Dr. Gerald Schoenewolf-Solutions to Stop Mass Shootings

Show Transcript

What's Behind the Mass Shootings?

[00:00:00] Bob Gatty: As of October 26, the United States has had at least 565 mass shootings so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, or about two mass shootings a day. Those numbers Came out a day after a deranged U. S. Army Reservist killed at least 18 people at a bowling alley and bar in Lewiston, Maine.

[00:00:27] According to officials, the suspect, Robert Card, 40, believed that people, even members of his own family, were out to get him and were calling him a pedophile. 

[00:00:37] Because mental illness is at the heart of many of these killing events, we have with us today a long time psychoanalyst and author, Dr. Gerald Schoenewolf, an expert in these cases to discuss what's behind these deadly tragedies. Stay with us. 

[00:00:55] Dr. Schoenewolf is the author of 30 books, including 14 on psychology and philosophy and nine novels. His most recent is The Mass Killer, six histories that tell us why. He is eminently qualified to discuss our topic today.

[00:01:15] Dr. Schoenewolf thanks so much for joining us today on the Lean to the Left podcast. 

[00:01:20] Gerald Schoenewolf: I'm glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me. 

[00:01:24] Bob Gatty: Absolutely. Now, America has become the mass killing capital of the world. That's the first sentence that I read in the description of your book. Which is a psychological study of mass killings intended to help us understand how America got that way.

[00:01:43] You say your book dismisses the popular theme linking mass killings to the availability of guns in America. What then, Dr. Schoenewolf, is behind all of this? 

[00:01:55] Gerald Schoenewolf: Okay, so we have twice as many mass killings in America as in any other country. And the reason I say it's not because of guns is because guns have always been available in the United States since the first amendment, the second amendment was passed way back in the 1700s.

[00:02:16] We didn't have mass killings until recently, in the last three or four decades and in those decades, all of a sudden, we began having mass killings, and then they began to mushroom until they're, as you said in the introduction they're almost two a day. We define mass killings as three or more killings in one setting.

[00:02:39] Then, yes, you would come up with that figure. In studying this, I, studied the research for the last, for about a year, and what I came up with is that it's the reasons for the mass killings have to do with the disturbance in our culture. Sexual dysfunction and with also with family.

[00:03:03] As you pointed out, these killers have mental problems. And so I'm a psychoanalyst. So that's one of the things I focused in on. Have they do have severe mental problems and that is because of the deterioration of the family. And I studied these families of the mass killers in this book, and that's how I came up with this understanding.

[00:03:30] Okay. 

[00:03:32] Bob Gatty: Now, I need to know, in your view, what as the solution. Clearly, the thoughts and prayers... offered up by politicians following these events are not enough. What do the six case histories cited in your book tell us about that? 

[00:03:52] Gerald Schoenewolf: The six case histories tell us things that all of these mass killers had have in common.

[00:03:59] And they, what they have in common is they usually have an early trauma. The earlier In one's life, one has a trauma, the more devastating that trauma is. If a one year old baby... Loses its mother, uh, at one years old, that, that is very traumatic for that one year old, because that one year old hasn't even formed an ego yet.

[00:04:26] Whereas if a person, a kid is 12 years old, that's not nearly as traumatic to lose the mother. So we're talking about early traumas. Most of these mass killers had early traumas, in the first few years of life. One of, one of them had polio, got polio at I think it was three or four years old.

[00:04:49] And then at a very early age, like at three, had to wear leg, had to go through the polio disease and then wear leg braces. Okay. And had parents that were not sympathetic to that. The parents were always fighting. They were more involved with each other than with their boy's polio. So he felt completely abandoned in his struggle with his polio.

[00:05:16] This compounded the trauma. So that was one instance of one of these mass killers. Another one had an early trauma, this was a boy who was born in Korea. His mother and father had an arranged marriage in Korea and South Korea. And the mother did not want to marry this man.

