I suspect the real limiting factor is simply the number of people who are willing to do such a thing.
Would it be inappropriate for me to use this question as a consulting case study in my interviews?
Take a diverse population you know well - your high school class for example. (we’ll take mine…240)
How many social outcasts are there (not just nerdy or unpopular kids, kids who are really on the outside of society)? (say…10)
What percent have exhibited violent or disturbing behavior? (%10)
What percent have or could gain access to firearms? (%90)
What percent would seriously contemplate a shooting spree? (%2)
What percent would go ahead and plan one out? (%25)
What percent would act on their plan? (%25)
What percent would be clever or committed enough to not telegraph their intentions and thus get caught? (%50)
Extrapolate that to the total population of the US (300 M)
I calculate about 700 ticking timebombs out there at any given time.
It might be better to work backwards though.
How many successful school shootings are there in a year?
How many foiled attempts are there?
Est how many plan such a shooting without ever going past the planning stage
How many students in your class fit the profile of those students?
Extrapolate to the total population
A monkey can operate a firearm (which, as a side note, would be AWESOME). You load the magazine, pull the slide back to chamber a round, safety off and it’s rock and/or roll time. We aren’t talking about precision shooting at 500 m here. If you can point your finger at someone and yell bang, you have all the training you need.
The trick is finding someone so irrationally angry at imaginary enemies that exist only in their head.
And not to mention any names, but there are people here who I wonder about. Anyone who constantly rails against some particular group - blacks, Republics, Chritians, Jews, rich people, fraternities, Quakers, whoever - is a prime candidate to go off. All it takes is some perfect storm of personal misfortune, means, opportunity and that person’s in a clocktower with a .30-06
Definitely…and there is no precise way to even ball park such a figure. Its going to be situational and change constantly. As you say later, someone who is marginal today could snap tomorrow…and some (copy catters type) folks who were planning such a ‘cool’ thing could get cold feet, drop the whole idea and never do it.
I haven’t read much lately either, but the initial stuff I read seemed to indicate that most of the shots were pretty much inside of 10 feet…i.e. pretty much point blank even with a 9mm pistol. I think even a novice could hit a man sized target at 10 feet with a pistol, especially in a building environment hallways and classrooms (no where to duck or hide if he catches you in the open). I remember one teacher was shot in the doorway of his class trying to block it so the students could get out…hard to MISS a shot like that. And if people are bunched up, even if you miss the one you were shooting at, you are bound to hit someone.
Agreed. Thank the gods (or luck) that there doesn’t seem to be that many people who ARE willing to do such a fucked up thing.
-XT
The ‘military training’ idea is completely backward. People who fall into that category are much less likely to do this sort of thing.
Being even remotely successful in the military means being able to listen and follows orders and, in particular, being able to work as part of a group. Disturbed loner types don’t do any of those things well at all. They would be the first ones to wash out.
The ‘ability’, or rather capability, to commit mass murder like the VT guy implies a definite and serious mental defect. It has practically nothing to do with having any mechanical or physical prowess with firearms. It has everything to do with detaching your innate humanity enough to be able to fire a gun pointblank into other human beings over and over.
That is the reason it doesn’t happen very often. We are hard-wired not to be able to do such things…
Not hardwired; trained from early childhood, IMHO. What strikes me as more significantly abnormal about such killers is not their willingness to kill lots of people - history shows there’s no shortage of those - but that they are willing to die to do so, and not for some greater cause.
I think the logic is pretty unreliable. As many in the various threads have noted, there are risk factors, the life circumstances of the potential murder… so many factors as to make the predictive value of such an assessment fairly worthless. I too am amazed that in a country of 300 million, we’ve had so few events like these.
I think a better metric would be to figure out the number of people at risk for this kind of behavior. There are folks who likely have every single risk factor in spades and will never commit such an atrocity. Maybe someone with fewer will actually do this in the future. What I do worry about is the attention and focus on the shooter, which will no doubt encourage copycat events. Some losers will think that this is a great way to become famous.
The percent of people able to do such a thing is limited pretty much to the pool of gun owners .
:rolleyes: Does the word ‘horseshit’ mean anything to you? If not, take a wiff of your post some time…
-XT
I think anyone is capable of developing a mental illness that would distort their world view to the point Cho’s was. Crazy can strike anyone at any time.
What exactly is this? Your answer to my OP is 100% of the USA population? What is this drivel?
Yes. Anyone can have mental illness or brain damage or a brain tumor that could cause this kind of behavior.
It’s a very specific type of crazy, though. He may have been planning this for well over a month in advance. Saving up $600 bucks, to start with, then however much the Walther cost, and filing the serials off, and making his manifesto, and so on.
I went to Scout camp on a military base, and some of the soldiers let us fire handguns and rifles on the shooting range. I had never fired a gun ever before, but I turned out to be pretty good with it: I even beat one of the soldiers in a shooting contest (the targets, amusingly were these thin plastic shell things of Russian soldiers). The reality is that modern weapons are quite accurate and simple to use. And you can even go to s shooting range with or without any training or gun liscence and practice. So clearly neither weapons training nor even owning a weapon are necessary to go get a gun and use it. Killing people close quarters with a handgun is not exactly Lee Harvey Oswald ont he book depository: you point and shoot. The only thing this guy had to worry about was reloading, and that’s pretty damn easy if you just practice a couple of times too.
What don’t get is why he filed the serials off. First of all, that’s generally ineffective unless you know what you are doing. Second of all, he apparently intended to kill himself anyway, and wasn’t exactly concealing his identity to begin with. What’s the point?
Generally when killers have military training, they are people who were briefly trained and then kicked OUT of the military for being psychologically unstable. Part of the reason for things like boot camp is to see how people act under stress, and generally any mental illness pops up like a big red flag.
Been awhile in these parts since I’ve dared to put my head where the moon don’t shine. Here goes:
Let’s say there are five “mass murders” per year in America. That would mean, annually, one mass murderer in 60 million people (assuming a population of 300M, and no repeat offenders). Divide that by a life expectancy of 80 years (yeah, I’m rounding up) and you get 750,000. So, right now one in 750,000 people in America is or will be a mass murderer. That’s 400 people. I think that works out to a percentage of 0.0001333~.
Of course, the numbers assumed were, somewhat, pulled from my derriere. But the formula seems sound.
Everone keeps talking about how disturbed the jerk was. But I’m liking what his one professor was quoted as saying, that that’s “crap” and he was just plain “mean.”
A room mate was quoted as saying he’d started working out in February…actual action three months back, so add a few weeks planning prior to that. Same room mate said the televised footage he sent to NBC was the first time he had heard him speak, or look directly at anyone (the camera).
Speculation is that the package to NBC was supposed to announce his identity to the world on his own terms. He only needed to conceal his identity for one day (package was sent overnight, but delayed due to wrong address)
If he had done enough damage to his face when he took his own life, and managed to kill everyone who might recognize him, it might have taken a couple of days to figure out who he was.
Pure drivel
Nah, you’re missing the point, bb. Tumors and brain damage does weird shit to people. Kalhoun’s right.
Three months, he’d been planning this. That’s a real specific kind of crazy-ass motherfucker. Someone plans something like this for three months, there isn’t any way you can prevent it. I had three months to plan, I could probably take out Lower Manhattan without any chance of being stopped.