Mass public shootings on the rise, but why?

[FuXnDajenariht]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18249724/:

"NEW YORK - Mass public shootings have become such a part of American life in recent decades that the most dramatic of them can be evoked from the nation’s collective memory in a word or two: Luby’s. Jonesboro. Columbine.

And now, Virginia Tech.

Since Aug. 1, 1966, when Charles Whitman climbed a 27-story tower on the University of Texas campus and started picking people off, at least 100 Americans have gone on shooting sprees.

And all through those years, the same questions have been asked: What is it about modern-day America that provokes such random violence? Is it the decline of traditional morals? The depiction of violence in entertainment? The ready availability of lethal firepower?

Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox blames guns, at least in part. He notes that seven of the eight deadliest mass public shootings have occurred in the past 25 years.

“I know that there were high-powered guns before,” he said. “But this weaponry is just so much more pervasive than it was.”

Responding with legislation
Australia had a spate of mass public shooting in the 1980s and ’90s, culminating in 1996, when Martin Bryant opened fire at the Port Arthur Historical Site in Tasmania with an AR-15 assault rifle, killing 35 people.

Within two weeks the government had enacted strict gun control laws that included a ban on semiautomatic rifles. There has not been a mass shooting in Australia since.

Yet Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota State Department of Corrections, said the availability of guns was not a factor in his exhaustive statistical study of mass murder during the 20th century.

Duwe found that the prevalence of mass murders, defined as the killing of four or more people in a 24-hour period, tends to mirror that of homicide generally. The increase in mass killings during the 1960s was accompanied by a doubling in the overall murder rate after the relatively peaceful 1940s and ’50s.........."

so what are your thoughts on it?

[FuXnDajenariht]

this part of the article really intrigued and surprised me though...

"Remarkably, violence in today’s media seems to have little to do with mass public shootings. Only a handful of them have ever cited violent video games or movies as inspiration for their crimes. Often they are so isolated and socially awkward that they are indifferent to popular culture."

do you think the mental health industry bears a tiny bit of responsiblity for what happened at V.Tech? or would you point the finger at the courts and PC bureacracy being too lenient and for tying the hands of mental healths professionals trying to give him serious treatment?

what do you think could of been done to help someone like the Korean kid, who seemed to be too far gone for any effective treatment, in a humane way short of locking him up for the rest of his life? i highly doubt prescription drugs would have had any winning results either.

even his family acknowledged that from day 1 that he was alittle off as a child. i watched a news report that stated it was taboo to speak about mental illness and that in most cases its just swept under the rug and ignored. do you think his family bears some responsibility for what ended up happening?

ya think maybe the kid just needed to get laid?

[SPJ]

there are so many things to do or act in life.

a trip, a lesson/class, a movie, a novel, a music/concert, judo, ping pong, --

we all have our rebellious, confused moments/periods in life--

especially, precocious teens having questions about life, and everything.

--

it is a phase, we all have to live and pass and move beyond--

-

find something to strive for, or set goals to achieve,--

--

give meanings to our "existence/life".

--

of course, not involving hurting ourself, and others especially the ones we love, parents, family, schoolmates, teachers. they are parts of our lives.

--

shoot all you want in a video arcade or firing range.

--

hurting others would hurt yourself more.

--

[SPJ]

little things that we like or cherish.

I was saddened by a movie, can't sleep the whole week.

It was a movie about a girl that was dying of cancer, and losing hairs and all.

the boyfriend and her liked to visit nite market in hongkong.

they used a paper net to catch goldfish. if you may catch one, you keep the fish. the girl liked to eat red bean icee or smoothie.

the very last moment of the girl--

she woke up in a dream, she was having fever due to infection and became dilirium. she had leukemia. she wanted to go the nite market to have red bean icee or hong dou bing again. she was too weak to walk.

so the boyfriend in tears, and comforted her, that he would go and get her the icee.

the boy went over the nite market, could not find the vendor. b/c the old man that sells the icee was sick and abscent.

the boy was frustrated and yelled at everyone .

by the time the boy came back to the hospital, the girl (played by yuan yong yi) was gone.

--

is it her last wish was to eat the red bean icee or did not want the boy friend to see her leaving this world.


--

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5qN6GQzUq4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6QU1ChgZq4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWljDHZyIeg&NR=1

there is a remake TV drama series coming, bu liao qin forget me not.

[Yao Sing]

Originally Posted by FuXnDajenariht

"I know that there were high-powered guns before,” he said. “But this weaponry is just so much more pervasive than it was.”

I seriously doubt this statement. Guns don't kill, people kill. I guess with this logic then before there were guns there was no murder, or mass murder.