[00:05:39] She was an educated woman in Korea and he was a blue collar guy who had managed to earn some money by going to Dubai and making some quick money. Didn't want to marry him. Her father forced her to marry him. She married him, was, then she had this son his name was Sung Hyu Cho.

[00:06:03] I don't know if I'm pronouncing that and she had postpartum depression when she had him. Postpartum depression,, causes a mother to not pick up her baby. A mother with postpartum depression tends to lie in bed, to be resentful of being, having a pregnancy and of having a child.

[00:06:24] She was particularly depressed because she hated Her husband and resented having to marry him, and she hated her father for making her marry him, and so that was taken out on the son, and so the son was born in a climate where he was completely neglected. So those are two examples of the early traumas that these that these mass killers had.

[00:06:49] Bob Gatty: Okay. So those traumas occurred in the past for these people, for these killers. Over and done with. What are we supposed to do today to deal with them? 

[00:07:03] Gerald Schoenewolf: Okay the other thing that then happened, I want to just continue with the two symptoms that I, that of mass killers.

[00:07:12] Okay. Is the cultural. Disturbance in our society. That's what really causes us to have twice as many killings as any other country, because we have a divided culture right now.

[00:07:25] Bob Gatty: Yeah it's been that way for a while, 

[00:07:27] Gerald Schoenewolf: yeah. In that way, and it's getting worse and it's if you have a divided family where the husband and wife are continually fighting, the children suffer.

[00:07:37] aNd when you have a divided culture in which the liberals and conservatives are always fighting, everyone suffers too, because there's constant restlessness. In the country and all kinds of other things that are happening and more violence is happening all the time. People get angry because they're driving on the highway and they lose it and they start killing each other because they're following too close behind the other car, somebody goes up to a door and knocks at the wrong door, and they get shot through the door, it's people are restless today and quick to violence.

[00:08:12] And so that affects everybody. aNd there's, a lot of stuff going on. All of these people I studied, all but one are white, young white males, or one was an older white male. These killers are mostly white males. Why is that? And there's a lot of studies that show that white males today are lagging behind.

[00:08:38] They're lagging behind in college. They're lagging behind in schools. They seem to be they feel forgotten. And this they're not taken as seriously because of the feminism has helped women elevate themselves, but it has not helped white males. And that's another thing that's happening.

[00:09:00] Yeah, 

[00:09:01] Bob Gatty: That's happening for sure. And the, in a certain segment of the political world knows how to take advantage of it. Don't they? 

[00:09:12] Gerald Schoenewolf: Yes. So then you asked me what, how to prevent this. So it's very complicated. It's not just let's ban guns. Yeah. It's we have, first of all, we have to restore the family, , and restore parenting.

[00:09:30] It's been the trend for the last 50, 60 years for women to go to work. And this has been good for women. It's raised their self esteem. But at the same time, some studies show that women are more depressed today. aNd that, all the advances they've made have not necessarily had good results.

[00:09:55] And one of the byproducts is that parenting has not been advocated, not been, good parenting, it has not been in the foreground of people's minds these days. And so that, that has caused a... One third of our families, and it's rising as I speak, are single parent families. And there's just all this confusion now about families.

[00:10:23] There's no one single value system anymore. 

[00:10:27] Bob Gatty: You're the second guest that I've had on my podcast that's talked about the issues of the family being behind this violence that's occurring often turning into these mass shootings. However, you said that somebody could come up to somebody's door and it's the wrong apartment.

[00:10:53] This happened. We know that and they get shot. Somebody follows too closely behind somebody in the car and the driver gets out and shoots the following driver. Now, if guns were not so accessible, if we didn't have. Way more guns in this country than we have people really would that not by controlling that, would that not help reduce these kinds of flash shootings 

[00:11:24] Gerald Schoenewolf: that occur?

[00:11:26] I think it would do some good, but I think mass killers would find guns. Yeah, they'd go down in the black market or wherever they need to go and they'd find the guns. All right. 

