The answer that comes from the anti-safeguard lobby, those who mainly want guns to be unregulated with respect to ownership, safety, use, or disposition, is that such laws would not have stopped the tragedy that prompted the conversation.

They may be right (but see below). But they have missed the point. The problem is, the people who suddenly want to do something about senseless gun deaths have also missed the point.

About 33,000 times a year, in the United States, a bullet fires out of a gun, penetrates a human, and kills them. The number of times that a bullet leaves the gun and penetrates a human and only wounds them is considerable.

Since the difference between being dead and being alive is mostly random (with respect to the variables at the scene) and partly a function of the excellence, and presence or absence of, trauma specialists, it is worth noting that about 50,000 times a person is shot in some manner in the United States. But when working with gun relates statistics, we tend to focus on death, because in most cases, as tragic and horrific as a death may be, it will usually have one good feature: The data point representing it is well behaved. An embarrassing accidental discharge of a firearm resulting in a minor injury is unlikely to be reported at all. But when you are showing off with your Glock and a bullet is fired through the wall of your apartment and the toddler next door is blow away, that data point is going to exist and it will be carefully examined, verified, reported, and curated.

Of the ~33,000 killed each year, only a tiny percentage (but see below) of those individuals are killed in any kind of mass shooting, including school shootings.

In other words, the sad and macabre fact is that if we were given the choice of eliminating school shootings as they currently happen, vs. all the other shootings, we would be foolish to pick ending just the school shootings. We would be better off with the Watership Down alternative. Stop the carnage overall, but pay the price of a few of our children for that freedom from violence.

But you might be thinking, “Those 33,000, they were criminals shot by good cops, and gang member shooting each other, so who cares?”

Stop thinking that.

The statistics on gun violence are hard to get a handle on for several reasons, but what I’m going to tell you here is close to the actual reality and verifiable. I’ve included some sources below. These numbers are based on estimates from the last few years of available data.

Over the last five or six years, 33,000 people in the US died of a gunshot per year. Most of them, ~21,000, killed themselves intentionally (suicide). Of the rest, about one tenth of a percent were cops killed by gunfire in the line of duty (most cops who die in the line of duty are killed accidentally in car accidents, etc.). About 2% were citizens killed by cops. About 24% were murdered in the usual ways.

The number of times per year a person dies because of a simple accident, like the gun goes off while being cleaned, or in a hunting accident, is probably just over 300 (a little less than once per day). The number of people killed each year, on average, in a mass shooting roughly similar. This is about three quarters of one percent of the total gun carnage.

If we wanted to reduce the gun carnage as quickly and efficiently as possible, we might do things that reduce the largest of these numbers: suicide. We immediately realize that this is a mental health issue, and by the way, mass shootings may often be a mental health issue as well. Heck, considering that homicide is often an extension of day to day interpersonal violence which can go even worse, maybe a lot of those 11,000 shootings are also mental health issues. Putting it another way, if we could wave a magic wand and make all the mental health issues go away, assuming most suicides are in this category, then the number of dead per year would drop to a few thousand instead of a few tens of thousands. That would be great. So lets do that.

But while we are busy shoring up our approach to mental health, lets look at other ways to address the gun carnage.

Let’s start with the largest number, suicide.

When I bring up reducing gun carnage by addressing suicide, I often get push back from poorly informed libertarian-thinking people who are angered that I would want to take this basic right away from people. If someone wants to kill themselves, they should be able do to it. What about someone with a terrible, painful, disease who just wants to end it? What kind of monster am I to deny them of this right?

The other push-back is this: If someone wants to commit suicide, and you “take away the guns,” they will still kill themselves.

Let me tell you right now, that most of the time, when you hear either of these arguments, you are hearing from someone who, because they’ve had this conversation with people like me before, knows they are lying. They are simply trying to seed doubt, to dampen the anti-gun argument, because they are anti-protection. For all I know, they may even like the carnage. Certainly, they are willing to ignore basic facts in order to not have to be restricted in any way in the pursuit of their dangerous hobby (or business, in the case of those who trade in these weapons of death and mayhem).

