...whatever you are doing. Stop.

Your diary is showing up four times.

Give me a few minutes to clean this up and please don't edit it any more.

Thanks.

...the mind is racing, there are new thoughts, old ideas can be better phrased...a Writer's lot is maybe not happy, but they must be allowed to run when the will moves them...

That being said...

When working from a Diary, use the Edit Tab at the top of the Diary...do not preview....and I think you will be Okay.

Very Best Wishes, Traveller

It doesn't help that the Police shot an unarmed youth to cause the protest. They shot him first in the buttocks as he fled, then in the back, and when he lay on the ground, they shot him in the head. So, maybe naturally enough, a crowd gathers...this is what came of that. I commented on the Colorado shooting by noting that the militarization of our civilians wasn't possible without the militarization of the police first. A led naturally and inexorably to B...and 100 round clips. I'm not saying the police don't have a hard job, but they are out of control and have been for years and years now. No politician has the courage to take them on. Traveller

but what seems to me to be something of a change is the fact that the perpetrators of spree shootings seem not to end the event by turning the gun on themselves as the final event.  

For example Anders Brevik in Norway.  He seemed to actually want to tell "his" side of the story.  

A few random observations - the perpetrators mostly seem to be men, and the presence or absence of a death penalty doesn't seem to make a difference; my point being that the death penalty may not make a real difference.

I'll venture an answer. Social fragmentation and isolation lead to normal folks becoming unstuck, especially when they are stressed. They lose their sense of proportion. People need to feel their lives have value and meaning.

This ain't a tragedy. Tragedy has a cleansing property - catharsis and all that. There's nothing cleansing about these massacres. Bit by bit they (and other features of modern life) are taking apart the bricks that hold our society together.

but our society is constantly battered with waves of barbarians invading our society. They're called children. Most of them turn out well enough but there are some who cannot or will not surmount mental illness. I do not think it's a coincidence that Holmes, Loughner, Cho, Whitman, Bundy, Breivik were all newly adult men in their early 20s when they went off. The strand that can propel young men to do great things may also enable them to commit terrible acts. A friend of mine is a mental health professional, and he mentioned that 18 is an age where certain mental illnesses in a young man come to the forefront. If not treated, then a downward spiraling can manifest itself in several ways, including murder.

Glad to see you around, Blaise.

phenomenon, with a few examples of Asian & Middle Eastern males thrown in the mix. There would seem to be some cultural aberration at work here.

You can divide mass shooters into four broad types divided according to motive & target:

1) Disgruntled Employee - your classic office shooter, going after people he knows, perhaps targeting 1-2 individuals in particular (ex girlfriend, hated boss, etc.). There seems to be at least a partial revenge motive with this type. School shootings like Columbine & Virginia Tech tend to be broadly similar in that the intended victims are part of a known community.

2) Family Shooter - Father/Husband offs his family, then himself. Sometimes the guy goes on a random shooting spree after taking out the family, sometimes there's a hostage standoff, or a police standoff. (Mothers/wives do this more rarely, but they tend to use poison/drowning rather than shooting...you rarely ever see women involved in the third subtype.)

3) Spree Killer/Mass Killer - This guy goes out shooting more or less random strangers, and the motive seems to be a combination of desire for attention (high body count) and the simple joy of killing people. The Port Arthur Massacre, the Aurora shooter, etc. fall into this category. (Note the FBI for some reason distinguishes mass shootings from spree killings...spree killings involve more than one location with no cooldown period. I don't see a meaningful distinction in terms of motive...obviously police agencies want to distinguish perpetrators who might move on to a different location from those who are staying put.)

4) Terrorist/Resistance shooters - John Lee Malvo, IRS shooters, Ruby Ridge-type standoffs, Andre Breivik, the Mumbai shooters, perhaps Timothy McVeigh, Gabby Gifford's shooter, etc. These shooters have political/religious motives, but are otherwise motivated by considerations similar to the first 3 subtypes (high body count, news interest, etc.). Militant terrorists who are part of a larger organization could take a separate category, but for present discussion their motives & methods are broadly similar.