[00:11:40] Bob Gatty: You're probably right there. It's just like when you ban you, you ban booze, what happened? Back. 

[00:11:48] Gerald Schoenewolf: Going back to prevention, one of my ideas, and this is not my idea, other people have had this, that to have parents register or license before they can have children.

[00:12:03] A barber has to have a license to cut hair. You gotta have a license to go fishing. But you don't have to have a license to have a child. And having a child is one of the most complicated things that anybody can do. Having a child and raising a healthy child. So if parents had to be licensed, you'd have, you'd be able to weed out, say, schizophrenic parents or borderlines, or bipolars, psychopaths. You'd be able to weed out parents who are not going to be able to have healthy children. And you'd, and you also could have parent training.

[00:12:42] You not only weeded out the parents that cannot have good, healthy children, but you could also train parents to, to raise healthy children. There's a lot of research that can help people to know the basics, that just the bare basics of how to raise healthy children. 

[00:13:04] Bob Gatty: Who would do this licensing? 

[00:13:06] Gerald Schoenewolf: A government agency would do it. 

[00:13:09] Bob Gatty: Okay, so you'd have the government deciding who could have kids and who can't have kids. That sounds like Nazi Germany to me. 

[00:13:17] Gerald Schoenewolf: You're going from, you're going to, to an extreme you, okay, we can go, we can keep going as we are and just allow anybody to have children and I think it's just going to get worse and worse.

[00:13:31] There has to be some control about how we raise our children. 

[00:13:35] Bob Gatty: Should it be control or should it be part of the education process? 

[00:13:40] Gerald Schoenewolf: Okay, but if it isn't enforced. If you just say, okay, you guys need to be more educated then everybody will educate themselves however they want to.

[00:13:51] Bob Gatty: All right, so what happens, Dr. Schoenewolf if two people, let's say two 20 year olds, they're hot for each other, they strike up a relationship, their birth control mechanisms fail. And they have a kid now. They didn't get a license for that. What's going to happen to them? They going to go to jail because they did that or what?

[00:14:17] Gerald Schoenewolf: Yeah. Without being licensed then the kid would be taken away from them.

[00:14:23] Bob Gatty: Ah, so now we would have the state being the parents of these Accidental Children. Is that right? 

[00:14:30] Gerald Schoenewolf: I think the state would have to have special centers. For child rearing where Children who were taken away from their parents would be raised in and by experts who would be trained in how to raise Children.

[00:14:46] Bob Gatty: Wow. Okay. I don't know about that one. That's the first time I've had somebody say that the government should decide who has the right to have a kid and who doesn't. 

[00:14:57] Gerald Schoenewolf: Yeah. Okay. These are radical solutions, but we have a radical situation in our country. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

[00:15:06] Bob Gatty: Yeah. Okay. We do have a radical situation in the country. Now, in, in Maine, where this latest incident occurred by the time this thing shows, it may not be the latest incident, but in Maine, where this terrible incident occurred, where 18 plus people were killed by this guy. They're saying there should have been a red flag law that there should have been a law that said when somebody is demonstrating that he or she is a danger to himself or others guns would be taken away.

[00:15:38] Do you agree with that? 

[00:15:40] Gerald Schoenewolf: Yes. All of these killers I studied they did tell people what they were going to do. All of them did. All of them posted things and told friends and told, teachers. They all told people what they were going to do, but nobody... intervened. 

[00:15:56] Bob Gatty: Yeah, that's what happened in Maine.

[00:15:58] It, it did, and no one stepped up. Now, if there was a law that required that do you think that would have maybe stopped this killing from occurring? 

[00:16:11] Gerald Schoenewolf: I certainly hope, now, so another radical idea That I proposed and it had to do with the division in our country with the restlessness is that now that this is really radical is I would require political movements to have to register with the government. Right now our country is being controlled and manipulated by radical movements. The black movement, black rights movement the gay movement, the transgender movement, these movements, they're not run by sane people.