Many people who attempt suicide are young and very few are sick and in pain. A large percentage of those who attempt suicide with something other than a firearm fail. Most who attempt suicide with a gun manage to kill themselves. Most people who attempt suicide and fail then get mental health care and they do not ever end up killing themselves. Across all age groups, 90% of those who make an attempt of suicide and survive never end up committing suicide. A large percentage of suicides are impulsive. It is estimated that 71% of the time, the suicide is decide on in less than one hour before the act.

OK, now, I’m going to take a break and go unload the dishwasher or something while you put those facts together and see what you come up with.

… tick … tick … tick … tick …

A partial but important solution to reduce the gun carnage is to first reduce the number of available guns, but also, to firmly secure the guns that to exist. Lock them up, and lock up the ammo in a separate place, and make the use of a gun for anything something that requires more thought, and not something that can be easily done by a non gun owner by simply grabbing an available firearm from Dad’s dresser drawer or a neighbor’s coffee table hidy-hole.

In the US, in the majority of households that have both children and guns in them, the guns are not stored safely away, and are often loaded and unlocked. A minority of US gun owners with children in their homes store the ammo separately and keep it all locked up.

May people who kill themselves with guns decide at the last minute to do so, and their access to the guns is unfettered. Often, this is a young person living in a household where an adult has a loaded firearm readily available, “just in case.”

The reason to have a firearm readily available and loaded is this: If someone comes into your house that you did not invite, you get your chance to shoot them to death. Yay. But what happens far more often is that your child or some neighbor or some other person in your household decides to kill themselves, and they use your gun to do it. Or your teenager offspring sneaked out of the house to party and is sneaking back in through the bathroom window, so you wake up, groggily grab your gun, and start shooting. Or as happened a while back to my neighbor: you are a recluse living in what the neighborhood kids mistake for an abandoned house, one of the kids sneaks into the house on a dare, and you grab your gun off the nightstand and blow him away.

What needs to happen instead is that it is required by law that you not be a knucklehead. You should be required by law to keep your gun unloaded and locked up, and the ammo also locked up at a different location. You, yourself, since you have the key or combination and know where everything is, can easily put it all together and eat a bullet any time you want to, so don’t worry about that right being taken away from you. But hopefully the extra work you need to go through to do so will allow your forebrain to catch up to your limbic system and call off your own suicide. More importantly, your hobby as a gun owner will not as easily allow someone else to use your gun to die or to kill. The total number of suicide deaths would go down dramatically, and we will have tackled the largest number among those cited above.

The next biggest group of gun deaths is homicide. Having guns more secured would probably reduce this as well. Just as suicide can be impulsive, and thus, aided by having loaded guns laying around, some homicides are impulsive as well.

A fair number of homicides involve violent criminals shooting at each other and killing either the other bad guy, a cop, or an innocent bystander. Some, perhaps many, of those guns are stolen. They are stolen from gun owners who did not secure their guns. You might say, “a determined criminal can yada yada yada… so it does not matter.” But you are wrong. Properly secured houses are burglarized far less often than improperly secured houses. Properly secured and hidden items in the house are stolen less than items left around in obvious places. When a criminal breaks into any home, one of the first places they check for stuff are the obvious places people are known to keep their loaded guns. The criminal wants to take that gun right away in case the home owner shows up, and because it has real value as a stolen item.

So, once again, properly locked up deadly weapons would reduce those numbers. I’ll even suggest this: Of those 300 or so accidental discharges per year (some of which result in death), a good number are little kids finding your boy-toy (gun) and pulling the trigger. That can’t happen with properly secured firearms.

“But it is not enforceable” you lament. “You are legislating what people do in their own homes and you can’t enforce it anyway” you cry out from your Libertarian perch!

Bull. First, any time there is a criminal act involving a gun, it is possible (not always, but often) to trace back the source to see if that was ever a properly secured gun. Every time there is a suicide there is an investigation. Frequently, it will be possible to determine if the gun was improperly stored. A set of widely known best practices with an accompanying law can and will be enforced sufficiently that there will be deterrence against sloppy gun storage.

