Mr Stratofortress...
It's obviously impossible to address this root cause directly. All I have suggested is that when a sensational shooting happens in America, it is oversimplified to ‘Gun Control’ to promote a special interest when yes there are a lot of factors, guns being one.
I wake up every day without fear, and I live my life standing up. I could be walking down the street and somebody who just got fired or screwed over could decide to plow into me and my dog for no reason. The universe is indifferent. It sucks, and shit happens. I am fine not being in control. But I wont be a paranoid pu$$y like I hear being talked about on here, “I won’t go to America or I’ll be murdered”. I go to your countries even though most of you are very passive to something far more insidious, Islamic extremists. But I don’t act like a big baby and bitch about it, because I am going to live my life in absolute paranoia or wait on the government and police to solve every problem I might have, no more than I am “waiting on Jehovah” to fix everything.
http://markmanson.net/school-shootings
Here are some of the things I took out of it, I hope help you understand, but I recommend reading the whole thing.
By 1999, there had already been a series of school shootings across the United States… They were small-time jobs, amateur hour. Eric was far more interested in Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building…
But he didn’t just want to top the body count, he wanted to top the notoriety, the fame, the horror. He wanted to terrorize people and he understood that his best weapon was not the guns he secretly purchased or the bombs he built in his basement — it was television. He would not kill jocks or preps, he would kill indiscriminately, because that’s what caused the most fear and got the most attention. He wouldn’t just blow up the school, but he’d blow up the parking lot, the police cars and the firefighters and the journalists who rushed to the scene. He would, quite literally, go out with a bang, the shockwaves of which, carried by mass media and the internet, would reverberate through the world for decades.
As chaos engulfed the school in Colorado, it would quickly fan out accros the country, commanding more or less 24-hour television coverage for weeks on end. The drama would be replayed endlessly — bloodied and crippled students climbing out of the library window, the heroic coach who lost his life saving dozens of kids. And then there would be the questions and the speculation. Why? First it was goth culture and Marilyn Manson. Then it was bullying. Then it was being social loners and outcasts.All of the explanations were later discovered to be untrue. The event truly seemed inexplicable. And because it was inexplicable the media and the viewers couldn’t let it go. Books were written. Memorials were built and ceremonies filled out. Eric Harris got his death wish: “Columbine” was a household name.But this “witch hunt” we go through every time a school shooting happens is a total ruse. Elliot Rodger didn’t become a killer because he was a misogynist; he became a misogynist because he was a killer. Just like Eric Harris didn’t become a killer because he loved violent video games; he loved violent video games because he was a killer. Just like Adam Lanza didn’t become a killer because he loved guns; he loved guns because he was a killer.Every school shooting incident comes in the same dreary package: an angry, politically-charged rant, shrink-wrapped around a core of mental illness and neglect. These shooters leave behind journals, videos, diagrams, manifestos and treatises. They broadcast their plans and intentions to their friends and family. They email news outlets minutes before they start firing. They write down their plans and make checklists so that others may follow in their footsteps. They go on angry rants against materialism, hedonism, the government, mass media, women, and sometimes even the people close to them.
And each time, as a culture, we work ourselves into a frenzy debating the angry exterior message, while ignoring the interior life and context of each killer. We miss the point entirely.According to the FBI, mass shootings (defined as shooting events that kill at least four people) occur on average every two weeks in the United States. Yes, every two weeks. Yet we rarely, if ever, hear about most of them. The reason is because these shootings are easily explainable. In most mass shootings, the crimes occur at a private location and the victims are people close and well-known to the shooter — family members, neighbors, friends. Many of them are attributable to gang violence or illicit criminal activities. Others are a crime of passion.
School shootings only account for 4% of all mass shootings and yet they dominate the news media and get the entire country talking about them for weeks on end.
There are a few reasons for this:
They occur in everyday public locations which are supposed to be safe.
An FBI study on school shooters found school shootings are never a result of a crazy person “snapping.” Most shooters do have serious mental health or emotional issues, but they all plan their attacks months or even years in advance. And as they plan, they almost always “leak” information about the attack beforehand, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes in incredibly obvious ways.
