Coupling.

Sitting down to lunch yesterday, K asked, 'Have you heard about what happened in Texas?' I hadn't. For some reason, the first thing that came across my mind was there's been a school shooting.

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The night before, at thirty-or-so minutes past midnight, I finally finished reading Malcolm Gladwell's latest book Talking To Strangers. Eerily and unfortunately, it was absolutely relevant with the news coming out of Uvalde, Texas. Admittedly I, like the critic in that NYT article, wondered for the better part of half the book what the hell Gladwell was trying to say. Then he posited the psychological idea of coupling with the act of suicide.

It made perfect sense.

His idea of coupling, that behaviors are linked to a very specific context, made just as much sense with the act of an eighteen-year-old kid shooting his way into an elementary school, then killing nineteen children and two teachers. 

Coupling is why there need to be barriers between people and guns. Like Gladwell showed they did for suicide rates, barriers will one-hundred-percent reduce the number of mass shootings and gun violence. It's just that most of us have never heard of coupling. So we jump to other conclusions.

For his explanation of coupling and suicide, Gladwell used the story of the poet Sylvia Plath and England's use of town gas. The precursor to natural gas, town gas was made by burning coal and therefore contained carbon monoxide. Since it was available in every home in England, it was an easy and downright humane way to, well, commit suicide. No fuss no muss. One winter night after fantasizing about killing herself, Silvia Plath tucked her children into bed, sealed off the kitchen, and stuck her head in the oven. Fifteen minutes later she was dead.

Well, that was easy.

The trouble for all those folks wanting to do the same thing (of whom fifty-percent were women) was that some officials in London caught on to the suicide trends and how they were linked to town gas. So for the next fifteen years England converted every single appliance from town gas to natural gas, which doesn't contain carbon monoxide.

Gladwell then guesses what we might all be thinking: that all those people who were intent on committing suicide would simply find another way. It's the conclusion we always jump to and the rhetoric we always hear politicians spew. In criminology, that's called the displacement theory. In the context of crime (or in this case, suicide):

Displacement theory argues that removing the opportunity for crime or seeking to prevent a crime by changing the situation in which it occurs does not actually prevent crime but merely moves it around.

Yep, we hear this argument all the time, to the point of saying displacement is assumed to be true. But is it really? What happened in England?

Suicide rates plummeted. What's even more fascinating is they plummeted at the same rate to the declining use of town gas. The act of suicide wasn't displaced. That article linked above from Shortform puts it best:

If suicide could be displaced, it would mean that a suicidal person would be just as likely to commit suicide no matter what methods were readily available to them. The rate of suicides would be relatively steady over time.

The alternative possibility, the coupling theory, would assume that suicide is coupled to a particular context, such as the availability of carbon monoxide. If suicide is a coupled behavior, it would mean that to commit suicide does not only require a depressed person—it requires a depressed person, in a particular mindset, with a particular means of killing themselves readily accessible. The rate of suicides would vary as contexts changed over time. 

If you haven't guessed, coupling is what in fact happened in England. It, not displacement, also happens with crime, Gladwell demonstrates. Time and time again, all over the world. That article closes with this:

Understanding coupling theory and how the context of a method affects the behavior of suicide can help you understand Sylvia Plath’s complex character. She wasn’t just a doomed genius destined to commit suicide. She was a woman who tragically lived in a particular time and place that allowed her to easily commit suicide. 

That near-perfectly describes the kid who killed all those innocent children and two teachers yesterday. A disturbed boy who grew up in what could be termed (for lack of a better one and with very limited knowledge of his background) a broken home, who lived in a state within a country that prides itself with having the most lax gun control laws in the world that allowed him to easily purchase automatic weapons and carry out his demented idea.

Taking Gladwell's coupling theory into consideration, if even one barrier (say, a waiting period) was in place to stop him or make it harder to acquire that kind of needless weapon, the question becomes: would he have done it? How about two barriers, or three?

If history is any indication, it would very likely have stopped him. And all those children and those teachers would still be smiling, and laughing, and playing.