Pssst.......Sys, There's Been another School Shooting
- Thread starter long-duc-dong
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It isn't even a blaze of glory. That would mean standing up to an overwhelming force that is trying to take you down. These guys are "chicken brave" at best.
In my opinion, the single root problem - above access to guns, above overhauling the mental health system - is our culture of celebrity.
One thing @syskatine is accurate about is that these guys are all losers. And they want fame. They want to be known for killing a lot of people. That is why there needs to be a risk assessment program for things that continue to be soft target zones like schools. It's not enough to know someone is mentally ill. There is also a narcissistic, psychopathic personality component to whatever dissociative problems they've got - which make them crave the fame and notoriety of a mass murderer.
Look at reality TV. Being famous for being famous and all the every day losers who become well known through these shows and media. It's really a new problem that humanity hasn't had to face before, but syskatine's losers want fame more than anything. Enforcing existing background check laws and improved metal health networks would help, but identifying these people before they kill is imperative. Don't forget the biggest school mass murder in US history was done with a bomb. Not guns. ID the killers before they kill. Don't ass**** the Constitution for pointless feel-good blather.
I think facebook and social media in general makes the losers feel more isolated and hopeless. Before facebook losers would congregate and have good loser times together. Now they stay home and have the same electronic life everyone has but it feels more pathetic since they don't have awesome real life things to put on their instagram and timeline. I read the Santa Barbara shooter's manifesto and it was a real eye opener. These people are hard to detect by their nature since they are so isolated. We will just have to deal with this until the pendulum swings away from the atomized society we have now.
Reducing gun culture and gun saturation would help. There is no question that these losers and south Chicago would both be less dangerous if guns weren't so ubiquitous, but nothing does more to increase gun sales and culture than empty gun grabber rhetoric. At some the gun control people have to realize they are their own worst enemy and if they just shut up about it people will realize that spending more money on their financial collapse/race war arsenal than their health insurance is stupid.
There are the schizophrenic ones like Lanza, and probably the Sandy Hook guy and maybe even the TV broadcast guy that should be easy to identify. But really what can you do once they are identified? We value privacy to much to intervene in something as personal as mental health.
This is the discussion that should be happening from the top down. The only thing I disagree with is stating that "Reducing gun culture and gun saturation would help" without more explanation.
so much is made of gun control vs no more gun control. I'm at least curious as to specifically how you affect negative gun culture and ssaturation and why specifically you believe it will help in a statistically meaningful way.
Because most things I've heard are very broad brush approaches that may or may not impact a statistically minuscule problem in the least but clearly limit existing personal freedoms.
The problem needs laser surgery, not a sledgehammer.
THe NY Times had an article over the weekend regarding where these people are getting their guns. Plenty of them got their guns legally(like the last two -- neither had been identified as nuts/been processed through a mental health agency) and others got them by just going through the process and should not have, but bureaucratic inertia/incompetence won the day so they got the guns.
I think you're on to something @07pilt about the isolating effect of social media -- i'ts extended the old holiday blues and mania to all year for the reasons you stated. Now these people don't just confront their loneliness and lack of "measuring up" to other people's awesome lives during holidays, they're confronted that synthetic depiction year round. It's not the sole explanation, but it's significant... There have been plenty of pre-facebook examples before this recent spate though --- the UT belltower, Edmond post office, etc. but I wonder what an analysis of the social media activity of mass shooters in the last 10 years would show.
I think you're on to something @07pilt about the isolating effect of social media -- i'ts extended the old holiday blues and mania to all year for the reasons you stated. Now these people don't just confront their loneliness and lack of "measuring up" to other people's awesome lives during holidays, they're confronted that synthetic depiction year round. It's not the sole explanation, but it's significant... There have been plenty of pre-facebook examples before this recent spate though --- the UT belltower, Edmond post office, etc. but I wonder what an analysis of the social media activity of mass shooters in the last 10 years would show.
I think it is self evident that if the guns are less available (not by law, just if it organically happened) there are less losers and gang bangers with guns. Sure the ones who really want guns will get them, but they wouldn't be as an appealing of a "solution" if you had to drive a city over, deal with shitty customer service, and the guns cost 3x as much as they do now. If 90% of people quit buying cars, in about 5 years it would be a total pain in the ass to buy a car and gas it up.
I really think if people talked less about gun control the whole gun issue would fade away. Remember in the cheap oil and Al Gore days when liberals would whine about Hummers and Excursions. I swear it drove up sales. People would buy gas guzzlers just to piss off liberals. Gas went up, people quit buying gas guzzlers at such a clip. Gas has come down and people still aren't buy gas guzzlers like they were in the Al Gore days because liberals aren't bitching about it so much. If I was the gun lobby I would find a way to secretly back Obama for a third term. He is the best thing that ever happened for them.
I agree that mass shootings are not a giant problem compared to lots of other problems (still a bigger problem than terrorism in the US). But gun violence and suicide is a substantial problem especially for young people. There are solutions that don't limit existing personal freedoms, but they involve ending the drug war, fixing schools, and an actual war on poverty rather than a war to mitigate the harm of poverty.
