“In every suicide there is ‘thwarted belongingness,’ where the person has lost a relationship that was significant,” Brickley said.
He said an example would be a teen who had four close friends and one pulled away.
The second thing that is present in every suicide is the belief that the person’s loved ones will be better off and suffer less pain if the victim dies rather than lives, Brickley said.
If a teen is consistently getting in trouble or getting bad grades, that teen might think his family would be better off without him.
The third factor is a mind-over-matter state that someone has to be in to actually take their own life.
“Someone has to physically be able to handle the method in which that person has chosen to die,” he said.
Separating children from their parents isn’t just immoral. It also threatens our national security.
The American Public Health Association wrote that the trauma from such separation could lead to alcoholism, substance abuse, depression, obesity and suicide. (While the White House says the policy will end for future migrants, it will still affect the thousands of children currently in custody.)
.. But even for those who believe immigration lawbreakers deserve punishment, there’s another argument against separating children from their families: national security. The government’s policy puts the United States at risk, in both the short and long term, by breeding a generation of children with psychological problems and a population elsewhere that reviles us. Traumatized children are prime recruits for extremist groups.
Their children and children’s children grow up in the shadow of, to use the language of 9,300 mental health experts, “shrapnel of this traumatic experience embedded in their minds.” As adults, these traumatized children are significantly more likely to have encounters with law enforcement.
.. An extensive body of literature documents how early childhood trauma creates cycles of violence that can destabilize whole nations.
.. most “deterrence” interventions, including jailing and family separation, actually triggered increased terrorist attacks.
.. In North America, the survivors of forced attendance in American Indian boarding schools have seen the effects reverberate for years. Scholars in Canada have drawn causal links between boarding school attendance (sometimes for children as young as 3) in the 1900s and elevated levels of depression, drug use and criminal behavior two generations later.
.. Native American women sent to boarding schools as girls were six times more likely to be incarcerated than their white counterparts and had a 57 percent higher rate of alcoholism as adults.
.. A 2016 study of 15,587 adult children of incarcerated parents found that separating children from parents directly increased interactions with the criminal justice system, including drug abuse and gang affiliation.
.. Syrian children separated from their support systems are “more likely to become
- the youngest laborers in the factory,
- the youngest brides at the altar, and
- the youngest soldiers in the trench.”
.. The individual suffering of older children is immediately consequential to our security because incarceration centers have become recruiting grounds for armed groups. Trump’s favorite boogeyman, the MS-13 gang from which so many Salvadorans flee, was founded in Los Angeles prisons. The United States is keenly aware that young people can be easily radicalized while imprisoned
.. We have seen the radicalization of incarcerated youths firsthand. One of us, Steven Leach, spent years working with South African juveniles awaiting trial. These youths did not all enter detention as organized criminals, but without exception, among those who worked with Leach, each left prison a member of the gang.
.. A similar problem emerged in the internment camps of the Anglo-Boer war, in which British soldiers detained civilians to deter guerrilla campaigns by Boer insurgents. Approximately 115,000 people were held in the camps between 1901 and 1902; 22,000 Afrikaner children died. More than a century later, that horror remains at the forefront of the Afrikaner imagination
.. He leverages lies to stoke fear here: “We don’t want what is happening with immigration in Europe to happen with us!”
..Naturally, this feeds radical anti-American sentiment and promotes nationalism abroad when the U.S. is most in need of alliances to solve global problems.
.. There is now strong evidence that punitive deterrence strategies don’t work, no matter how burdensome they are.
.. punishments between 2000 and 2015 effectively reduced economic migration from Mexico but had negligible impact on the population the administration is targeting with its current policy: asylum seekers fleeing violence.
The report points out that there is no consequence worse than death and violence at home for these migrants.
.. If these are people we want as enemies, we had better be prepared for a multigenerational war.
The Gaza Violence: How Extremism Corrupts
As you know, everybody sees the Middle East through his or her own narrative. Conservatives see it through the “front line in the war on terror” narrative and defend Israel’s actions on the Gaza border fence this week. Progressives see it through the “continued colonialist oppression” narrative and condemn those actions.
.. sometime in the 1990s, a mental shift occurred. Extremism grew on the Israeli side, exemplified by the ultranationalist who murdered Rabin, but it exploded on the Palestinian side. Palestinian extremism took on many of the shapes recognizable in extremism everywhere.
.. First, the question shifted from “What to do?” to “Whom to blame?” The debates were less about how to take steps toward a livable future and more about who is responsible for the sins of the past.
.. Second, the dream of total victory became the only acceptable dream.
.. extremists stop trying to win partial victories, insisting that someday they will get everything they want — that someday the other side will magically disappear.
.. Third, extremists over time replace strategic thinking with theatrical thinking. Strategic thinking is about the relation of means to ends: How do we use what we have to get to where we want to go? Theatrical thinking is both more cynical and more messianic: How do we create a martyrdom performance that will show the world how oppressed we are?
.. If you read the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’s April 30 speech or much of the commentary published over the past week, it’s clear that some powerful Palestinians now believe that the creation of the state of Israel is the wrong that needs to be addressed, not the expansion and occupation.
.. They rejected incrementalism. After Israel withdrew from its settlements in Gaza, the Palestinians could have declared a new opening, taking advantage of the influx of humanitarian aid. Instead, they elected Hamas, an organization that lists the extermination of the state of Israel as an existential goal. They expended resources that could have improved infrastructure to fund missiles and terrorist tunnels.