Originally Posted by FuXnDajenariht

Australia had a spate of mass public shooting in the 1980s and ’90s, culminating in 1996, when Martin Bryant opened fire at the Port Arthur Historical Site in Tasmania with an AR-15 assault rifle, killing 35 people.

Within two weeks the government had enacted strict gun control laws that included a ban on semiautomatic rifles. There has not been a mass shooting in Australia since.

Guess the people that have been stabbed to death feel much better about that.

Originally Posted by FuXnDajenariht

Duwe found that the prevalence of mass murders, defined as the killing of four or more people in a 24-hour period, tends to mirror that of homicide generally. The increase in mass killings during the 1960s was accompanied by a doubling in the overall murder rate after the relatively peaceful 1940s and ’50s.........."

Again, it's the people doing the killing regardless of the weapon used.

Originally Posted by FuXnDajenariht

do you think the mental health industry bears a tiny bit of responsiblity for what happened at V.Tech? or would you point the finger at the courts and PC bureacracy being too lenient and for tying the hands of mental healths professionals trying to give him serious treatment?

Originally Posted by FuXnDajenariht

i highly doubt prescription drugs would have had any winning results either.

Not yet substantiated yet but he may have been treated with anti-depressents like the Columbine killers and others. But that's not important since the goal is to outlaw guns, not FDA approved money-makers.

Originally Posted by FuXnDajenariht

ya think maybe the kid just needed to get laid?

Prostitution (only recourse the the society challenged) is illegal. Better to have frustrated psycotics than have a girl make a buck on a BJ.

[Mega-Foot]

Let's face it. The rise in public shootings is directly linked to a lack of self-discipline, over exposure to violent depictions of killing in the media (honestly, how can this not be? This kid lived out the average FPS video game on the market), and discontent at home and abroad concerning the state of tension and oppression in the Koreas.

[Fu-Pow]

I think that a phenomenon so complex requires a multidimensional analysis. It should include psychological, cultural, societal, technological and biological perspectives.

People want to blame guns in the US. Well other countries have more guns per capita than the US and less murder.

People want to blame the "culture of violence" in the US. Well other countries watch many of the same movies, TV shows and video games that we do.

People want to blame the shooter because he was just "wrong" or "pscyhologically disturbed." Some want to say that his mind was out of his control that it was a biological "chemical imbalance."

People point to these cases and say there is a certain "social profile" to these cases. That people who are socially awkward, from the lower middle class, etc. Well not everyone in that social profile goes around killing people.

All perspectives have some degree of truth to them but shouldn't be looked at in isolation.

In the case of Virginia Tech we have a mentally disturbed, probably chemically-imbalanced individual that fits a certain social profile and lives in a "culture of violence" where it is fairly easy to purchase fire arms.

Its hard to put the blame on any one factor. They all contributed to this "eruption" of violence. Nothing occurs in a vacuum. They all need to be addressed (though the pundits and politicians would have you believe "the cause" is whatever their pet issue of the moment happens to be.)

I don't have an answer. I'm just saying that we can't conveniently point the finger squarely on one thing as we'd like to.

FP

[Mega-Foot]

I blame the media mostly. I still think that fantasizing about killing 33 people is a lot like rampaging through a video game, slaughtering thousands of living creatures**albeit virtually**in a fist person manner. Not to mention the movies. Just think: Doom, Texas Chainsaws, Hills Have Eyes, Only the Strong. They're just sick movies filled with graphic violence, sex, and blood and gore.

[SPJ]

http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...te-cnn-partner

[FuXnDajenariht]

""While Kim's family has not been harassed since the tragedy, neighbors haven't exactly gone out of their way to console the shame-ridden family. "We didn't want them to know, but then they found out," she says. And with almost a sigh of relief, the diminutive Kim adds, "After killing so many people, it is good he committed suicide."

lol d-mn....grandma is a gangsta.

[Scott R. Brown]

Keep in mind that headlines are designed for the specific purpose of getting people to read the article or in some cases to get people to ignore the article and just accept the misstatement (read: LIE) contained in the headline as a statement of fact.

Duwe found that the prevalence of mass murders, defined as the killing of four or more people in a 24-hour period, tends to mirror that of homicide generally. The increase in mass killings during the 1960s was accompanied by a doubling in the overall murder rate after the relatively peaceful 1940s and ’50s.........."

"tends to mirror" means to occur in conjunction with, that is: "at the same time as". A rise in mass homicides is occurring "at the same time as" a rise in homicides, therefore it "appears" they are more prevalent because more are occurring. According to straight numbers they are increasing, but according to statistical percentage there is no demonstrated evidence of this within the article. So we don't really know if more are occurring as a statistical percentage or not.

