Guns and Teens

By Dr. David Laing Dawson

As either a parent or a law maker, a clinical case from some years ago tells you all you need to know about teenagers and guns. I will have to leave out some details to keep this anonymous.

The boy had a girlfriend. He and his dad hunted together. The father kept his rifles in a locked cabinet. Some jealousies and betrayals occurred in the girl/boy relationship. Someone posted salacious accusations against the boy on social media.

The boy decided his life was thus ruined, permanently and forever.

He decided he would have to kill himself.

That night he broke into his father’s gun cabinet and took out a rifle. He found the ammunition, loaded the rifle and took it into the back yard. His parents were upstairs asleep.

The boy sat beneath a tree, placed the gun between his legs, the muzzle under his chin. He fired the rifle. The bullet tore through his jaw and mouth and nose and ruined his face. But it missed his brain.

Damaged and bleeding he found his way back to the basement rec room and the gun cabinet. He then replaced the rifle and locked the cabinet because at that moment his worse fear was of his father finding out he had broken into the gun cabinet. He then lay on the floor where his mother, wakened by the gunshot, found him.

He survived.

I was thinking about this case because of the current tragedy in Oxford Michigan. Definitely it is a rather extreme situation when a parent buys an automatic handgun as a Christmas present for a 15 year old, and then stores it in a bedside table; and this child writing “the thoughts won’t stop. Help me” does indicate the possibility of a psychotic illness developing.

But going back to the situation above:

• This otherwise bright successful teenager suffers social embarrassment/shame at school, in his peer group. (This is bound to happen at some time for many if not most teens, and greatly magnified these days by social media)
• From this he concludes his life is over. (Of course, he has no sense of time and perspective as a teenager)
• He decides the only path is suicide in dramatic fashion. (As a teenager, thinking through alternatives to direct action is beyond his capabilities, and as a teen he has no real sense of how permanent and devastating to family that action could be and/or he might even, before the age of 18 or so, imagine being around to see the consequences of his actions on the friends who betrayed him. A “They will be sorry” moment.)
• He doesn’t tell his parents because of his sense of shame, his need to present himself to them as an adult, a “man”, and not a frightened child. Though given enough time, most parents would notice something is going on with their child.
• Of course he knows how to get into the gun cabinet. Or his mother’s purse, his father’s wallet, the liquor cabinet, the porn sites on his computer, the basement window. It is an adolescent prime directive to figure out how to get around the rules.
• And then the most telling and yet hopeful bit of all: after shooting himself and ruining his face he is still most concerned about getting caught breaking into the gun cabinet and incurring his father’s disappointment and wrath. So he puts the gun back before lying on the floor to die.

Average teenager, ordinary parents, suburban middle class, a moment of social shame, embarrassment among peers, an extreme adolescent reaction to this, and ….. an available gun.