make things more efficient.  I suppose that shows I think more like an engineer than a politician.

Let's contrast the way the medical profession is being shoved into the computer age with the way the legal profession did it.  To my knowledge, there are no laws that compel a law firm to use software in its operations.  There may still be some old backwoods lawyer in Tennessee who uses a Dictaphone, and his secretary puts the machine's earphone up to her hearing aid and types documents out on an IBM Selectric.  But if they still want to work that way, nobody's going to exact legal penalties on them—they just won't get a lot of work done. 

Back in the 1980s, one of the first word processing programs to make a big impression on the legal profession was Corel's WordPerfect.  The personal-computer application world was still in its infancy back then, and it was a time when a variety of competing applications were available and shared the growing market.  Somehow, WordPerfect managed to capture a critical fraction of the law-profession market, and the network effect of dominant market share took over.  This happens when a product's output has to be shared among users, as word-processing output often is.  If everybody you work with uses Product X, you are under a lot of pressure to buy Product X yourself, even if you personally prefer Product Y.  So when X equaled WordPerfect, lawyers all over the U. S. began to adopt it as their standard word-processing software, and this remained the case even as the rest of the world dropped everything else and bought Microsoft Word. 

Even as recently as 2011, however, as many as half the law firms in New York City still use WordPerfect, even though it can't do things as elementary as generating .pdf files.  But lawyers have always wanted to be different than everybody else anyway—is there any rational reason that legal documents are fourteen inches long instead of eleven inches, like everybody else's paper?  Not that I know of.  The main point here is not the rationality of lawyers, but the fact that somehow or other, the vast majority of the legal profession adopted electronic legal records with no incentives or penalties from government.  It might have taken a little longer than if compulsion were used, but it happened in a way that didn't give rise to a whole new type of paralegal profession.  Instead, legal secretaries just went ahead and learned WordPerfect.  I'm pretty sure that lawyers now generate more paper with fewer secretarial staff people than in the old pre-computer days.

In his magisterial history of the last half-millennium From Dawn to Decadence, the late historian Jacques Barzun wrote in 2000 that "[t]he point at which good intentions exceeded the power to fullfill them marked for the culture the onset of decadence."  He says this in a passage in which he decries the gradual but nonetheless deadening rise of the power of bureaucracies over the average citizen in the late 20th century.  He wrote that ". . . hospitals. . . suffered the same difficulties as the government bureaucracies.  Those appointed to man them improvised their procedures, and as legislation augmented, laid down rules that filled hundreds of pages, an impenetrable jungle for citizens and officials both. . . . When [the common man] had to thread his way among the gears of an institution, he began a collaboration with an indefinite number of its representatives, amiable or grudging, but all armed with computers, who helped or delayed his rescue from entanglement."  Needless to say, Barzun did not view this as a positive development, but as an antidemocratic move toward tyranny, a tyranny ruled not by one supreme despot but by an army of faceless bureaucrats.

Ideally, engineered products such as EMR and word-processing software should make life better in some way.  "Better" can mean different things to different people, of course.  If you are someone who was unemployed before you got hired as a medical scribe, why, then, the EMR legislation was a good thing, I suppose.  But if you are a doctor who decides that, rather than facing another year of increasingly complex legal mandates, you are simply taking early retirement, then society has lost a valuable contributor for reasons that did not have to be that way.  Yes, even the free market can make mistakes, or at least peculiar decisions:  witness all the lawyers who still use WordPerfect.  But it is by no means clear that the heavy hand of the federal government has produced a net benefit to the health care of its citizens by the mandated move to certified EMR software. 

Sources:  Charles Krauthammer's weekly column appeared on Feb. 6, 2014 on the website of National Review at http://www.nationalreview.com/article/370537/health-care-myths-we-live-charles-krauthammer and was reprinted later that week by many national newspapers.  The statistic on how many New York City lawyers use WordPerfect was cited by blogger Jeffrey Zeldman in his blog at http://www.zeldman.com/2011/01/07/reality-check/.  The quotations from Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence (New York:  HarperCollins, 2000) are from pp. 778-779.  I referred to Wikipedia articles on WordPerfect and EMR (Electronic Medical Records) and the federal government website http://oncchpl.force.com/ehrcert/ehrproductsearch of the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. 

Global Warming, Solar Energy, and $300,000 Tortoises: The Morality of Energy Production

On Tuesday, June 25, in a speech before enthusiastic students at Georgetown University, President Obama delivered a message outlining his vision for what the United States ought to do, and what he personally is going to do, about the moral issue of energy production.  Now at first glance, you would think that energy production is a technical issue that should be left to engineers and economists.  But it was clear from the President’s speech that he thinks it is also a moral issue, as moral as which side you should fight on in a war.  His speech, in fact, was peppered with militant terminology.  He spoke of having the “courage to act,” he talked of the “fight against climate change,”  and expressed his desire for America to “win the race for clean energy.”  Toward the end, he called for citizens “who will stand up, and speak up, and compel us to do what this moment demands.”  To that end, he announced that he was going to ask the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to issue regulations that, according to Obama critic Charles Krauthammer, will “make it impossible to open any new coal plant and will systematically shut down existing plants.”