Second, having a law and accompanying training, information, learning, and a general cultural shift towards being smart rather than stupid about something, does and can work even without a lot of enforcement. When seat belts were first deployed by regulation, a lot of people balked at the idea. They didn’t want the restrictions, the wrinkles, the trouble. Two things happened early on in the history of seat belt adoption. First, there were many apocryphal scare stories about how if you wear a seat belt in certain kinds of accidents, you would actually die instead of live. Second, they started making cars that automatically put your seat belt on for you (remember those?). Tensions rose.

But then a third thing happened. Laws requiring the use of seat belts started to spread. Once there is a law about something, that aspect of an event (an accident or a crime) is automatically addressed by investigators. It became routine for the seat belt wearing status of an accident victim to be reported. Then the news started to regularly report whenever a fatal accident happened and the person was not wearing their seat belt. Over time, the reporting seemed to indicate that mainly reckless youth and drunk-out-of-their-mind drivers were the ones not wearing their seat belts, and thus dying. In other words, foolish people were making foolish decisions and suffering the ultimate consequence, in such a way that all can see and all can learn and all can quietly eschew that behavior. Seat belt compliance continues to rise, and many lives are saved.

That is what we need with guns. We need a decade of reporting on how Uncle Joe effectively killed his niece by having a loaded gun around that she used to kill herself at the age of 14, and how he got fined or jailed for his role in her death and, worst of all, had his permit to own a gun revoked. We need a decade of reporting about how this or that wanton criminal was convicted of homicide, but that the owner of the stolen gun he had used had never secured that gun, so it was easily taken from his home by a burglar, and the original gun owner was held partly liable for that act, and fined and his gun rights taken away. We need a decade of stories distributed by suicide prevention groups about all the kids who lived because Dad and Mom had their weapons secured. All that.

So again, regulations requiring proper storage of firearms and ammo will reduce a good portion of the next largest parts of the gun carnage.

The cops kill nearly a thousand people a year. Why? In part because there are so many guns out there that the cops are constantly on edge. In the old days, it was rare for a cop to pull their gun. Now, they have their guns out frequently. In fact, when a cop walks over to pretty much anybody these days, they have their hand on the gun so they can pull it out instantly if needed. The other day, a community resource cop, a cop who’s job it is to sit with kids and read them stories and talk about safety and stuff, felt the need to be heavily armed in the classroom, with a gun designed to be discharged instantly (no safety) just in case. When a kid grabbed that gun and fired it in the classroom, it made me wonder if something was wrong with our system…

The point is, if guns were routinely secured, and their sales better regulated, and yes, this would take a few decades but this will matter to future generations, there would be fewer illegal guns in circulation, and fewer legal guns in criminal hands, and that would cause a down-cycling of how many people carry guns around out of fear, and that would make it less likely for those 50 cops that get murdered by gun a year to be killed, and then maybe the cops would not shoot 1000 people a year.

Which brings us to the mass shootings. The mass shootings, including the ones in school, happen (apart from previously discussed mental health issues) because we have a culture in which we eschew any regulation on guns. Anybody who wants to be a school shooter can easily get the guns, partly because there are so many, partly because we don’t regulate guns very effectively. We have no problem as a society allowing people to own thousands of rounds of ammo and dozens of assault style weapons.

Also, our gun culture stops us from asking important questions or taking important actions at key moments. The most recent mass school shooting, one of the worst ever, was apparently carried out by a guy who was known to be a gun nut, known to be threatening others, known to be hanging around the school he did not attend in a threatening manner.

Why did no one bother to check out this situation, to discover his gun cache, to stop him before he killed all those children? I do not know, but I’ll toss out a guess for you to consider. Our pro-gun culture, especially in rabidly pro-gun states like Florida, where any person can murder any unarmed person if they “feel threatened,” fetishizes the gun and all the freedom it implies to a greater degree than fear of the gun and all the killing it can do imbues caution in our actions. Maybe nobody wanted to look like they were anti-gun.

So, sensible regulation of gun sales, ownership, and storage will probably reduce the number and severity of school shootings from several different angles, including changing the culture of expectations surrounding the gun fetish, and including access to massive arsenals.

