What I Pit is the fact that I find myself immediately wishing this turns out to be in connection with crime-for-profit, a dispute between drug dealers or something. Because, while it might be all one to the dead, that’s the kind of crime we can all understand. As opposed to crazies doing it for reasons only psychiatrists can hope to understand. How did we get to this point?!
In Bath Township, Michigan, Andrew Kehoe killed his wife, 38 elementary school children and five other adults, and injured at least 58 other people, by means of firebombs and ordinary explosives planted at his farm and the nearby elementary school. He then committed suicide by blowing up his truck while in it. It remains the worst school mass murder in U.S. history.
May 18, 1927.
Whatever this horrific point is, we didn’t just now arrive at it.
This was not a “mass shooting” like the Santa Barbara case. It sounds like some sort of escalating argument between groups. It also says “at least two people were shot and eight people were in custody,” NOT “2 dead and 8 injured.”
I don’t know what you’re trying to prove. I was not denying the existence of mass shootings; I was simply telling the OP to read his own damn link, and get it right, before starting a Recreational Outrage thread.
It’s a normal reaction. None of us wants to think about the reality that we could be the victim of a random murder. So we want to assign risk factors to murders we hear about so we can mentally distance ourselves from them. We tell ourselves things like “That kind of thing only happens to people who hang out in the drug scene and I don’t do that. So I’m safe.”
So brave. So very very brave. I salute you sir. Only one so full of brave bravery like you could ever stand-up to and pit the injustice of “whole mass-shootings situation”.
Some agreement; it would be a nicer world if all motivations were sane.
But…some disagreement. Insanity is a deep and permanent part of humanity. It’s built in. Much of it comes from the distribution of mind among the various layers of the brain.
Who has never lost his temper, shouted at a loved one, done something stupid, or acted against his own best interests? Who has never been “insane” – if only to the degree of throwing the golf clubs into the pond?
If insanity could be (magically?) cured, I have a feeling that creativity and emotional gratification would be lost as well. Who would be a Vulcan?
Did you think John Mace said violence has risen? Because otherwise I am not seeing the connection in your post.
He didn’t say that by the way. The world ( or at least Western society, but arguably the world ) is undoubtedly less violent than in times past, but modern 24 hr media does tend to amplify the considerable violence that is still out there.
I know, I know; but crazy-pointless kill-sprees just seem to be happening more and more lately. Maybe that’s a media-driven illusion, but according to Angry White Men by Michael Kimmel (it’s mostly AWM who do these things, though not exclusively), which researches a lot of post-Columbine stats pretty thoroughly, it might have sociological causes unique to our time.