| PUBLICATION:
Montreal Gazette DATE: 2006.10.23 EDITION: Final SECTION: News PAGE: A1 / FRONT BYLINE: ANDY RIGA SOURCE: The Gazette COUNT: 1129 ILLUSTRATION: Photo: NORMAND BLOUIN, THE GAZETTE / ; Photo: Part of the form that gun-licence applicants have to fill out asks about divorce and breakdowns.; Colour Photo: THE GAZETTE / Day 3 of a Five-Day Series -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dangerous applicants hard to spot: The shooting rampage at Dawson College last month refocused the gun-control debate. Today's report is the third in a five-part series Guns: a question of control. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- As Kimveer Gill and Dragolub Tzokovitch have shown in recent weeks, little stands between a mentally unstable person and perfectly legal semi-automatic handguns and rifles. To get a licence to buy such restricted firearms, all a deranged person has to do is answer No to gun-licence application questions about suicide attempts, alcohol addiction, divorce, job loss, bankruptcy and calls to police about violent behaviour. Two references must vouch for the application's accuracy - but there is little to stop a crazed person from choosing people who don't know about, or turn a blind eye to, his or her problems. They must also take a safety course and belong to a gun club. Both Gill and Tzokovitch passed the checks and had licences for their restricted guns. Gill, who posted violent, suicidal messages on the Internet, killed Anastasia De Sousa and left 20 others injured at Dawson College. Police suspect Tzok-ovitch, a psychologist suffering from depression, shot and killed his wife and two daughters in Beaconsfield. Both committed suicide. The shootings sparked a societal debate, raising questions about gun licensing. Should psychological testing of applicants be imposed? Should psychologists meet each face to face before licences are handed out? "Is it too easy to get a licence? Well, we know that an individual like Gill was able to get a licence to own a restricted firearm," said Universite de Montreal law professor Louise Viau, who was on a federal advisory committee that looked at tightening gun-control laws after the 1989 Ecole Polytechnique massacre. Today's gun laws are more stringent than they were when Marc Lepine legally bought his semi-automatic rifle, she said. There is, for example, more of an emphasis on gathering data about licence applicants' spouses and ex-partners, who are encouraged to report concerns to police, she said. If a licence applicant's spouse or ex-spouse does not sign the form, authorities now automatically notify them about the application. Also, since the massacre, authorities have kept a tighter rein on most types of guns through a national registry, she noted. But Viau said recent shootings make it clear that more must be done to weed out potentially dangerous gun owners, particularly those seeking semi-automatics. - - - Experts say psychological tests and one-on-one interviews would be very expensive to administer to the 14,000 Quebecers who apply for gun licences every year, including 2,000 seeking access to restricted firearms. And such measures would probably not be very effective in accurately zeroing in on people who might one day use a gun to harm or kill others, they say. "It's incredibly difficult to predict a rare event like someone being violent," said Rex Kline, a Concordia University expert on psychological assessments. "It's a tough problem for which it would be nice if we had an answer, but we just don't." There "is really no psychological test that is any kind of magic. Predicting dangerousness is incredibly hard; psychological measures are not good predictors of that." One-on-one interviews "are even worse," Kline added. "Psychologists have no special ability whatsoever to divine someone's intentions, to look into their soul. They can ask about mental-health issues and history of hospitalization and such, but psychologists have no ability to read minds." In settings like psychiatric hospitals or when ordered by a court, tests are administered (on paper or a computer screen) that can look for "depression or evidence of psychoses or general maladjustment," he said. But "it's really hard to connect (the results) to whether someone is going to do something violent, and that's the problem." Administering tests on a wide scale is impractical, he added. "You'll end up catching all kinds of people who aren't going to be violent - it's almost inevitable because if it's rare that means that if you screen for it, there tend to be many false positives." And tests can only present a snapshot of a person's mental state at a specific time, noted Barbel Knauper, a McGill University psychology professor and an expert on psychological questionnaires. "Since becoming violent is influenced by so many factors - one of them being the context in which a person lives - giving tests to (all who apply for gun licences) wouldn't be such a great predictor," she said. "If it were possible to predict someone's behaviour based on a test score, our world would be different. But we know there are many things that happen in life which will affect people's future. It's just not possible to reliably predict what a person will do." Psychological testing is helpful in certain situations, such as in deciding when convicted sex offenders and violent criminals are released from jail, she said. "We are doing pretty good with this. They are being tested in jail, they are getting therapy and so on. Maybe there would be more sexual offences and murders if there were not good tests and good psychologists and psychiatrists." The main reason it works in such cases is that psychologists know what to look for. In addition, Knauper said, "testing for probability of re-offending in the case of sexual offenders is an in-depth, very lengthy process. There are various test batteries, structured interviews, etc. Such test batteries and diagnostic interviews have not been developed and are not available for 'diagnosing' likelihood of violent use of guns." Some members of the general public "might want wide-scale (psychological) testing of gun- licence applicants and could defend the idea, but I can see so many people who would say it's not predictive enough, it's not valid enough," she said. "It would prevent a couple of murders from happening and then some people might argue it's all worth it, but you know it won't fly because, in my opinion, it's too expensive - it would cost billions - for what you're getting from it." - - - Privacy can also be a troublesome issue when investigating licence applications. Police say they are stymied by privacy laws, which bar them from accessing applicants' psychological and medical history. And any move to delve deeper into the personal lives in the licensing process would probably be opposed by gun owners, some of whom have long complained that the current system involves too many personal questions. In 2001, federal