Following the Parkland school shooting we're again hearing about the "epidemic" of "gun violence" and how to stop it. I wrote a piece in 2016 about how this is exactly the wrong metaphor for school shootings or any other kind of violent action. I dislike the term "gun violence" because it depersonalizes a shooting. If person A robs person B, we don't say that B "succumbed to the theft epidemic," like catching the flu. Rather, we focus on the perpetrator A and the causal effect of A's action on B's person or property.
In general, epidemiological models of crime, terrorism, or other social problems are misleading because they treat the acts in question as things that just "happen" to some people, rather than being the conscious, deliberate, and often systematic acts of particular perpetrators against particular victims.
In a follow-up piece I pointed to Edith Penrose's trenchant critique of the use of biological analogies in social science. She wrote: “The chief danger of carrying sweeping analogies very far is that the problems they are designed to illuminate become framed in such a special way that significant matters are frequently inadvertently obscured. Biological analogies contribute little either to the theory of price or to the theory of growth and development of firms and in general tend to confuse the nature of the important issues.” More generally, if we want to understand school shootings, or terrorism, or other forms of harmful human action, we need to treat them like actions, not diseases whose "growth" we need to stop.