The final remaining argument against my position that guns need to be responsibly sold and owned, is this: If someone invades my home, I want my gun loaded, freely available, and by my side right along with my freedom!!!

That might sound to some like a reasonable statement, but in fact, it is ignorant yammering.

I know that the person who truly believes this now, in 2018, is a nonredeemable gun nut so I don’t mind offending you. Such individuals need to be forced to do the right thing and jailed when they fail. But for those watching form the sidelines, it is a bogus argument. Having guns readily available for self defense in the home rarely works as a self defense strategy, but often leads to wounding or killing of household members, in the case where the gun is actually deployed as a killing machine. Often that is totally separate from the context of a home invasion. But even when there is a home invasion, the chances of the gun owner or a family member being killed or injured might actually be higher than the chance of the invasion being thwarted or the invader killed or wounded. The statistics are hard to analyze here, but at the very least, the chances are very close or overlapping.

But that is not the main point I want to make. The point is that playing fast and loose with guns is immoral and bone-headed. It is how we kill our children, not how we protect them. You think you are protecting your home and family, but actually, you are endangering them AND you are endangering everyone else.

But you can still have your cake and eat it too, if you must. In order to address home invasions in a way that also allows you to play with your big gun, simply follow these two procedures.

1) Lock the damn guns and ammo up.

2) Secure your home with an alarm system that will warn you that someone is breaking in. It need not be a fancy expensive system. Anything that makes lights go on and noises happen when someone is trying to get in. Also, do the other things you can do to reduce the chance of a robbery to being with. You can find out what those are from your local police department, or google it. Yes, “a determined thief will break in anyway yada yada yada” but the truth is that if you are the low hanging fruit, you are asking for it, and if you make it hard, you will be better off. You have to be an idiot to allow someone unfettered access to your home in such a way that your only recourse is to reach over to your night stand, grab your gun, and start shooting.

Or, perhaps you are not an idiot. Perhaps you are just waiting for a chance to kill someone, so you arm yourself and make it easy for someone to break into your house. Leave around clues that you have great prescription drugs ready to steal. Then lay in wait. There is that, and perhaps some version of it is not terribly uncommon. People who think that way …

But wait, now were are back to the mental heath fix, so we’ve got that covered as well.

One more thing, something I hinted at above, and if you’ve gotten this far into my rant, you get to hear all about it. School shootings are small part of the overall gun carnage. And, mass shootings in general may be the most difficult of all the gun related violence to actually address with laws, regulations, and tactical responses. Since gun death is large (33,000 a years) and mass shootings in schools is small (a couple of hundred a year) then the school shootings may seem unimportant in the long run, even if they are very shocking when they happen.

So, since that idea is totally wrong and misguided, I want to propose a thought experiment. Suppose we lived in a society with very few guns, and not much gun violence overall. In this imaginary place, we’ll call it Nacirema in honor of the Anthropologists who are known to have worked there and the Naciremas who live there, mental health care is widespread and effective, and many of the problems that cause mental health problems, whatever they may be, have been addressed by ensuring a healthy and fair economy for all, great health care and nutrition, effective early childhood care, and all of it. It is rare for someone to die because of a gun shot.

Then, suddenly, there is a mass shooting at a school. Then another. And then more. After a few years, we realize that a few hundred children are being killed each year, but never before did this happen.

Pause for a moment and substitute my thought experiment with the alternative thought experiment of your choice. Every year, we learn, 300 Nacirema children are killed in exploding school buses. Or, High School football stadiums built by a particular contractor start to collapse, killing dozens of student at a time to add up to 300 a year. Or a mad poisoner is operating in the school cafeteria to the tune of 300 deaths a year.

This should be obvious but in case it is not: a few hundred victims per year of mass shootings, many in schools, is not made less horrific or smaller because others happen to die at the muzzle of a gun.

Selected resources and other posts:

The Truth about Suicide and Guns

CDC on Homicide Data (various links, start here)

CDC on Suicide Data (various links, start here)

Guns and Suicide

Gun violence by the numbers

How much like Byron Smith is the average gun owner?