[00:16:52] They're run by, by militants, they're run by militants and they have now infused their values. They've actually forced their values on our country. 

[00:17:04] Bob Gatty: Now you just cited Black Lives Matter and you cited the LGBTQ plus community. What about the crazy re right wingers, the white supremacist and all those folks?

[00:17:18] Gerald Schoenewolf: Yes. All of them, all the radical movements, whether the right or the left that are causing the restlessness. , they're causing riots. The conservatives rioted in the White House, the blacks rioted in neighborhoods, all of these things if political groups, had to register with the government, they would have to adhere to policies.

[00:17:42] They, they could not have unpeaceful protests. These unpeaceful protests have been, mushrooming in recent years. It used to be we only had Peaceful protests like the ones that Martin Luther King had but that's, more now, we're having all these unpeaceful protests and they become violent in, in, in many cases.

[00:18:04] So 

[00:18:04] Bob Gatty: you're saying that social movements like Black Lives Matter or whichever ones the conservatives participate in, they would need to register with some government agency. Is that it? 

[00:18:18] Gerald Schoenewolf: They need to register, and they could, and if they broke the rules they would lose their registration. 

[00:18:26] Bob Gatty: All right, and if they lost their registration, what would happen?

[00:18:30] Gerald Schoenewolf: Then they could not function as a, they would not function as a legal group anymore. 

[00:18:36] Bob Gatty: Okay let's just say that an LGBTQ plus group registered with the government, and then they held a rally, and some Opposing folks showed up at the rally and there was trouble, violence.

[00:18:57] Somebody got hurt, maybe killed. Who would suffer the consequences? The group that set up the, that set up the protest that dutifully registered with the government or the people that showed up and caused the problem to start with. 

[00:19:19] Gerald Schoenewolf: It would have each incident would have to be examined, find out those kind of things . 

[00:19:24] Bob Gatty: Who would do the examining.

[00:19:27] Gerald Schoenewolf: It would have to be a A panel that represented all points of view. 

[00:19:33] Bob Gatty: Okay, so it would be like when they were talking about the National Health Care Bill way back when, I think it was before Obamacare, there was discussion about some kind of a panel that would decide whether people could have certain medical procedures or not. And And they were, that proposal was really opposed strongly by a lot of different interest groups representing patients, representing old people, so on, and I don't believe it was ever adopted, although there is some kind of a, in Medicare, there is, there are some controls, but nevertheless it seems like it sets up the government to be the be all and end all which is what the conservatives all say they oppose, right?

[00:20:30] Gerald Schoenewolf: Yeah I'm not a conservative. I don't have any political affiliation. Huh. I think that politics has become too preeminent in our society right now and in the world. I agree with that. Absolutely. 

[00:20:45] If politics becomes preeminent, then you're going to have wars. Yeah. I would like psychology.

[00:20:52] To be, of course, I'm a psychologist. I'd like psychology to be preeminent. When I grew up, and you grew up in that era too in, in the 60s, late 50s and 60s psychology was very important then. Psychology books became bestsellers and people were very interested in reading books about raising children and and how to live and so forth.

[00:21:15] And that's a deeper way to look at things than the political way. Politics divides people. Psychology unites people. 

[00:21:26] Bob Gatty: Okay, how would you go about making that happen? 

[00:21:30] Gerald Schoenewolf: Like I'm saying, see I'm trying to the prevention ideas I'm proposing are actually psychological ideas and they will never happen.

[00:21:41] I don't have any hope that these things are gonna ever happen. Okay. You have to propose things and think that, in some century, maybe in the year 3000 they'll happen. Right now it's too heated, we live in a hysterical time. pEople get hysterical about these issues and then they can't discuss them in a calm way.

