# Killing People is Easy **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 24, 2018, 11:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killing-people-is-easy/811136 "2018-03-24T23:29:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 11\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![DavidwithanR](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/3bc359/32.png) [@DavidwithanR](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidwithanR)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2018, 8:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killing-people-is-easy/811136/21 "2018-03-26T20:32:12Z")
The OP argument has a lot in common with Bill Clinton’s famous argument (trying to avoid impeachment) where he attempted to redefine the word “is”. Namely that while (looked at on its own) it’s a smart piece of arguing, it aims (in the broader context) to obscure the truth rather than explain it. ---
**Author:** ![Crazy\_Canuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/crazy_canuck/32/5282_2.png) [@Crazy\_Canuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Crazy_Canuck)\ **Post date:** [March 26, 2018, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killing-people-is-easy/811136/22 "2018-03-26T21:09:40Z")
This entire post reads like someone I might write if I binge watched all thirteen seasons of Criminal minds without breaking to sleep because I’m also snorting enough cocaine to kill a small horse. > [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > I purposely decline from mentioning them because the thing that most saves us from them at the moment is the fact that most people are not very clever nor imaginative. If monkey is aware of something he can feasibly do, then monkey do. Otherwise, monkey does not. Does anyone else feel that this whole monkey thing is racist, or is that just me? Also, you should check your ego and realize far more people are clever and imaginative than you are giving them credit for. Even after two decades of selling drugs I was constantly amazed at how clever and imaginative people can be in screwing over their fellow man. The real thing that prevents tragedy is that the vast sum of those clever people **don’t want to kill anyone** , not that you are the only human on the planet clever enough to figure out a new way to kill a bunch of people. > [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > It takes some time until the desire to kill Do you have anything resembling a cite that this “desire to kill” exists? I’ve known people who were sociopaths and scared the shit out of me, but they didn’t have a “desire to kill.” They merely valued human life the same way you value the life of a fly. I maybe met one sexual sadist who might qualify, but he got off more on suffering than killing. > [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > If you go onto YouTube, there is an infinite supply of videos on how to make things via 3D printing, chemistry, robotistry, AI, machine learning, etc. Is robotistry a real word? I don’t think it really is, but it sounds kinda catchy so maybe it should be. > [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > If you go onto the Internet, there is an ample supply of locations for people to go and find others who consider it a good idea to kill oneself or others, trade tips, ideas, and videos. Ample supply? I’ve got 4chan and … hmm … err … yeah, that’s it. (If you’re dumb enough to take advice from 4chan, you get what you deserve.) If you start talking about killing others and offering tips on the internet in general, you can expect a visit from law enforcement. They love it when you post videos, they call that “evidence.” > [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > Killing people is not hard. In my actual, real-life experience, the only thing harder is living with yourself afterwards. > [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > Shutting down one vector of technical feasibility may, for a brief period, decrease the numbers of deaths that are the result of a human’s desire for someone to die. Oh, now I see. This is all about gun laws. > [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > This is far less a problem of tools of death than it is a problem of human desire, human creativity, and the spread and normalization of knowledge. Bullshit. This is very much a problem about the tools of death, and now the rambling feel of your post makes a lot more sense. You are starting at the conclusion you want and working backwards, instead of starting at the facts you observe and moving forwards. > [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > 1. To limit the knowledge, e.g. by requesting that the mass media not report on suicides, mass killings, serial killings, etc. and by not mentioning it training students and everyday workers for active shooters. I expect that to work as well as refusing to teach teenagers sex ed so that they will never have sex. > [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > early detection of suicidal/murderous intent combined with laws that allow us to deal with these people pre-crime I’m guessing you’re a bigger fan of the second amendment than the sixth. > [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > Humans are just big water balloons. Despite your belief in your resilience, the reality is that a thumbtack is enough to end you forever. Only if you are a hemophiliac. Otherwise, blood clots. I took a five inch steel blade to the chest once, and while it hurt like you wouldn’t believe, I’m still here. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2018, 12:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killing-people-is-easy/811136/23 "2018-04-02T00:42:24Z")
> [@enipla](#): > > I actually read that. To summarize - Don’t report mass murders, and don’t teach how to stop them. It gives people ideas. Ok then. Those would be among the points that I made. Cites on request. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2018, 1:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killing-people-is-easy/811136/24 "2018-04-02T01:29:01Z")
