Something that I have noticed about these mass shootings in the U.S.
Something I have noticed about these mass shootings is that they seem to be planned well in advance. Maybe suicides could be prevented by a reduction in the stockpile of guns available, waiting periods, better enforcement of existing laws, etc. But apparently these mass shootings that get so much attention are not a case of somebody going to a gun show or the black market, acquiring a bunch of guns and ammunition, and then shooting dozens of people the next hour or next day. Apparently they are planned well in advance. Here's what one article says about school shootings:
"Despite this last fact, the ubiquitous question “what made him snap?” leads us astray. The Secret Service found that 93 percent planned the attack in advance. Hardly spontaneous combustion. A long, slow, chilling spiral down. Early evidence in the Aurora case suggests it fits this pattern. James Holmes apparently spent months acquiring the guns and ammunition he used, and it’s likely his descent began much earlier. What set him off down that path?" -- Aurora Shooting: What Does a Killer Think?
It makes one wonder how somebody can plan such crimes without anybody else noticing.
By the way, I forgot one in an earlier thread:
Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
Quoting Wayfarer
I forgot about Amy Bishop:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Alabama_in_Huntsville_shooting
"Despite this last fact, the ubiquitous question “what made him snap?” leads us astray. The Secret Service found that 93 percent planned the attack in advance. Hardly spontaneous combustion. A long, slow, chilling spiral down. Early evidence in the Aurora case suggests it fits this pattern. James Holmes apparently spent months acquiring the guns and ammunition he used, and it’s likely his descent began much earlier. What set him off down that path?" -- Aurora Shooting: What Does a Killer Think?
It makes one wonder how somebody can plan such crimes without anybody else noticing.
By the way, I forgot one in an earlier thread:
Quoting WISDOMfromPO-MO
it's always men...
— Wayfarer
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goleta_postal_facility_shootings
Quoting Wayfarer
?WISDOMfromPO-MO OK - nearly always men....
I forgot about Amy Bishop:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Alabama_in_Huntsville_shooting
Comments (51)
Fix the monetary corruption by virtue of passing anti-trust laws. We, as Americans, cannot assume that those in power are good actors. Our laws do not reflect this. The facts do not support it. Unfortunately, those in power write their own rules.
Ce la vie...
That's why you need massive arms stockpiles, to defend yourselves from those in power. Seems like paranoia.
Dollars to doughnut, you won't find 5 female shooters in a hundred gun rampages.
In a sense, the number of people killed by guns here is remarkably low, given how many people are in possession of arms.
The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that corporations are persons with rights; that, I believe, monetary contributions to politicians are free speech protected by the First Amendment (I say that it is bribery); etc.
Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court have also upheld the gun rights of private citizens.
Which one do you see activists spending a disproportionate amount of their resources trying to undo?
Which one do you see the news media--FOX notwithstanding--frequently casting in a negative light?
The point is that it not always men, and that I forgot about maybe the most infamous one where the shooter was a woman.
In doing so, they neglected to act in a way that guarantees the equal rights of all citizens. By virtue of allowing undisclosed amounts of money to be used as a means for expressing free speech, the Supreme Court granted tremendous power to the rights of only those with financial means.
It is yet illegal for multinationals to donate money to political parties in the States (and most legislatures).
Legal personhood is a fiction which has mostly for effect to allow the corporation's agents to act legally only under the name of the corporation. This was already possible, with the agents of a corporation being protected before by the entrepreneurial veil, which could however be lifted in certain circumstances of high-level malfeasance.
Corporate personhood is a lobbying issue, and because lobbying has a terrible reputation, corporate personhood is seen as a terrible thing. Of course, this is based mostly on sentiment, because lobbyism is indispensible in the type of states we all live in nowadays.
The point is null if it's trying to base itself on heavy outliers. No one in their right mind dispute the possibility that women commits a gun rampage. They have all the required parts for it after all. What no one in their right mind should dispute is that the absolute discrepancy between the tendency to commit gun rampages is a relevant factor in the analysis of the phenomenon.
All the guns in the world won't protect one from some kinds of harm. Rather, using arms in such cases makes one a danger to society.
‘Somebody else noticing’ is what gun regulations are for. In case you hadn’t noticed, nearly all of them have been abolished. Hence, the problem.
Why?
I've always found the topic concerning whether a particular mass murderer was mentally ill or not to be intriguing. To my simplistic mind it would seem as though anyone who plans and follows through on the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of human beings must be, ipso facto, mentally ill.