The above paragraph reveals the headline to be clearly misleading. The headline may be a statement of fact in that mass murders are occurring in greater numbers, but with any rise in population all statistics of life occur more often. So just as there are more mass murders so are there more births, deaths, illnesses, deaths attributed to accidents, etc. The above paragraph states that the increase in mass murders coincides with the increase in murders. However, there is no evidence in the article that demonstrates the rise in number of mass killings to be statistically greater.

Here are some other statements made within the article:

In fact, Duwe found that mass murder was just as common during the 1920s and early 1930s as it is today.

Here the author demonstrates the inaccuracy (LIE!!) of his headline. How can something occur more often, but be “just as common” at the same time.

The difference is that then, mass murderers tended to be failed farmers who killed their families because they could no longer provide for them, then killed themselves. Their crimes embodied the despair and hopelessness of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, the sense that they and their families would be better off in the hereafter than in the here and now.

On December 29, 1929, a 56-year-old tenant farmer from Vernon, Texas, named J.H. Haggard shot his five children, aged 6 to 18, in their beds as they slept. Then he killed himself. He left a note that said only, "All died. I had ruther be ded. Look in zellar."

Despondent men still kill their families today. But public shooters like Virginia Tech's Seung-Hui Cho are different. They are angrier and tend to blame society for their failures, sometimes singling out members of particular ethnic or socio-economic groups.

"It's society's fault ... Society disgusts me," Kimveer Gill wrote in his blog the day before he shot six people to death and injured 19 in Montreal last year.

The common denominator here is an inability of some to cope with failure which results in a sense of hopelessness. The conclusion then is that SOME people have inadequate coping mechanisms which results in acting out with violence against others.

[Section edited out for brevity]

Even so, the small-town America of yesteryear wasn't completely immune. On March 6, 1915, businessman Monroe Phillips, who had lived in Brunswick, Georgia, for 12 years, killed six people and wounded 32 before being shot dead by a local attorney. Phillips' weapon: an automatic shotgun.

Remarkably, violence in today's media seems to have little to do with mass public shootings. Only a handful of them have ever cited violent video games or movies as inspiration for their crimes. Often they are so isolated and socially awkward that they are indifferent to popular culture.

Ultimately, it is impossible to attribute the rise in mass shootings to any single cause. The crimes only account for a tiny fraction of homicides.[Bolding is mine]

Once again the rise is a small percentage of all homicides and contradicts the implication of the headline! This article appears to be nothing more than the author's attempt to capitalize on the sensationalism presently occurring in all the media in regards to this crime!

[Nick Monticello]

In fact, Duwe found that mass murder was just as common during the 1920s and early 1930s as it is today.

Yeah, but for different reasons. back then the Mob was in it's hey day, and mass killings and mass hits between them were the in thing to do. They killed as part of some sort of urban warefare turff fights to controll territory, or avenge various slights.

If you took all the mass Mob killings out of the picture, was there ANY mass Killings similar to what we have now?

The type of killings we are seeing now alll seem to be lone, dispondent, social outcasts lashing out in the most perverse and violent way possible. It's totally different than the 1920's and 1930's mass hits/killings.

[SevenStar]

I heard on the news over the weekend (I think, it may have been early this week) that a guy had people held hostage somewhere in houston. They said the door was chained shut (sound familiar?) I never heard what happened with it though.

[Nick Monticello]

He killed the male hostage, and let the female go. He also killed himself. Rummur has it that it was a Love triangle.

[Mr Punch]

Originally Posted by Nick Monticello

Yeah, but for different reasons. back then the Mob was in it's hey day, and mass killings and mass hits between them were the in thing to do. They killed as part of some sort of urban warefare turff fights to controll territory, or avenge various slights.

If you took all the mass Mob killings out of the picture, was there ANY mass Killings similar to what we have now?

The type of killings we are seeing now alll seem to be lone, dispondent, social outcasts lashing out in the most perverse and violent way possible. It's totally different than the 1920's and 1930's mass hits/killings.

Good point.

Also, as Scott managed to quote just after his claim that the author was sensationalist, without realizing it disproved his allegation:

Originally Posted by Duwe

The difference is that then, mass murderers tended to be failed farmers who killed their families because they could no longer provide for them, then killed themselves. Their crimes embodied the despair and hopelessness of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, the sense that they and their families would be better off in the hereafter than in the here and now.

On December 29, 1929, a 56-year-old tenant farmer from Vernon, Texas, named J.H. Haggard shot his five children, aged 6 to 18, in their beds as they slept. Then he killed himself. He left a note that said only, "All died. I had ruther be ded. Look in zellar."

Great Depression dustbowl family killings and mobsters. Completely different to angry unlaid types who off 20 strangers.