> [@Crazy\_Canuck](#): > > Does anyone else feel that this whole monkey thing is racist, or is that just me? Seeing as most spree killers and mass murderers are white, to the extent that I was envisioning anyone while writing, it was a white person. More importantly, “monkey see, monkey do” is a commonplace and, at least so far as I am aware of the moment, phrase that is unrelated to anything racial. > [@](#): > > The real thing that prevents tragedy is that the vast sum of those clever people **don’t want to kill anyone** , not that you are the only human on the planet clever enough to figure out a new way to kill a bunch of people. I would agree with the first part. The latter, that most people are clever, seems to be disproved by the Bell curve, the regional disparities in violent acts and methods, and the lack of creative mass killings. I’ll also note things like con-artistry and magic. In both cases you have people engaging in what would generally be considered as professions centered around cleverness, yet you’ll note that the basic games and tricks are largely descended from centuries or millennia of these professionals passing on a small menu of basic parts. Almost no magicians nor con artists actually come up with new tricks and, instead, simply pull from the menu. But, then again, the number of new magical acts has increased in recent years, because scientific and mechanical advances have opened a new search space that the few inventive magicians can explore. Con artistry has moved into new territory, like Nigerian email cons, but these are just the old games on a new platform. The common Nigerian scam, for example, is just the Spanish Prisoner con and something like 200 years old. Fundamentally, magic was constrained to the limits of the human hands, materials science, and animal training. Con-artistry is constrained by the limits of human failings. The first is able to move forward with technical progress, the latter less so. I would vote that things like mass killing, if we are interested in preventing them, are more similar to magic. Technology, as a general rule, will enable more creativity and a wider search space to explore. > [@](#): > > Do you have anything resembling a cite that this “desire to kill” exists? Well unless you believe that people are inhabited by evil spirits and coerced into murderous acts, I think it’s safe to say that they had a desire to do it (excluding accidental homicide, etc.) And particularly when you have people like the Joker guy that shot up the one theater, the Parkland kid, the Vegas shooter, and most serial killers, many of whom explicitly chronicle a desire to kill, it seems unreasonable to assume that there isn’t a desire to kill in some people. Heck, I’ve heard people admit to wanting to join the military as a safe outlet to exorcise their desire to kill people. Since I don’t know what you are proposing in alternate to “a desire to kill” as a motive for people who go out and engage in a good ol’ fashioned group of killings, I think I would have to have to understand what your counterproposal is to try and present any data beyond the above obvious points to back or counteract one view over the other. > [@](#): > > I’ve known people who were sociopaths and scared the shit out of me, but they didn’t have a “desire to kill.” They merely valued human life the same way you value the life of a fly. I maybe met one sexual sadist who might qualify, but he got off more on suffering than killing. Despite all of the media reporting, mass killings and serial killers are quite rare. If we could go and identify and arrest all of them just 10 seconds before each crime they would otherwise have committed, it is unlikely that it would even be noticeable in the overall homicide statistics for the country. That you haven’t met such a person doesn’t seem surprising. > [@](#): > > Is robotistry a real word? I don’t think it really is, but it sounds kinda catchy so maybe it should be. Hm, possibly not. It seemed to follow from “roboticist”, and there is a “[robotistry.org](http://robotistry.org)”, but the Google results in general are slim. I’m not sure if I largely made it up or have heard it around. Will reply more later. ---
**Author:** ![bob\_2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bob_2/32/3341_2.png) [@bob\_2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bob_2)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2018, 1:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killing-people-is-easy/811136/25 "2018-04-02T13:02:43Z")
There does seem to be a copycat element to these things. How the psychology works is beyond my pay grade, but whenever I see a school shooting or a truck being driven into a crowd, I do think that it won’t be long before the next one. The latter method does seem to be a recent phenomenon; the one in France stands out. It could just be that there are people who sit at their computers playing Carmageddon and dreaming about what it would be like to do it for real, and/or others who want to commit an atrocity but do not have the tools, who see the reports and think - “WOW! I could do that.” ---
**Author:** ![Pantastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3bc359/32.png) [@Pantastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pantastic)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2018, 1:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killing-people-is-easy/811136/26 "2018-04-02T13:38:48Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > Large vehicles have existed for nearly a hundred years, but only in about the last ten has someone figured out that you can effectively weaponize them against a crowd and rack up a death count in line with that of a gun. This is just absurdly untrue. Large vehicles have been used against crowds for quite some time, and defending against it has been in the minds of security experts for some time. Large corporations in the 1990s made a point of quietly putting up anti-vehicle barriers (and other defenses) in their subsidaries in strife-prone areas, and after 9/11 began applying them to the US too. It didn’t make the news, but people were definitely aware of the issue. > [@](#): > > I could postulate that this directly follows from the airing of a Mythbusters episode where Adam and Jamie infinitely plow a large truck through an arena of parked cars. You’d need to explain why corporate and government security were installing anti-vehicle barriers at their offices before the episode even aired, thought. And why it did follow from that and not from ‘cars driving through crowds’ scenes in movies far earlier - 1980’s Blues Brothers features cars driving through a mall, for