Both Harris and Rodger had the police called on them multiple times due to suspicious behavior. Both of them had a history of strange and violent outbursts towards friends and those close to them. Both put their intentions and their angry rants up on the web for everyone to see. Elliot Rodger wrote and re-wrote his plan out, sometimes including murdering his family members and stealing their car. He wrote that if someone had just searched his room, it would have all come apart, he would have been found out. Eric Harris wrote almost the exact same thing 15 years earlier.
Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter who killed 32 people, turned in paper after paper that depicted gruesome killings and gun violence. He had a history of mental health issues and had been reported to the campus police four times for aggressive and antisocial behavior, particularly towards women. One of his professors went so far as to tell the board that she would rather resign than teach another class with him in it.
Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, also had a history of mental illness and inappropriate anti-social behavior. And he too, began sharing his intentions online through forum posts and audio. Lanza had paranoid delusions about mass media and the government, and began to argue that school shootings were justified as a form of protest or revolt. People humored him and ignored him. No one realized he had a small armory of semi-automatic weapons in his house…
Gun control gets the headlines. Mental health care gets the headlines. Violence and video games and misogyny and internet forums and atheism — the list is endless at this point…
Despite being relevant and important discussions, the glamorous headlines are ultimately distractions — they just feed into the carnage and the attention and the fame the killer desired. They are distractions from what is right in front of you and me and the victims of tomorrow’s shooting: people who need help. And while we’re all fighting over whose pet cause is more right and more true and more noble, there’s likely another young man out there, maybe suicidally depressed, maybe paranoid and delusional, maybe a psychopath, and he’s researching guns and bombs and mapping out schools and recording videos and thinking every day about the anger and hate he feels for this world.
And no one is paying attention to him.
Ok, so you've identified a root cause. According to your 'root cause analysis,' it's revenge (on steroids) which motivates killers like Dylan and Erick of Columbine Infamy.Wrong. I am saying the INFAMY motivates them. It’s not revenge, its revenge on a stage. But beyond that I am saying things changed with them. They set a new standard that each wacko has been trying to achieve since.
Now let's say, that as someone in the aviation field, I wanted to find a root cause as to why planes crash. By applying similar logic as you have, I deduce that gravity is to blame. Therefore, I ask the manufacturers to design an anti-gravity device. Then, I'll see about getting ejection seats installed in all passenger seats. You see where I'm going with this?I don’t because it makes no sense. A more intelligent analogy would be why someone would intentionally crash a plane. I’m not analyzing why or how a bullet kills someone when it hits them. Sorry this nonsense is completely lost on me.
It's obviously impossible to address this root cause directly. All I have suggested is that when a sensational shooting happens in America, it is oversimplified to ‘Gun Control’ to promote a special interest when yes there are a lot of factors, guns being one.
Now, back to Dylan and Erick. Their motivation was revenge. On steroids, as you say. Fine. Now, what solution do you propose?Did I say I had a solution? Nope. I didn’t . If this phenomenon has transcended simply a gun control problem, does it make sense for us to put blinders on to all other factors? And just guns guns guns it was guns that caused this. That’s a Band-Aid.
Now that you've identified a cause. Do you want to develop a device that flies around and measures peoples' 'motivation for revenge?' Should we come up with 'thought police' as in "1984." Hmmm, a bit impractical as I see it.Your fallacious reasoning suggests I implied anything like this. When I did not, these are your ideas my friend. Don’t put things out there like this, this kind of stuff doesn’t go over well here.
I wake up every day without fear, and I live my life standing up. I could be walking down the street and somebody who just got fired or screwed over could decide to plow into me and my dog for no reason. The universe is indifferent. It sucks, and shit happens. I am fine not being in control. But I wont be a paranoid pu$$y like I hear being talked about on here, “I won’t go to America or I’ll be murdered”. I go to your countries even though most of you are very passive to something far more insidious, Islamic extremists. But I don’t act like a big baby and bitch about it, because I am going to live my life in absolute paranoia or wait on the government and police to solve every problem I might have, no more than I am “waiting on Jehovah” to fix everything.
