Have we become used to or immune to mass shootings?

[DanaC]

Another lost boy, whatever the reason.

[tw]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Another lost boy, whatever the reason.

The most important part of a story about a car crash - why it happened.

Same here. The largest reason this story is significant - we need know what that reason is.

[DanaC]

Oh, I don't disagree.

But we also need to know why this keeps happening. At an individual level there is a reason - but there is also a meta reason for why young people (mainly boys) are doing this.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Because the girls keep saying no, and the boy's hormones back up.

[Clodfobble]

Malcolm Gladwell made a very compelling argument about the root cause (in a nutshell, culture is contagious and social trends can go subconsciously viral) in his book "Tipping Point." Very much worth the read, as most of his stuff is.

[tw]

Originally Posted by DanaC

At an individual level there is a reason - but there is also a meta reason for why young people (mainly boys) are doing this.

We would be decades farther into understanding had research into forensic psychology not been openly banned by laws desired and promoted by the NRA.

Only subjective conclusions from observation are apparent. These actions are common with people inspired by hate (ie Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, KKK, Donald Trump), educated in isolated environments where parents believe the world to be evil (also called racism, antisemitism, inspired by introverted news sources - propaganda, and contempt for what make science so useful - a hypothesis confirmed by experimental evidence and controlled experimentation).

What inspired Timothy McVeigh? What inspired so many Americans to so hate the American soldier as to believe Saddam had WMDs? Probably the same reason why most knew smoking cigarettes increases health. And why immigrants (legal and illegal) are evil. But again, we can only make conclusions from observation.

These latest bombings are only a worse case example of forensic psychology that has been obstructed due to emotions even inspired and aggravated by the NRA.

We know how Goebbels so easily promoted hate. We know from Philip Zimbardo's famous Stanford prison and torture experiments that so many adults are so easily manipulated and therefore will respond like children.

We also know pedophilia and other anti-social behavior has been created by brain tumors - and cured by removing those tumors.

So much more research is necessary. But extremists have subverted such research using the same emotional denials that also deny man made global warming.

So much to learn. So many just don't want to learn. So many so hate themselves as to not criticize the local gossip (ie 5PM news, tabloid newspapers) for not reporting why every car crash happened - so that we actually learn something.

Therein lies the underlying reasons and where a solution begins.

[Undertoad]

Sudden crazy thought: most school shooter's worst fear would be that the classmates became more famous than he did from the event.

So: have the Parkland teens inadvertently found a cure?

[fargon]

Either that or another reason to do it.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

So: have the Parkland teens inadvertently found a cure?

The NRA shifted tactics. They got guns into YouTube. To make it more interesting, this time it is a girl. They know how to keep our attention.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

The NRA is the most potent human rights organization on the face of the Earth.

Briefly, thus: you have those rights, human, civil, or however characterized, that despite any degree of force, fraud, injustice or propaganda militated against them, you yourself can enforce. With the whole of the people having enforcement's wherewithal, the individual need not often do very much very often to enforce his liberties, which I am assuming are as necessary to the individual as oxygen. Three hundred million pairs of hands make light work. That's also about the number of guns in the US alone. It may barely be enough for the need.

Yet, there are those who would remove the means of enforcement from our hands, tutting and telling us we shouldn't be trusted to look after our own liberties, or resist crime, or follow the adult responsibility inhering in keeping lethal force under our personal control. They adduce all manner of excuses and rationalizations -- but the point is these people are tyrannical. It is worthwhile to stop them and stop them hard.

Some nondemocratic persons will squall in distaste at the prospect -- but they're actuated by a notion that only a state, or in autocratic wacko extremism, a ruler, an El Lider, has a right to act. They seem uncomprehending of the fact that a State strictly speaking does not have rights, but interests. Rights are really for persons.

The NRA, the GOA, the JPFO all understand how rights are gotten, and how you retain rights -- despite having a fraction of the youth, misled through their inexperience, marching against human rights in these days. They've had that in other nations that ground human rights to powder in times past; you can call up the list of those names and years in your own mind. Trying to "stand up to" a human rights lobby is going to land you in monstrous trouble, and in theory can get you prosecuted for conspiring to deny others their civil rights under the appropriate Federal law. As more than a few Democratic good ole boys got, there where old times are not forgotten, look away.

[Griff]

Nope. The NRA now represents force against reason.

[Griff]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/m...ype=collection


This is a good read.

[Undertoad]

No discussion of it here; so have we become used to or immune to vehicle attacks?

[glatt]

It's looking like it, unfortunately. The last time I was in a crowd, I found myself thinking about how I was vulnerable to a vehicle attack and powerless to do anything about it if something happened.

[Undertoad]

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toront...sian-1.4632435

[A post the killer might have sent] referred to the "Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger." Rodger was the 22-year-old California man responsible for a deadly rampage in Isla Vista, Calif., that left six people dead and a dozen more injured.

In a video posted ahead of that 2014 attack, Rodger raged about a number of women turning down his advances, rendering men like him "incels," a term used by some groups to mean "involuntarily celibate."

Bluff said Minassian didn't seem to have a core group of friends and remembers him being mostly "sort of in the background" rather than at the centre of a social group.

"I remember seeing him probably just walking down the halls, usually by himself, or in the cafeteria by himself," he said. "My memory is not perfect, but certainly, it would not be, I don't think, a misstatement to say that he wasn't overly social.

Cellphone video posted to social media on Monday afternoon shows a man stepping out of a white van with a damaged front end that is stopped on the sidewalk. He steps into the line of fire a police officer who has his weapon drawn and can be heard yelling, "Kill me" and gesturing at the officer to shoot him."

The Toronto driver is clearly one of the "rage against being" types of killers, ala Dana's JBP video. Hatred for being itself and a desire to take revenge for the outrage at it.