Various WaPo pages on number of people shot dead by cops.

US police shootings: How many die each year?

Causes of Law Enforcement Deaths

A selection of my posts on gun violence and related topics (This blog has recently been re-worked, so only those posts I’ve gotten around to re-tagging are on this list. Use the search bar at the top of the page to find more.)

But seriously … I’d like to do something today that I’ve been meaning to do, quite literally, for years. I want to run down a selection of readings that would provide any inquisitive person with a solid grounding in Behavioral Biological theory. At the very outset you need to know that this is not about Evolutionary Psychology. Evolutionary Psychology is something different. I’ll explain some other time what the differences are. For now, we are only speaking of fairly traditional Darwinian behavioral theory as applied generally with a focus on sexually reproducing organisms, especially mammals, emphasis on humans and other primates but with lots of birds because they turn out to be important.

I’m not going to give you the science; Here I’m just going to give you the books. In all cases I’ll provide links to the Amazon page, because that has become a sort of default quick and dirty way of recognizing a book (you often get to see a picture). In many cases, however, these books are not available new, so you’ll have to find them in your local library or used book store, or on-line somewhere. There are only a few that, if found used, should be expensive owing to rarity or some other value-enhancing feature. Some have been so widely used in classrooms that they are readily available at used book stores near campuses, if you can find such a beast.

You will notice that most of these books are old. That is because Behavioral Biology reached a point a few years back when two things happened: 1) It had matured to a standard academic discipline so things like anthologies of the hottest new papers or “oh wow” books by key writers in the field were no longer as common and 2) It started to be eclipsed, in trade publication, by Evolutionary Psychology, which is unfortunate.

OK, I said this was about the books and not the science, but I’ll give you a little bit of science as a framework for the literature bomb I’m about to explode.

Darwin’s Natural Selection has genomes evolving due to differential fitness of specific alleles. There is co-evolution among genes, some of which are in the same bodies, some not, some in the same species, some not, so we get Sexual Selection and various other co-evolutionary phenomena.

Behavior happens, and is facilitated in tetrapods and fish and so on by neural systems which have some basic capacities. Neural and sensory systems, information processing systems, etc. can be shaped by Darwinian selection on the genome or by selection (still likely Darwinian more or less) on the behavior itself when said behavior is passed on extra-genetically, as extended phenotype, culture, memes, whatever you want to call it. This applies mainly to mammals, and within mammals, more in primates and within primates, more some apes. So there is parallel evolution in some species between genes and behavior, which are always interacting with each other.

Neural and sensory systems should evolve to enhance fitness. But fitness can be extended beyond alleles of genes, and include, just like co-evolution does, genes in other parts of the genome, others of the species (the other sex, other ages, etc.) and other species. So, things like Kin Selection can emerge whereby individuals act in the interest of their gene-sharing kin, not just themselves. Perhaps there are higher levels of selection as well.

As behavior evolves, Darwinian influences on it are limited. The degree to which genes can determine behavior in a given species is not determined by adaptive design, but rather, by phylogenetic constraints, developmental issues, and yes, to some extent, adaptive design. No matter how cool it would be to have a brain programmed by genes to recognize when another person is telling you a lie, the genetic coding for this behavior does not exist in humans mainly because it did not exist in primordial mammals or other vertebrates, where the basic brain system we have today was first developed by evolutionary processes. No matter how cool it would be to be born able to produce language, we are not born this way because our ancestors were not born this way and our brains do not develop this way. Many, perhaps most, important behavioral features of brainy primates can’t be coded into genes because of the way brains evolved over tens of millions of years. So Natural Selection, Kin Selection and other kinds of selection on behavior work through a variety of proximate means in humans, including fine tuning of things like “drives” or other psychological features that can be somewhat adapted during development as well as the culture we require to be human and a fair amount of reinvention of roughly the same wheel again and again and again.