You want to blame sensationalist media? Then I assume you're ok with trashing the First Amendment.Again dude, the fallacies. You are very good at using the straw man fallacy over and over. You must have been a fantastic witness. Elder? Pioneer maybe? You are in effect saying that because I think the United States Media sensationalizes stories involving murder and fear and suffering, that I disagree with the first amendment. I never said “do away with the media” or “do away with the first amendment”. I personally ignore sensational media sources. And most news all together. That has nothing to do with you just stated.
Prior to this massacre, there had been others, though not as large. Since the buyback program, there have been no such massacres at all, in Aussie land since '96. NONE. Now, keep in mind, that there have likely been people there, who were 'motivated by revenge on steroids.' But it's a but hard to act out these motivations if you have no, or at least restricted access to the tools that make this possible. And please, spare us the nonsense about how..."they can use a machete." Or, " they can get a can of gasoline and start a fire." Yes, there have been very isolated incidents like this here and there, but you can't even BEGIN to equate that with the chronic mass shooting problem as it exists in the US.America has a ‘gun’ psychology, jihadists have a 'tie a bomb to your ass psychology'. Again none of what you are saying has to do with my position that there is a psychology to commit sensationalized spree shootings in a America. You are still talking about gun laws and patting Australia on the back. You are all very knowledgeable of the efficient killing capability of a firearm, but if fatality numbers were all these folks cared about, they would go the Timothy McVey route, shit he killed 168 people and injured like 600 others without firing a shot, he also didn’t go shoot himself. Motive. The spree shooting is about more than death.
A) Imitate the Australian example. Which is heavy restriction to gun access. Part of the reason this has worked in Australia is geography. It's more difficult to smuggle illegal weapons onto an island. Hence, US borders would need some major beefing up.These solutions still are too basic. EVERYONE wants to cherry pick what they think it is. But they miss the point. One of the best articles I have read that describes what I am getting and, and you don’t seem to understand is this.
or
B) Follow the Swiss example. Which is an expansion of regulation, over not just guns, but ammo as well. Perhaps expand the idea of National Guard, or IRR (ready reserves) to allow for assault weapons to be kept at home, but with strict rules on training, procedures, and weapon securing. Also include strict penalties for non-compmiance. So, your kid gets hold of your weapon, and shoots up his school, then your irresponsible ass is going to Leavenworth for a looong time.
http://markmanson.net/school-shootings
Here are some of the things I took out of it, I hope help you understand, but I recommend reading the whole thing.
By 1999, there had already been a series of school shootings across the United States… They were small-time jobs, amateur hour. Eric was far more interested in Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building…
But he didn’t just want to top the body count, he wanted to top the notoriety, the fame, the horror. He wanted to terrorize people and he understood that his best weapon was not the guns he secretly purchased or the bombs he built in his basement — it was television. He would not kill jocks or preps, he would kill indiscriminately, because that’s what caused the most fear and got the most attention. He wouldn’t just blow up the school, but he’d blow up the parking lot, the police cars and the firefighters and the journalists who rushed to the scene. He would, quite literally, go out with a bang, the shockwaves of which, carried by mass media and the internet, would reverberate through the world for decades.
As chaos engulfed the school in Colorado, it would quickly fan out accros the country, commanding more or less 24-hour television coverage for weeks on end. The drama would be replayed endlessly — bloodied and crippled students climbing out of the library window, the heroic coach who lost his life saving dozens of kids. And then there would be the questions and the speculation. Why? First it was goth culture and Marilyn Manson. Then it was bullying. Then it was being social loners and outcasts.All of the explanations were later discovered to be untrue. The event truly seemed inexplicable. And because it was inexplicable the media and the viewers couldn’t let it go. Books were written. Memorials were built and ceremonies filled out. Eric Harris got his death wish: “Columbine” was a household name.But this “witch hunt” we go through every time a school shooting happens is a total ruse. Elliot Rodger didn’t become a killer because he was a misogynist; he became a misogynist because he was a killer. Just like Eric Harris didn’t become a killer because he loved violent video games; he loved violent video games because he was a killer. Just like Adam Lanza didn’t become a killer because he loved guns; he loved guns because he was a killer.Every school shooting incident comes in the same dreary package: an angry, politically-charged rant, shrink-wrapped around a core of mental illness and neglect. These shooters leave behind journals, videos, diagrams, manifestos and treatises. They broadcast their plans and intentions to their friends and family. They email news outlets minutes before they start firing. They write down their plans and make checklists so that others may follow in their footsteps. They go on angry rants against materialism, hedonism, the government, mass media, women, and sometimes even the people close to them.