privacy commissioner George Radwanski agreed. "Much of the information collected in the application process - about mental health, job losses, bankruptcies, substance abuse etc. - is highly intrusive," he said at the time. "We have concerns about the breadth of the information captured as well as its usefulness in the decision-making process." The questions he objected to remain on the form. - - - Raymond Contre, president of the Federation quebecoise de tir, an organization that represents target shooters, said the current system is already stringent. "There is no perfect system, there will always be flaws," Contre said. "But I can assure you that when it comes to applications for licences for restricted firearms, it's very, very strict. From what I see, it's taken very, very seriously" by authorities. Still, Viau of the Universite de Montreal says the least authorities should insist on is that every applicant undergo an interview and in-depth background check before they are allowed to own semi-automatic weapons, with gun owners paying the cost. "Maybe the (interviewer), if they talked to them long enough, would see that the person is 'weird,' that something is not right," she said. "They can ask what do you do in life, what are your interests. They would have certainly learned that (Gill, for example) was into Goth, vampirism. Does he have friends or not?" Such questions could draw out an applicant and shed light on his or her mental state, Viau argued. "Don't forget that the ownership of weapons is a privilege, not a right," she added. "And when in doubt, public security should weigh more heavily than the right of the individual who wants this gun." Psychological testing. Page A4 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PUBLICATION: Montreal
Gazette -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Psychological testing at work might hold some answers: Most assessments of job applicants are unreliable and seen as intrusive -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Employers sometimes do psychological testing and in-depth interviews before hiring and promoting workers, and some have had to deal with workplace shootings. So can anything be learned from the corporate world as Canada seeks a better way to keep gun licences out of the hands of the mentally unstable? In the past, some employers gave recruits the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a test that aims to uncover anti-social, psychotic and neurotic tendencies. That test - which takes 60 to 90 minutes and features more than 500 true-or-false questions - was phased out of the workplace years ago and is now used almost exclusively in clinical settings to help diagnose mental disorders and determine treatment methods, said Mary Dean Lee, a management professor at McGill University. In the workplace, she said, the test results might "say, 'this person is prone to being a psychopath,' but (results) weren't very valid or reliable and they were intrusive," said Lee, who specializes in organizational behaviour and human resources. "They didn't help predict who will perform well." These days, companies are also restricted in the type of questions they can ask applicants. They can't discriminate based on mental health and want to avoid accusations that they are administering tests that are biased - against those of a certain race, for example. "If it's not job-related, if statistically you can't show that the result of this test predicts performance, then it's considered not a legitimate kind of measurement to take," Lee said. And even if employers could delve deeper into the psyche of workers, it's unclear whether it would help in, for example, preventing employees from shooting co-workers. "We're at the beginning of understanding all these kinds of the things," Lee said. "In the case of someone who pulls out a gun and shoots people at work, was that person a kind of time bomb waiting to go off? How much of it was that and how much of it an intolerable work situation and this person took a lot of abuse, a lot of inhumane treatment and was in a box and snapped?" Today, some employers use off-site "assessment centres" to put executives through their paces before they can move up the corporate ladder. Testing might include one-on-one interviews, standardized pencil-and-paper tests and workplace simulations overseen by professionals to see how the subjects react to stress. The applicant may be put in a stressful situation - given an hour to deal with an overflowing inbox, for example. "What they're looking for is how well you set priorities," Lee said. "And people are also watching you to see how stressed you are - are you sweating, are you taking your clothes off? You're being observed on how well you're handling this impossible task." In another test, the applicant may be told they have an hour to write a speech with the help of two subordinates, not realizing the two are actors - one coached to be hostile and belligerent, the other submissive. Such testing is very expensive and not widespread, and is more common among big companies. The cost depends on how extensive the testing is, how many people are involved in the process and other factors. In the workplace, a key to learning about potential hires is asking the right questions in one-on-one interviews, says David S. Cohen, a Toronto-based human-resources consultant who has helped airlines and police forces improve their employee-screening processes. For a gun-licence application, "a proper interview would require open-ended questions with the ability of the person asking the question to ask additional probing questions," said Cohen, president of Strategic Action Group. "It would have to be done in person and it would have to be done by somebody who is trained in behavioural interviewing. And there would have to obviously be a very, very specific set of questions and appropriate answers determined in advance," he said. Because of the time and cost involved, Cohen doubts the governments would implement such interviewing - and follow-up research - in the gun-licensing system. But if it did, Cohen has suggestions for questions that applicants could be asked. "Tell me about the last time that you got really angry? Describe the situation," Cohen said. "If you find that the person gets into a fight every time they get involved with people, I don't want to give them a gun." A follow-up investigation based on what an applicant says would be crucial, he added. "You might ask, 'Tell me about a time when you were confronted by a police officer,' " Cohen said. "The person might not have a record, so it wouldn't show up in a background check. But if they tell you they had an interaction with an officer, that you can check out." Firearms Debate -The Front Lines Saturday: In the first instalment
of a five-part series, we look at what the polls tell us about attitudes
toward firearms. Plus, the law - gun registry earns respect as well as
resentment. And online: |