Foundations of Behavioral Biology

The basics are to be found most efficiently in some excellent textbooks. If you do not know all the in formation provided across most of the chapters of Martin Daly and Margo Wilson’s textoobk Sex, Evolution and Behavior, then you simply need to read that book. Some of it is outdated, but really, where there are studies that have been supplanted by more recent work, those studies are not usually wrong, just classic. Obviously, you would read a book written 20 something years ago as a book … that is not current. But it is basic. This book must be supplemented with the material in Robert Trivers Social Evolution. It was Trivers that took basic stuff like Natural Selection and Kin Selection and made them part of a larger toolkit of behavioral science, and in particular, introduced the all important Parental Investment Theory, which turns out to explain a fair amount of the patterning we see in bird and mammal behavior.

Here, I will pause for a bit more theory. Kin Selection theory explains why bees commit suicide, but worked (in our minds) initially with bees where there was a single queen mothering all the offspring and not too many male drones. But then suicidal and other behaviors was observed in bees without this social pattern, and lots of insects (and mammals) with the same peculiar pattern of genetics that bees and ants have were found to have bee-like patterns of behavior. Co-evolutionary patterns are often found in one or two species, make total sense from a Darwinian point of view, but then the young turks (graduate students usually) find numerous counter examples showing that the predicted patterns don’t hold up. Since I just made a huge statement (above) about patterns, I’d better point out that it may well be that most cases, or at least many cases, do not fit the rules! Does this mean that the rules are invalid, that there is no Natural Selection or Kin Selection, or Parental Investment, etc. etc.? No, usually not. What it usually means that when people discovered, for instance, an explanation for sex bias in Red Deer offspring (high ranked females have male offspring, other females have female offspring) they assumed that this adaptation was so cool that it must occur in all mammals, and then they discovered that it is actually rather rare in primates and may occur in the end in only a few mammalian species, and seemingly not in humans. For instance. But this does not mean that the so-called Trivers-Willard hypotheses (which you will find described in Social Evolution and elsewhere) is wrong. Rather, this subset of parental investment theory is expected to work only under certain circumstances. And this is true of all of these behavioral models.

Think of these evolutionary models as being like currency behaving in a rather straightforward economy, but where that economy is only a subset of a larger economy involving barter, coercion, bribery, some very intense marketing and with con artists everywhere. Under many conditions the money will change hands in predicted patterns, following the rules, but under most conditions, while the expected values and directionality of exchange is a force, it is only one of many forces. And, the system is likely very dynamic. It may turn out that we don’t live in a world where evolutionary stable strategies … co-evolutionary systems that are stable over the long term are maintained because there is no “better” (more fitness enhancing) alternative … are very rare because, in fact, conditions are constantly changing. ESS’s may be rare, but that does not mean that the evolutionary forces and the definition of what is “stable” are non existent. They are just living the life of Sisyphus.

Advanced Behavioral Biology

I would start the next phase of learning with one of my favorite books, one I’ve used many times in classes: Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers (Evolution and Cognition) by, as it turns out, Robert Trivers. This volume includes many of the key papers that were behind the literature cited above that you’ve just finished reading, along with interesting introductory material by Trivers, giving context. You will be more than prepared to read the source material, to understand it better than most people will if encountered on its own, and to see its strength’s and shortcomings. Do report back.

You can read Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers (Evolution and Cognition) either before or after the following two items, which are by the authors of one of the above mentioned textbooks, and which provide excellent empirical studies of human behavioral biology using strict Darwinian approaches. Both of these books may be fairly hard to find: Homicide: Foundations of Human Behavior and The Truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian View of Parental Love (Darwinism Today series) by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson.

Proximate Mechanisms: Hormones and Neurons Galore

Now that you’ve got a good exposure to the basic theory and to some empirical species-wide studies (of humans) let’s step back for a moment and look at the biology a bit more closely. First, you have to understand endocrinology and related neurobiology at several levels, and you also need to entertain yourself with some excellent writing. So, read Mel Konner’s The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit followed by Robert Sapolsky’s The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predicament.

To put this in the most important context (as it relates to the most important human adaptation) now read Konner’s The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind, or watch the documentary Childhood (at least the first hour of it).

At this point you are ready to explore the human brain, it’s evolution, and the evolution of language. You’ll want to start with Terry Deacon’s The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain.