And each time, as a culture, we work ourselves into a frenzy debating the angry exterior message, while ignoring the interior life and context of each killer. We miss the point entirely.According to the FBI, mass shootings (defined as shooting events that kill at least four people) occur on average every two weeks in the United States. Yes, every two weeks. Yet we rarely, if ever, hear about most of them. The reason is because these shootings are easily explainable. In most mass shootings, the crimes occur at a private location and the victims are people close and well-known to the shooter — family members, neighbors, friends. Many of them are attributable to gang violence or illicit criminal activities. Others are a crime of passion.
School shootings only account for 4% of all mass shootings and yet they dominate the news media and get the entire country talking about them for weeks on end.
There are a few reasons for this:
They occur in everyday public locations which are supposed to be safe.
- The victims are targeted and killed at random.
- The victims are innocent bystanders and often children.
- The killers leave behind large amounts of material about themselves for the media to share.
- The perpetrator and victims are generally upper-middle class, white, and privileged.
- These shooters know what they are doing.
They’re not “crazy.” They don’t just “snap.” Most of them spend months or years planning their massacres. Elliot Rodger had apparently been planning his shooting for over a year. You don’t just show up with a 140-page manifesto and a large stockpile of weapons one day. You work at it for a long time. And you plan not only the violence, but the presentation for the audience, the performance — what they will see from you, what they will hear from you, the reasons why, the message. It’s all very conscious and deliberate.
And it works. Their killing sprees are specifically targeted to generate the most fear and uncertainty from the public, because the more fear and uncertainty they generate, the more attention they get. They then use all of the attention as a platform to promote themselves or whatever complaints they may have against society. It’s the Columbine formula. It works. And as Eric Harris pointed out in his journal, it’s not about the guns. It’s about the television. The films. The fame. The revolution.An FBI study on school shooters found school shootings are never a result of a crazy person “snapping.” Most shooters do have serious mental health or emotional issues, but they all plan their attacks months or even years in advance. And as they plan, they almost always “leak” information about the attack beforehand, sometimes intentionally, and sometimes in incredibly obvious ways.
Both Harris and Rodger had the police called on them multiple times due to suspicious behavior. Both of them had a history of strange and violent outbursts towards friends and those close to them. Both put their intentions and their angry rants up on the web for everyone to see. Elliot Rodger wrote and re-wrote his plan out, sometimes including murdering his family members and stealing their car. He wrote that if someone had just searched his room, it would have all come apart, he would have been found out. Eric Harris wrote almost the exact same thing 15 years earlier.
Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter who killed 32 people, turned in paper after paper that depicted gruesome killings and gun violence. He had a history of mental health issues and had been reported to the campus police four times for aggressive and antisocial behavior, particularly towards women. One of his professors went so far as to tell the board that she would rather resign than teach another class with him in it.
Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, also had a history of mental illness and inappropriate anti-social behavior. And he too, began sharing his intentions online through forum posts and audio. Lanza had paranoid delusions about mass media and the government, and began to argue that school shootings were justified as a form of protest or revolt. People humored him and ignored him. No one realized he had a small armory of semi-automatic weapons in his house…
Gun control gets the headlines. Mental health care gets the headlines. Violence and video games and misogyny and internet forums and atheism — the list is endless at this point…
Despite being relevant and important discussions, the glamorous headlines are ultimately distractions — they just feed into the carnage and the attention and the fame the killer desired. They are distractions from what is right in front of you and me and the victims of tomorrow’s shooting: people who need help. And while we’re all fighting over whose pet cause is more right and more true and more noble, there’s likely another young man out there, maybe suicidally depressed, maybe paranoid and delusional, maybe a psychopath, and he’s researching guns and bombs and mapping out schools and recording videos and thinking every day about the anger and hate he feels for this world.
And no one is paying attention to him.