Bullshit. And even if this were accurate, you can protect yourself against tornadoes and lightning strikes, so your analogy is crappy. I will grant you that sometimes people just go insane and there’s no way to predict it, but 1) that does not excuse their actions, as they are fully responsible for their own actions, regardless of what “quantum randomness” (or whatever the fuck) is going on around them; and 2) it’s a natural human response to be saddened/outraged when they hear about something like this. We’re not robots, “Oh, nine people brutally murdered at a Christmas party? Well, people go crazy. It happens. Meep, meep. What’s for dinner?” (3. Hi, Buckeye! )
Possibly no criminal history, but he did negligently allow his 13-month-old to nearly drown in a swimming pool several years ago, and then reneged on his responsibility for the disabled child afterward, causing his former wife to have to sue him for his homeowner’s insurance in order to help pay the medical bills. I offer this simply as additional information and not as support for some greater point, however.
I hate to hijack, and I know this was probably addressed in the GD thread, but if free will is an illusion, doesn’t that mean that any decision is predetermined, and that the “threat of punishment” cannot possibly “influence peoples’ decisions”?
On the contrary, if our “free” wills were totally uninfluenced by outside circumstances, then the threat of punishment would be completely useless.
I kind of did. I guess your post kind of inspired me when you said we shouldn’t get too emotional about these events and should try to understand what causes it. I agree on that point.
Mass murder is pandemic in America. These situations happen so often, they rarely make the news anymore. You have to get really dramatic and creative (such as dressing up as Santa Claus and shooting up your family on Christmas Eve, or that Amish school shooting two years ago) in order to get national media attention.
I don’t foresee anything changing, though. While it sucks to be one of the surviving victims, for the rest of us, it’s a winning situation. We get the opportunity to express our recreational outrage and pat ourselves on the back for being morally superior to these perceived sociopaths, while the national media revels in the bloodshed and rubs their hands with glee as their ratings jump through the roof.
Perhaps you could furnish some evidence that out of the 300,000,000 people who live in this country, enough have been killed in mass murders to qualify as pandemic.
I’d wager it’s considerably less than one-thousandth of one percent.
(Which is not to say that any murder, mass or not, isn’t horrible. But it does put the lie to the implication that when it comes to mass murder, ‘America is teh suxxor’.) :rolleyes:
Of course, who cares if America has more mass murder(er)s per capita than other countries. Or why. Shit happens, meep meep, what’s for dinner? :rolleyes:
Not all of us. Some of us are too busy jerking ourselves off for being so enlightened that we’ll glad-hand even a vicious mass murderer as long as he had a bad day at some point.
This board has become the Onion parody version of itself, and you’re our Jean Teasdale.
Hmmm…the possibilities for your posts on this thread so far are whooshing, trolling and stupidity. I was sure the first was a whoosh; after the second I switched to stupidity. Now I’ve moved on to trolling.
One more and I’m siccing the moderators. I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to be that stupid.
Um, no. Having been involved with one, I would imagine that it matters not one whit how much attention a narcissist gets, it’s never going to be enough. Saying if this guy had been paid more attention the tragedy might never have happened is exactly the type of self-justifying, self-pitying statement a narcissist would make. (Not directed at you, KGS.)
I completely understand the impulse to say fuck it all, and go on a murderous rampage against life’s inequities. But I don’t. Because it’s like, foreordained that I won’t.
You don’t think the moderators are reading this thread already?? Besides, all I’m doing is expressing my opinion. I don’t condone what this man did – I’m merely saying that we need to examine the underlying root causes of this man’s behavior, in order to prevent such tragedies from happening in the future. Writing him off as a random psychopath won’t solve a damn thing.
While I find your wording distasteful, I will agree with a small portion of your post. The national media does thrive on these types of stories and I can almost guarantee that that all sources (television, newspapers, and People Magazine) will be milking this for ratings and every nickle possible. Hell, I wonder how long it will be before a “based on a true story” movie is made.
Ya know, I giggle at tasteless humor, but that comment wasn’t funny in the least bit. What a calloused and vile thing to say.
Oh do tell. What has happen in your life that is comparable? Clue us in so we can better understand how you might “know what you are talking about”.
A few years ago something on a much smaller scale and different circumstance (no murder, but a disturbing accidental death) happened just around the corner from my house. It had nothing to do with me and there was never any danger to anyone else. Still, it was very unsettling and affected me, my family, and other neighbors for quite sometime. I can’t imagine the effects from something of this magnitude. I am sorry you are dealing with this Ruffian.
The question that troubles me here: did he really just snap or was he an evil fuck all along who just hadn’t been pushed far enough? The former is a more frightening conclusion than the latter, if you ask me. What happens inside the brain when someone snaps? Was it abject rage and hatred all along that just boiled over? What has to happen inside a person that they’re willing to shoot an innocent child in the face? The circumstances don’t really explain it…I think most of us have known people in worse situations who have endured, even shined. And I do have to wonder–and this is in no way meant to shift an ounce of blame or accountability–is there anything that could have been done to stop him, help him, get him to turn off this awful road before it was too late?