[00:22:03] You and I are discussing them today in a calm way but you don't see calm discussions. Another idea that I have is that we should have a national forum once a month where people from all walks of life could come and discuss their feelings about things that are going on in our country.

[00:22:25] Conservatives, liberals radicals, whatever, they can all come, but they have to discuss it without raising their voices or interrupting other people. There would be schools of constructive communication. And I think a national discourse, once a month, would do a lot to heal the country. That, that again is another psychological solution.

[00:22:49] Okay. 

[00:22:51] Bob Gatty: Those ideas. Do you have any other real radical ideas before we move on? 

[00:22:58] Gerald Schoenewolf: Those are the main three. 

[00:22:59] Bob Gatty: Those are the main ones. Okay. All right. leT's talk about some things that are proposed that maybe would have a more immediate impact on on these mass shootings? Maybe not.

[00:23:13] Should states be enacting open carry laws, making it easy, easier for people to run around with guns strapped to their belts? I live in South Carolina, and that's what the, that's what's going on here. 

[00:23:26] Gerald Schoenewolf: Oh I, no, I don't think that would be a good idea. That'd be like going back to the old West.

[00:23:31] Bob Gatty: Yeah, for sure. All right. What about toughening up background checks? 

[00:23:36] Gerald Schoenewolf: yEah, I think that's certainly a good idea.

[00:23:39] Bob Gatty: Yeah, because right now you can go here in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where I live. There's a gun show twice a year at a big convention center. Draws thousands of people. And people go there and if they buy guns from a registered, legitimate gun dealer, then they have to go through an instant background check.

[00:24:03] And if after a certain period of time, and it's not a very long period of time, they are not approved, then they get the gun regardless. If they purchase their gun from Joe Schmedlap down the street, No, no background check is required at all. You can just buy a gun. I could go across the street to my friend, and say, Hey, let me buy that gun of yours and I can buy it, bring it home.

[00:24:33] No background check required. Same thing would happen if you go to a gun show and you buy it from somebody sitting at a table, that's just an individual, he's got a half a dozen guns he's trying to sell. You can buy them and you don't need to do a background check. Now, should that not be tightened up? 

[00:24:52] Gerald Schoenewolf: Oh, certainly.

[00:24:53] Yeah. Okay. It's hard to control what somebody, if somebody goes to his neighbor to buy a gun, it's hard to control that kind of stuff. Okay. 

[00:25:02] Bob Gatty: Now you launched the Living City, sorry, Living Center Press to publish your books, right? Is that your company? 

[00:25:13] Gerald Schoenewolf: Yes, it is. Up until around 1990s or early 2000s, I was being published by regular publishers but I had some opinions, and you've probably heard them today, that were critical of some aspects of feminism some aspects of black rights.

[00:25:32] Yeah. And so I got cancelled. Okay. So I stopped being published by . Okay. So you said 

[00:25:40] Bob Gatty: Scrum. I'll do it myself. 

[00:25:42] Gerald Schoenewolf: I have been doing it myself. Fortunately. We have Amazon. Yeah. And people can publish their own books. So I, I use Amazon, but I have my own press name that I use living Center Press.

[00:25:55] Okay. And, I have a website called Living Center Press U.S.. Where you can look up all my books. I have a special website for The Mass Murderer. TheMassMurderer. com where you can find all It has gotten some good reviews And it seems to be taking off a little bit. This book was published not by my own company.

[00:26:21] The Mass Murderer was published by Defiance Press. In Texas. It's a conservative press. Yeah that's my story. That's why I publish a lot of my, my, my novels. I've published my, myself. Okay. And a recent one, Lizzie a biographical novel is about Lizzie Borden. Okay. It's it's also been taking off.

[00:26:45] Bob Gatty: Okay. What are you working on now? 

[00:26:49] Gerald Schoenewolf: Now I just finished a book called How to Save the World in Ten Complicated Steps. 

[00:26:55] Bob Gatty: Ha Ha! Okay then! You want to run through a couple of them? 