.. Yasir Arafat was once a terrorist, but at least he used terror to win practical concessions. The actions today — the knife attacks, the manipulation of protesters to rush the border fence — are of little military or strategic value. They are ventures in suicidal theater.
.. The shift from the politics of Rabin and Shimon Peres to that of Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman is a move from pluralism to ethnocentrism, from relentless engagement to segregation. It’s a shift from tough realism to the magical thinking that Palestinians are somehow going to go away.
.. sometimes Israeli policies seem callously designed to guarantee an extremist response.
.. That’s the problem with extremism: It is a flight from reality. It makes you stupider. Instead of cleverly working to advance your own interest in a changing context, you end up shouting your own moral justifications into a whirlwind.
.. Extremism is naturally contagious. To fight it, whether at home or abroad, you have to answer the angry shout with the respectful offer. It feels unnatural. But it’s the only way.
Nick Kristof Argues with Straw Men about Guns; Straw Men Win
If you can’t win an argument even when you stack the deck in your favor . . .
Kristof posits a primitive caricature of a gun-rights argument, delivers a thoroughly inadequate response designed to settle the issue, and then repeats the cycle. In other words, he erects one straw man after another and fails to best any of them.
Kristof first purports to answer the “argument” (it would be helpful, by the way, if he included a link to serious people making the arguments he’s purportedly rebutting) that cars are more likely to kill a person than guns, but we don’t try to ban cars. Here’s the core of Kristof’s response:
We don’t ban cars, but we do work hard to take a dangerous product and regulate it to limit the damage.
We do that through seatbelts and airbags, through speed limits and highway barriers, through driver’s licenses and insurance requirements, through crackdowns on drunken driving and texting while driving. I once calculated that since 1921, we had reduced the auto fatality rate per 100 million miles driven by 95 percent.
.. Second, he fails to mention that American gun violence is down 49 percent since its peak. The victimization rate for other firearm crimes dropped by a whopping 75 percent between 1993 and 2011. In other words, our national effort to reduce gun violence has been an extraordinary success. There’s work left to be done — just as there is work left to be done on automobile fatalities — but in any other context improvements like this would be cause for celebration.
.. Why not even mention the dramatic decline? Perhaps because it coincided with a generation-long easing of restrictions on gun ownership. Not only are there more guns in American circulation and less crime, there are more law-abiding people carrying guns and less crime. These are facts worth mentioning. They’re facts worth wrestling with. Kristof does neither.
.. No serious gun-rights advocate argues that the Second Amendment protects unregulated gun ownership, of course. The devil is in the details. For example, universal background-check requirements are almost certainly constitutional. But the argument against these laws isn’t that they’re unconstitutional; it’s that they’re unenforceable and ineffective. A recent Rand study looked at studies of the effects of universal background checks on violent crime and found the evidence “uncertain” and “inconclusive.”
.. In other words, criminals break the law not just when they use their gun but also when they obtain it. A universal background-check requirement isn’t relevant to already-illegal transactions.
.. An assault-weapons ban, by contrast, is unenforceable, ineffective, and likely unconstitutional. According to the Heller standard, the Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms in “common use” for “lawful purposes.” An assault-weapons ban would violate this test (the AR-15 is the most popular rifle in America; millions of Americans use it for self-defense, hunting, and target shooting), and it wouldn’t make a meaningful dent in gun crime, suicides, or mass shootings.
.. If you look at suicide rates by country, you’ll notice two things immediately. First, though America is awash in firearms, its suicide rate is relatively low compared with that of a number of other developed countries. Second, those developed countries have much stricter gun-control regimes than the United States.
.. To his credit, Kristof does at least note that other nations have large numbers of firearms without American levels of violence, but here’s the entirety of his response:
Yes, there’s something to that. America has underlying social problems, and we need to address them with smarter economic and social policies. But we magnify the toll when we make it easy for troubled people to explode with AR-15s rather than with pocketknives.
.. 41 percent of white households own guns, compared to just 19 percent of black households.” Yet the gun-death rate among black Americans is almost twice the rate among white Americans.
.. 41 percent of white households own guns, compared to just 19 percent of black households.” Yet the gun-death rate among black Americans is almost twice the rate among white Americans.
.. To note that a killing instrument kills fewer children than a pool is to note that guns are handled responsibly by the overwhelming majority of those who own them.
.. Finally, if Kristof wanted to “win an argument” with a gun owner, why did he completely ignore the benefits of gun ownership?
.. An informed gun owner is always going to respond to a gun-control proposal with at least two follow-up questions: First, will it make a material impact on the gun problem you seek to solve? Second, will it materially impact my ability to defend myself from known and foreseeable threats?
.. All too often, the answer to those questions is “no” and “yes.” All too often gun-control proposals operate as a form of collective punishment on the law-abiding while serving as barely a speed bump in the path of the criminal.
.. There is a cost in the “let’s just try” approach, and that cost is borne by the men and women who comply with the law.
.. We’ve proven that we can decrease crime while we protect the Second Amendment and expand access to guns. We know we can reduce suicides without restricting any person’s right to self-defense. We know we have fewer suicides than many other developed countries even as we have more guns. Moreover, we know that various so-called commonsense gun-control measures wouldn’t have prevented a single recent mass shooting... The law-abiding gun owner is a tremendous asset to American society. He’s a protector of his family and of American liberty. It will take more than the arguments that Kristof can muster to persuade him to further limit his freedom in the vain hope that criminals might finally obey the law.