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h3>It’s People!!!

Now that you have the basic behavioral biology, the proximate mechanisms related to hormones, development, neural systems, etc. under your belt, and a bit of real life application to human culture and society, it is time to explore the women and the men of the species. You might want to glance first at the infanticide literature. It turns out, despite protestations by Men’s Rights Advocates, that a lot of what happens in human culture and related human evolution has to do with the fact that men are dicks, and male committed infanticide is a big part of that. You’ve already explored that with Daly and Wilson and Cinderella, above. Now have a look at Sexual Coercion in Primates and Humans: An Evolutionary Perspective on Male Aggression against Females or a selection of the papers therein. Or skip that part and take my word for it.

Either way, your next stop should be with Sarah Hrdy and these two books by her, in order: Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species and Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Then, on to the boys with Richard Wrangham: Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. When you are done reading that, you’ll need some Frans DeWaal to calm down.

Report back!

I never knew her name, but I knew she worked in the cafeteria. We talked about a wide range of topics, including (and possibly mainly) the weather. A week or so earlier, we had an especially interesting conversation.

“He’s my nephew, you know.”

“Who?”

“That Bennett boy. We live on the same street. We’re blood, and I know him as well as I know anybody, and I can tell you he didn’t do it.”

She was talking about Willie Bennett, who had just a few days before that conversation been picked out of a lineup as the killer of Carol DiMaiti Stewart.

“I’m not saying he couldn’t have done it. Willie is NOT a good boy; I’ll leave it at that. But everybody knows where he was that night. He wasn’t near that place. We know he didn’t do it.”

Charles and Carol Stewart were at a childbirth class at the main baby hospital in town. I remember this really well, because two of my best friends were taking childbirth classes at that time at the same hospital on the same evening. So, when I heard on the news that a couple leaving that hospital from a childbirth class had been attacked, the woman killed and the man shot in the gut, I checked on my friends. It wasn’t them.

The event made national news in part because one of those cop shows was filming that night in Boston. Charles called on a cell phone to say his wife and he had been shot, but he was disoriented and he didn’t know where he was. The dispatcher got on the radio to all of the Boston cops at once, and had them run their sirens one at a time, asking Charles if he could hear the sound. Using this method, they located the car containing the victims, and were able to save Charles. Carol died later that night, and the fetus, delivered months early, died several days later.

And they picked up Willie because he was a known bad guy and resembled the description Charles had given of the assailant. Charles then picked Willie out of the lineup, apparently confirming that he was the assailant.

This would be a good time to mention that Charles and Carol were white people from an inner-ring suburb of Boston, and Willie was African American from the “inner city.” This matters if you consider the broader social context of this event. Boston has its race problems.

Then a little time went by and the police, quietly and without fanfare, started to get suspicious of the story. In fact, it would later be understood that they were suspicious from the beginning. A little pushing here and a little poking here, and suddenly Charlie’s brother, Matthew, confesses.

It turns out that on the fateful night, Charles called Matthew and gave him an address. When Matthew arrived, he found his sister in-law shot in the head and for all practical purposes dead, and his brother with a gut wound, both in Charles’ car. Charles gave Matthew a bag containing the firearm used by Charles to shoot his wife and himself and some valuables, like a wallet and stuff, and told him to get rid of the goods. So Matthew, apparently about as dumb as his brother, tossed the bag into a shallow creek not far from where they all lived. This was a creek where everybody tosses shit like this. The first place the cops would look.

Anyway, Matthew ratted out his brother, Willie was released, and Charles became the main suspect.

So, we were standing there in the snow, looking at the river. And I remembered what I had heard just a few minutes earlier.

“Did you hear about Charles Stewart?” I asked her.

“What about him?” blowing smoke.

“He jumped into the river this morning. He jumped off the Tobin Bridge. He did not survive.”

“Well,” she said, staring out into the river, looking at the nearest bridge, at the thick ice below the bridge, and the swirling snow and blowing drifts. It would be impossible to imagine how anyone would survive the jump off the bridge we were looking at into that water, and the Tobin Bridge was significantly higher. “Well…that”s something.”