Nearly every month, my column generates substantive comments. Here is my colleague Howard Stein, former head of operational risk, The Corporate & Investment Bank, Citibank and Citigroup International, reminding me that there is another way to look at the issues I am describing in my column on gun controls. He reminds me that “we have risk language to capture what is going on.”
Annie
As usual, you have a sound point of view. We have risk language to capture what is going on.
We are experiencing catastrophic loss events, but rather than their being infrequent Unexpected losses way out on a long tail, they have become frequent Expected losses. The basics of risk information and risk management don't normally contemplate high frequency catastrophic losses, because normally Controls get put into place to reduce the frequency and impact of Inherent incidents and make Residual incidents infrequent and less impactful.
It is a peculiar society that fails to put into place Controls to reduce significant Inherent risks. We are that peculiar society.
Your observation that many of the most extreme individuals are trained in the use of deadly armaments by virtue of their military training is an important observation. Was it the raw material that went into the military hopper or something that happened while in that produced these societally extreme individuals? Where does diversity and inclusion -- or exclusion -- fit into all this. As you know, I think, I am a strong believer in behavioral risk definition and remediation, an approach that I believe has been neglected. As in economics and so many other areas, behavioral approaches can be valuable diagnostically and operationally. Bankers, beginning about 1979, used behavioral statistical analyses to understand profitability -- as a replacement for or in addition to loss minimization -- to improve selection and ongoing risk management in consumer banking.
Somehow though, our society has focused on "controls" -- which are resisted by many or most for a whole panoply of reasons -- rather than more constructive approaches. Just as in vaccination and mask wearing, two matters of recent moment, we see the psychology of resistance and it is much stronger with guns than with health care; we know about oppositional and non-oppositional children; can't we learn and apply some new approaches rather than by flattening our foreheads by butting into walls. There was once an experiment, I'm not sure of this, where a dog was shown food through a hole in a fence that the dog couldn't get through; the fence was only eight feet wide and the dog could have easily gone around; but the animal would have starved to death sitting at the hole in the fence near the food and never figured out to go around the edge --- it's the shooters' fault but we seem to be no smarter than the dog in designing solutions.
Just as an aside, a grand niece of mine worked in the supermarket in Boulder, Colorado that was the site of a mass shooting about two years ago. She was an after school cashier. Her supervisor was killed. Fortunately the day of the shooting was not a school day so she wasn't there and the store wasn't filled with the high school students that usually stopped in for a snack and socialization before going home.
howard