But then again I don't know what specific standards 'experts' in the field use to determine whether or not these labels fit. I know these aren't completely arbitrary designations, but there does seem to be an element of arbitrariness in them.
Can a 'normal', ostensibly stable and sane person engage in these types of acts? If so then what constitutes insanity? Hearing voices? Having hallucinations?
Because meaningful relations between the constituency and its representatives are otherwise reduced to voting and 2 minutes addresses before the Parliement. We live in a time of professional politicians. We therefore needs professionnals to engage them meaningfully to express our interests.
According to this, "8 percent of perpetrators of firearm homicides are female". Although this includes single-victim shootings.
According to this, 2.27 percent of mass shooters (which I assume is what you mean by "rampage") are women.
Your claim checks out.
[sup]*[/sup] Figures are for the U.S. Only includes homicides, so there's room for error if women shooters are less "successful".
Thank you so much for putting the effort into it. (Y)
So, I'm sure anyone should realize that 97.73/2.27 shows that, in some meaningful way, gender is at play here.
I was surprised as to what the definition of "mass shootings" is and wonder how often the definition is used accurately in firearm statistics.
Different discussion but that appears a bit defeatist; we have a sucky system so we need sucky lobbyism to engage politicians and make everything worse for those who cannot organise themselves to lobby or don't have the resources to do so.
You are not being 'simplistic' in thinking that mass murderers must be mentally ill. Most people think mass murderers are either crazy or evil. I suppose that psychiatrists find that they are capable of effective planning and careful execution of plans, are not delusional as a psychiatric definition--hearing voices, for instance, have a clear understanding of their actions, and so on.
I agree with you that they are, ipso facto, mentally ill--mad, crazy, insane--whatever term one prefers.
I'll use Erich Fromm's formula: In an insane society, insane people are going to seem normal; mentally healthy people will seem insane. Fromm judged at least the American society to be insane. He wasn't excluding other societies from his diagnosis, but he was writing about this one.
Lemme rephrase that: you agree that they're not necessarily mentally ill by any real, official, accepted standards and the accepted meaning of the words mentally ill, but despite that and with no further arguments, you agree that they're mentally ill?
Another thing I have noticed is that they all involve guns never imagined by the people writing the constitution at the time of writing.
I also note that automatics are "illegal" but a kit to turn a gun into an automatic can be legally bought at exactly the same time as the gun.
I also note the high yield of morons in the USA generally, and in the gun lobby in particular.
Any thing else you want to say?
Most people in the world think that killing a batch of people for no particular cause is insane. The same way that it is insane to establish a policy of increased fossil fuel use, when sustainable clean alternatives are available (wind, solar), given the bad outcomes of global warming: climate change, sea rise, increased forest fires, storms, floods, heat waves, increased risk of disease, and so forth.
Are US policy leaders schizophrenic, psychotic, unhinged in some way listed in the DSM? Probably not, but their policies are decidedly crazy.
That is not what I said.
I said that they often seem to be planned well in advance .
Quoting charleton
Anybody who more than casually keeps up with politics and current events is reminded of such superficial elements in the gun issue all of the time.
Quoting charleton
In other words, if you want to look below the surface and try to identify the underlying causes of gun violence, do it alone and keep it to yourself. Only narrow, everything-is- black-or-white, superficial ideology will be respected.
10-4.
Second mass shooting in 2 weeks in the US.
Is it my imagination or did there seem to be much less mass shootings during Trump's presidency? If so, why was there a low incidence rate compared to (apparently) now.
I'm not a Trump supporter by the way, so not looking to score political points.
Finding some possibly conflicting data.
https://www.fbi.gov/about/partnerships/office-of-partner-engagement/active-shooter-incidents-graphics
https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/active-shooter-incidents-in-the-us-2019-042820.pdf/view
Shows 2017 (30), 2019 (28), and 2018 (27) as the highest number of active shooter incidents since 2000. Note the term “active shooter.”
However, when looking at “mass shootings” I find the following.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2021
107 so far this year.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2020
615 last year.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2019
434 in 2019.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2018
322 in 2018.
You can follow the wiki links to other years, but I’m confused about how there are more mass shootings than active shooter incidents. The second link states that of the 28 active shooter incidents in 2019, 12 met the definition of “mass killing.” Are there mass murders that don’t meet the definition of active shooter? But more to your point, mass murders have increased since 2018, but the same isn’t true for active shooter incidents, which have hovered around 30 since 2017.
Heard this several times. It is recency bias. The El Paso, Dayton, and Garlic festival shootings were right on top of each other. Las Vegas, etc.