example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIdGxR-aU6o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIdGxR-aU6o) . The idea that ‘drive a car into a crowd to kill a lot of people’ is a unique concept that only geniuses like Adam and Jamie could come up with just doesn’t hold water. > [@](#): > > I purposely decline from mentioning them because the thing that most saves us from them at the moment is the fact that most people are not very clever nor imaginative. I would bet money that you cannot come up with a simple, realistic, not overly specific method of killing people that hasn’t already been in a book or non-secret report. And I wouldn’t be surprised if a simulated version has been released in a movie. Your basic premise is just horribly flawed. ---
**Author:** ![HurricaneDitka](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/96bed5/32.png) [@HurricaneDitka](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HurricaneDitka)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2018, 4:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killing-people-is-easy/811136/27 "2018-04-02T16:31:00Z")
> [@Pantastic](#): > > … I would bet money that you cannot come up with a simple, realistic, not overly specific method of killing people that hasn’t already been in a book or non-secret report. And I wouldn’t be surprised if a simulated version has been released in a movie. Your basic premise is just horribly flawed. I’m curious, on this subject: was the thought of using airliners as guided missiles in a book or report prior to 9/11? ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2018, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killing-people-is-easy/811136/28 "2018-04-02T16:40:22Z")
> [@HurricaneDitka](#): > > I’m curious, on this subject: was the thought of using airliners as guided missiles in a book or report prior to 9/11? Sure. Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honour had a jet obliterating Congress in 1994. ---
**Author:** ![Budget\_Player\_Cadet](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/budget_player_cadet/32/205_2.png) [@Budget\_Player\_Cadet](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Budget_Player_Cadet)\ **Post date:** [April 2, 2018, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killing-people-is-easy/811136/29 "2018-04-02T16:52:29Z")
I’m somehow reminded of [this XKCD](https://xkcd.com/603/)… In that the entire premise is just wrong. We’ve got _so many new ways_ to kill each other, so many new opportunities to learn of interesting new ways to commit mass murder, more people working on interesting strategies, and the net result is… [Huh](http://www.krusekronicle.com/kruse_kronicle/2012/12/a-historical-perspective-on-violence-in-the-united-states.html#.WsJffZe-nIU). Not what your post predicts, certainly. So I feel like you should kind of grapple with that a bit before we start worrying about limiting information or fundamentally altering human psychology. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Pantastic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3bc359/32.png) [@Pantastic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pantastic)\ **Post date:** [April 3, 2018, 4:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killing-people-is-easy/811136/30 "2018-04-03T16:35:16Z")
> [@HurricaneDitka](#): > > I’m curious, on this subject: was the thought of using airliners as guided missiles in a book or report prior to 9/11? Is the jump from ‘using combat aircraft as suicidal guided missiles’ to ‘using commercial aircraft as suicidal guided missiles’ really so incredible that you think it would take an exceptional mind to make the mental leap from Japan’s Kamikaze attacks in WW2 to “the exact same thing, but hijacking a commercial aircraft for surprise”? Aside from the Tom Clancy book that Quartz mentioned, the 1981 movie Escape From New York featured a hijacked plane used as a guided missile. The 1996 movie Executive Decision also featured a plane used as a sort of guided missile (though it was going to be used to disperse gas instead of crashed into a building). In non-fictional accounts, there was the Bojinka Plot in 1995 that involved blowing up a lot of planes and crashing one into the CIA headquarters. [Bojinka plot - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot) There were also exercises done by NORAD in the two years before 9/11 that involved a hijacked plane used a missile: [USATODAY.com - NORAD had drills of jets as weapons](https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-04-18-norad_x.htm) So the idea absolutely existed in movies, books, and actual reports, and even one named attempt to carry out such an attack long before the actual events. And this is just what I found with an offhand google search, I’m sure there’s plenty more available with more than five minutes of effort. For example I’m quite confident that there are some 50s SF stories that involve crashing passenger air or space craft into buildings, but I can’t think of what to search on to find the names. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [April 4, 2018, 8:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killing-people-is-easy/811136/31 "2018-04-04T08:23:58Z")
> [@Pantastic](#): > > This is just absurdly untrue. Large vehicles have been used against crowds for quite some time, and defending against it has been in the minds of security experts for some time. Large corporations in the 1990s made a point of quietly putting up anti-vehicle barriers (and other defenses) in their subsidaries in strife-prone areas, and after 9/11 began applying them to the US too. It didn’t make the news, but people were definitely aware of the issue. Dulles 2002, someone had turned the doors into narrow mazes with those inverted-Y concrete blocks. My large suitcase and I were definitely aware of the presence of those blocks. The word _alunizaje_ has two main meanings in Spain: one is moon-landing (similar to _aterrizaje_, landing on land, and _amerizaje_, landing on water). The other refers to using a car or van to break through a store’s window (_luna_) in order to rob the store. It’s not exactly a new technique; IIRC, it has been in use for over 50 years. Vehicular murder has been on the books even longer, it’s just that there are more people interested in running over their ex than in plunging into a crowd of unknown folk. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/killing-people-is-easy/811136.md?page=1)