[00:27:01] Gerald Schoenewolf: One of the things I found out in researching this book, I think, again, I think the United Nations has become corrupt.

[00:27:10] It's become corrupt and it's really a powerless organization. And I think we need a world government that works. And I found out in researching this that when the United Nations was established, They, they passed an article, Article 103, that called for a meeting of the UN. In the beginning the six powers insisted that they run the UN.

[00:27:38] The United States, China Russia, and so forth, France. They won the war, so they wanted to run the UN, but they said, okay, we'll do it temporarily, after a while we'll set up a real government. So Article 103 calls for the UN and the Secretary General to call a meeting in which the four powers cannot vote.

[00:28:01] Only the General Assembly can vote, and they set up a, they would set up the UN so that it's a democracy. Not run by the four powers, the six powers anymore. Okay. People don't know that. They tried to have that meeting a few times, but it went nowhere because... Because the four powers put pressure on everybody and say no, you're not going to do this.

[00:28:24] And so then they did it. But that's there. My, my book calls for strengthening the United Nations so that it can handle things like global warming, like pollution. The ocean is just being polluted all over the place. Handle disarming the world of nuclear Arms. That, that's a very important matter and then handling we need to have standardized education throughout the world, standardized medicine throughout the world, standardized we're going to have computers and we're going to have standardized programming of computers in order to make sure that computers, that robots don't get out of control.

[00:29:10] So there's a lot of things that I, I talk about in, in this book. 

[00:29:15] Wow, it sounds really interesting. When you started out talking about the UN, I thought you were going to say we got to, we should get rid of the UN. But no you're advocating making it stronger, just improving it, correct? 

[00:29:28] Correct. 

[00:29:29] We need a world government, in the old days in, in the West we thought we didn't need a government.

[00:29:34] And so we had six gun shooters around and everything. There was no government and it didn't go too well. We need a government, including the world. 

[00:29:45] Bob Gatty: Okay. All right. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we close it up, Dr. Schoenewolf? 

[00:29:51] Gerald Schoenewolf: Can I show a picture of my book? 

[00:29:53] Of course you can.

[00:29:55] This is The Masked Killer. 

[00:29:57] All a picture of one of the killers that is distorted. Yeah, he's scary looking. It's on sale at Barnes and Noble and Amazon 95, or you can get the Kindle edition and it's taking off people. It's not just a study. It's, I think it's well written. The case histories are written like stories and very absorbing.

[00:30:22] People read the book and they can't put it down. I 

[00:30:26] think it's, something people should pick up this weekend and buy and read. 

[00:30:32] Bob Gatty: You guys who are watching this and listening to this, you need to understand, this man has written 30 books. 30! I looked, I went to his website, and I looked at all of his books and the dates, and he's, when did you start?

[00:30:46] In the late 70s, or was it 

[00:30:48] the 80s? 

[00:30:50] Gerald Schoenewolf: I think I started in maybe like the early 80s the early 80s. 

[00:30:58] Bob Gatty: And you've done all those 30 books. I've lost track. You did a bunch of plays. What? 16, 17 plays? Did you? 

[00:31:07] I did about 20 screenplays and I won awards for best screenplay at festivals. Wow, 

[00:31:15] that's really impressive.

[00:31:16] Here's this guy, he's a psychoanalyst and he's, he 

[00:31:20] just had the nerve to, he's working on a book, 10 Ways to Save the World. No small job there. And he writes all these books. It's just amazing. I wrote one book and it was really difficult and didn't do very well. And so I am in awe of anyone who could do what you've done, I really am. 

[00:31:41] Thank you. All right, guys. Listen, thanks so much. I appreciate you joining us today on our podcast, Dr. Schoenewolf I enjoyed talking to you a whole lot. Thank you. 

[00:31:51] Thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed talking with you too, it was nice to have a genteel conversation about these controversial things.

[00:32:00]