Moneyed interest groups are part of it, but I'd argue not a huge part. The fire arms industry isn't THAT big. It's not like tech or oil. The security costs imposed by their business on other businesses is probably larger than their current net profits.
IMO it comes down to: (in rank order)
A. Identity. Somehow guns have become a pillar of Republicanism, and our politics are very tribal. Gun owning households went Trump in every state except Vermont I believe. It's part of conservative identity. Part of some forms of Christian identity. It's part of rural identity. That makes it more emotionally charged.
It also ties into individual identity. The average American male is almost 200lbs. 24% body fat in their early 20s. If you can't run a mile or do a pull up, a gun and a truck become valuable tokens for masculinity. The weapon itself is a signal of strength in one's ability to defend oneself, particularly because anyone can use it.
B. The US is a low trust society and getting more low trust due to political tribalism and very rapid demographic shifts. People's perceptions of the need for defense are driven more by trust than real crime. Assault weapons have boomed even as violent crime has plummeted. Last summer's civil unrest probably intensified this.
C. General feeling of crisis. Global warming is unaddressed. Massive sovereign debt. Sloppy half assed coup attempts. Terrorism. Candidates screaming fraud when they lose. If your world is unravelling, better to be armed.
D. Police response times on rural areas are very slow. There is a real practical value to a gun. Part of why I have them. The opiate epidemic has sent rural crime above the national average (ironically given the rhetoric, San Diego and other major cities with huge undocumented populations have below average crime). Gun violence is also way less common in rural areas. Our political system highly favors us rural voters. If something is less of an issue for us, it has less chance of being addressed (although this fails to hold for water pollution because the GOP has somehow tied getting posioned by industry and not caring about your land to masculinity: "drill baby drill!").
Tribal identity is the key to the political deadlock. Masculine identity is probably the key to the rise in assault weapon ownership and mass shootings.
I think researchers are sleeping on the plunge in young males' sexual activity in recent years, and the effects of the dynamics of internet dating. Inability to find mates is identified as a major factor in the radicalization of Islamist terrorists. Far-Right sites are awash in references to their poor prospects and the fear of "cuckolding," whilst "incel" is a common insult.
However, you do end up in a bit of infinite regress, since that begs the question, why are young men, but not women to nearly the same degree, seeing this drop off in relationships?
You can also add to the whole problem feelings of self worth. The modern economy is not producing a lot of jobs for people without degrees, yet a state worth of people, mostly low skilled competing for the same shrinking pool of jobs, comes into the market each year through migration. The result is low labor force participation, low wages, and high competition.
Well said sir.
Mass shooters, if what I said about them is true, must've experienced a lot of negativity from people but these people, for certain, must be identifiable individuals in the social lives or what passes for of mass shooters. Yet, puzzlingly, they choose to lash out, shoot and kill, completely random people some of whom might have even been willing to come to the mass shooter's aid.
What I'm trying to get at is the assumptions that go into the inference from I hate what V, W, and, X did to me, now I'll go and murder Y and a whole bunch of random people. Somewhere inside the mind of a mass shooter X = Y and a whole bunch of random people. For my money, in a mass shooter's eyes, his misery is the handiwork of society and not of individuals and thus when ge contemplates revenge, his target is society and the deaths of totally random people will satisfy faer. Perhaps mass shooters of the specific kind I'm referring to are of the view that everybody needs to care what everybody does and if a handful of individuals fail to behave well towards the mass shooter, they are guilty, no doubt, but the rest are seen as accomplices, complicit in the suffering of the mass shooter and therefore as valid targets of their vengeance and no matter how warped and repulsive this logic may appear to be, I'm going to stick my neck out and say, "there might be a grain of truth in it". If anything then, mass shootings, despite the immediate response of condemning the mass shooter as diabolically evil, it also has, even if buried under a pile of lifeless bodies, the feel of a desperate, last-minute cry for help, sympathy, and compassion.
So the totemic regard for assault weapons, and even their use, is associated with the sexual fears/disappointments of unfortunate males? Well, I only own shotguns, and so am pleased I must then be less unfortunate.
Give 'em both barrels!
That is an interesting observation. You're right. It's definitely looks like a slow boil. I think there should be laws that forbid the sale of a gun until the buyer answers at least one question in writing: "Do you want to engage in a mass shooting of unarmed people?" I know that anyone in their right mind would simply answer "No." But if you're crazy enough to say yes to that question, you shouldn't be allowed to buy the gun. Right now we don't even ask that obvious question. We can debate if their should be other questions to ask someone before they buy a gun, but we should consider asking this obvious one.