If the construction of new coal-fired power plants is going to come to an end, maybe we can start building more Ivanpahs instead.  Ivanpah is a Piute term meaning “good water,” and is the name of a giant solar-energy project not too far from where Interstate 15 crosses the California-Nevada line on its way to Las Vegas.  Built by a consortium of construction and solar-energy firms, plus money from Google investors, Ivanpah consists of three circular arrays of tracking mirrors that direct sunlight onto four-hundred-foot tall “power towers.”  Atop each power tower is a cubical black boiler to make steam that turns turbines that drive generators to make electricity.  This is the kind of thing that President Obama sees as the future of energy production:  it is solar-based, it adds nothing in operation to the nation’s carbon footprint, and it is even respectful of the rights of the 150 or so desert tortoises on the construction site who were carefully inventoried and transported to an equally suitable habitat at a cost of about $50 million—or roughly $300,000 per tortoise. 

The engineer in me applauds the Ivanpah project.  It is an elegant yet simple solution to several of the problems that plague direct photoelectric energy production using solar cells, one of which is the fact that all days are not equally sunny.  When clouds show up, energy production from solar cells drops instantly, and this is not the sort of behavior that power grids like. 

The Ivanpah plant mitigates the cloud problem in a couple of ways.  First of all, unless there’s a solid cloud cover (not too common in the desert), smaller cloud shadows won’t put the five square miles of mirrors out of commission all at once.  And even if insolation, as it’s called, varies over a time period of minutes or even hours, the thermal inertia of the large power-tower boilers means that the plant will still be producing energy even when it is temporarily in the shade due to clouds.  So without any extra effort, the Ivanpah project has sidestepped one of the significant technical obstacles faced by solar-cell arrays.

Still, Ivanpah is expensive.  According to Wikipedia, the whole project, now nearing completion, will cost about $2 billion when finished.  This is roughly four times what a new coal-fired plant of equivalent peak output would cost.  And the coal plant will run any time you want it to.  True, you have to buy coal over the life of the plant, but this can be factored into the cost, and the economics of that calculation tells you why so much of our electric energy is still supplied by coal.

If we stopped building new fossil-fuel power plants tomorrow and allowed only nuclear, solar, and other renewable forms of new plant construction henceforth, several things would happen.  Electricity would become gradually more expensive and possibly less reliable than it would be otherwise.  And America’s contribution to the world’s output of carbon in the atmosphere, which has already fallen to 1992 levels, would fall faster and be overwhelmed by the soaring use of coal and other fossil fuels by China, India, and the rest of the world.  The overall objective effect on global warming would be minimal.

Everyone has a moral compass that helps prioritize ethical decisions.  For most people, murder is a more significant moral issue than jaywalking.  President Obama views the threat of global warming as a moral equivalent of war, to judge by his Georgetown speech.  He clearly wishes to unite the country around a common set of sacrifices that will allow us to hold our heads up before our grandchildren, whose world we should literally save from destruction by the evil forces of climate change.

I will merely point out, as Krauthammer has, that climate change comes in dead last in a poll of 21 matters of concern to Americans.  Jobs and the economy are things that the average U. S. citizen is far more concerned about, but the President’s moral compass seems to be insensitive to such concerns.  Or perhaps, as a practical politician, he realizes that in his lame-duck term he should spend his limited time on matters where he can act unilaterally, as with his instructions to the EPA, and not waste his energy on proposals he will not be able to get through Congress.  Leadership is a mysterious thing, and some leaders who have received the laurels of historical honor were excoriated and criticized at the time.  The President obviously feels he is in this category, and often refers to his unpopular proposals as being on the “right side of history.” 

But there sometimes is not much difference between being ahead of the pack and simply being out in left field.  If there was a truly united sense among Americans that the nation was under an existential threat and climate change was the culprit, President Obama’s rhetoric would fit the national mood and history might go his way.  But I fear what we are witnessing is instead the desperate actions of a leader who wants to force his vision of the future on a public that is unwilling to pay the high price for a dubious honor that may not come for generations, if ever.   

Sources:  I learned about Ivanpah from the print edition of the June 24, 2013 issue of Time Magazine.  I used information from the project website http://ivanpahsolar.com, President Obama’s speech of June 25 as transcribed by the Wall Street Journal at http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/06/25/full-transcript-of-obamas-remarks-on-climate-change/, Charles Krauthammer’s column for July 6, 2013 as presented in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette at http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/opinion/perspectives/charles-krauthammer-obama-will-risk-the-economy-for-no-impact-on-climate-change-694450/, and the Wikipedia articles on “Ivanpah Solar Power Facility” and “Fossil fuel power station.”