Firstly, school is an absolutely terrible experience. Unrelated to the pandemic, student suicide rates weren't anything to laugh about, although it seems worse now. It's a world where you're being convinced 5 days a week since you're 3-5 years old that your worth is determined by the letter score on every assignment. Schools have also been laxing their standards to give an A for decades, so currently many people see Bs or less to be for failures. In other words, you can't fuck up. You have to be perfect or you're worthless.
Perhaps as an extension of that, there's a dubious idea shoved into your throat that going to a highly ranked school and getting a job is the only worthwhile life direction you can take. As a result you have competitive students with extremely fragile senses of self-worth that hangs by their gpas, and struggling students that're reminded of their worthless for years on end.
Not to mention somewhere along the way as classes get more specialized, there's a realization that a great deal of material that you're being forced to learn for 6 hours of the day is practically useless.
I was more of the competitive kind of student and the only thing that I felt that kept me sane were the friends I could complain to between classes. Take that away and all that would remain would be the desire to end it all. Then change perspectives to someone who never had the friends to tie them back down to reality and are reminded of their worthlessness on a constant basis.
I would want a big power trip before logging out.
"Behavoiral template" :up: Copy cat murders!
I was just wondering as to how a mass shooter gains satisfaction from killing random people.
There are two points to consider:
1. One is the rather specific act of settling a score with someone who wrongs you. This needn't be further clarified as it's commonplace enough.
2. Then there's the obviously non-specific or general acts of getting even but the targets are completely random folks. This is what all mass shootings are.
1 above is not so much an issue. X hurt me, I want to hurt X back. Case closed.
2, on the other hand, is fallacious. X hurt me, I want to hurt Y. Something doesn't add up unless...mass shootings are a domino effect kinda phenomenon.
I think you are oversimplifying things. Mass murderers aren’t necessarily out for revenge, so to speak. There are other possible motivating factors involved. The hope of fame seems to be a rather obvious one, but also simply living a miserable life and twisting that into envy. So you get it in your mind that others should pay. You know the saying “misery loves company.”
Bump stocks were just ruled "not machine guns" by the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Does this change your statement? I'm not familiar with exactly what you're talking about so I assume you meant bump stocks but if not I'd be glad to be educated.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/us-appeals-court-rules-bump-stocks-are-not-machine-guns
Bloomie link in case you don't like ZH.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/federal-bump-stock-ban-blocked-by-divided-appeals-court
:up:
It makes sense to me to that this is what shooters are doing, going on a power trip, playing God, and (often) escaping into the grave from any consequences.
I also liked your description of the stresses of school, etc.
If a mass shooting were to happen, how would it stop without another person without a gun? The US is in a peculiar place that differs from places like Japan because they have Mexico and Canada as a place where, even if all guns were banned, would still flow in. Once banned the only people who would have guns would be people who don't follow the law, the ban. Not to mention it's fairly easy to make if it's a bootleg one.
Even if we can magically make all guns on the land disappear and have them never made again, it wouldn't solve the root of the cause: the desire to cause a mass shooting.
My point being, I don't understand the notion that the solution to the problem is as simple as, "just ban it"
Japan has very few gun deaths. To me, that doesn’t pose a conceptual problem. Less guns, harder to get guns, less gun deaths. Of course in the USA it’s a lost argument, there’s almost as many guns as people. (Or is it more?) In any case, if you say ‘gun ownership is not the problem’ then at that precise moment, I change channels.
Yes you can lower gun deaths if you can get rid of guns, but that in itself is very hard to make happen here, in the US. But then the real problem is that we have something in our culture, our way of living that causes people to take guns and kill as many people as they can with it That desire doesn't go away if guns are gone and just gets replaced with, "take a knife and kill as many people as they can."
Japan is an interesting exception in most regards, but I suspect that its low homicide rates translates directly to it's high suicide rates. In other words, people in Japan may be killing themselves before they can kill others, which in some respect is much more morbid than mass shootings considering their innocence.
That alone is extremely damaging, and it is further exacerbated by the fact that their grievances are generally met with ostracization and more humilation.
Are people really still scratching their heads at this? It is pretty obvious where the deadly cocktail of suicidality and a grudge against society comes from.
I did mention, hinted perhaps, that my analysis was not meant to cover all the cases, only a small fraction of mass shooters may fit my description.
Quoting Wayfarer
:up: :clap: Deep!!!