There's been a lot of talk about "bullying" in the US since the Columbine shootings, and more recently since the suicides of several gay teenagers. Certainly "bullying" seems to be a factor in some mass murder cases, particularly those with a component of revenge motive. Ex employees who've been (made to feel) bullied by supervisors, coworkers, and/or female coworkers who've rebuffed advances or filed complaints against the shooter; high school students who feel they've been rejected or humiliated by their peers; and even among the Spree subtype individuals who seem to feel themselves to be society's losers, put upon by their fellow citizens in general.

Bullying explains only some cases...but all of the above categories seem to share a common social pathology in that spree shooters and mass murderers have tended to act out of grievance. Whatever the specific motive (unhappy family relations, disgruntled office relations, race or religious antipathy, general social malaise), mass murderers seem to be people who feel that their society has somehow rejected or humiliated them and the values they hold important. This makes mass murderers very different from serial killers, who are generally acting out of personal motives rather than anger at their victims or society in general (with some exceptions).

It also doesn't explain why it is that so few of the members of society who also have reasons for grievance (racial minorities, women, working class individuals, the homeless, the mentally ill in general) become mass murderers. Why is it that mass killers are almost exclusively a) young, b) male, c) white, Asian or Middle Eastern, d) relatively well-educated, e) middle class individuals or small like-minded duos or groups? With so many who openly consider themselves undervalued, humiliated or put-upon by their own societies, why is there such a small subset of angry, ultra-violent people who "just snap"?

Here's a hypothesis. Spree killers are acting out a primarily social-symbolic gesture when they take so many lives that they make it on the news. Their motive is rarely simple revenge, it isn't desire for money or financial gain or even prestige in the way of most simple homicides. Rather, spree killing is a symbolic expression of rage against a symbolic target..."society" itself as represented especially on the television news. Spree killers are those who feel a symbolic grievance against society as an abstract concept: their social pathology is that they have somehow internalized a perception of their society's value system...and they feel a profound sense of rage or alienation because that value system has betrayed them somehow. Spree killers feel like they were owed some basic recognition, respect, prestige, honor which they have not received; society has failed to accord them the respect and prestige due to a powerful (and potentially dangerous) young male of the highest or warrior caste, and this dishonor has so dominated their self-image that they feel it has obliterated their will to live.

TL;DR - mass murderers tend to be aggrieved males of a majority ethnic group who feel that society in the abstract has reneged on the respect & prestige it owes them as powerful individuals capable of violence. They feel a social contract - that they would forbear from violence in exchange for appropriate respect & prestige - has been violated, and the only way to restore honor is by unleashing the violence previously held in check. A common motive in mass murders can therefore be described as aggrieved entitlement. 

The best way to prevent killing sprees is with relationships — when one person notices that a relative or neighbor is going off the rails and gets that person treatment before the barbarism takes control. But there also has to be a more aggressive system of treatment options, especially for men in their 20s. The truly disturbed have always been with us, but their outbursts are now taking more malevolent forms.

Link.

No God fearing man could have done this, unless God told him to. Ergo this kind of thing is the price we pay as a society for not having to be God fearing.

He may have a point. Where there spree killers back in the day, when God fearing was the default?

Obama speaks out for increased gun control.....  Well, I didn't think he'd do it before the election.  Very interesting but I suppose he is just showing how utterly nutbar the GOP is on guns.  The assault weapon ban may have prevented so many dead and wounded.  That's an easy sell for the kind of people who might vote for him.  The super-crazy gun fetishists?  Not so much.

Cribbed from none other than George Lakoff. Taranto:

The central problem with Lakoff's argument is that his idea of a "self-made man" is a straw man. A self-made man is a successful man who succeeded by dint of his own effort. When he says there's "no such thing," he's engaging in the sophistry of strained literalism, pretending that a man can be self-made only if his own effort is a sufficient condition for success. One might as well say there's no such thing as a self-made man because we all have parents, or because God created us, or because we are the product of millions of years of evolution, or because today's innovators stand on the shoulders of giants in the private economy.

That last point is crucial. No one denies that people alive today owe a debt to the past, but Lakoff and his fellow progressives seem to be under the misimpression that government is the only means by which we receive that sort of inheritance. The great industrialists of the 19th and 20th centuries might have paid a lot of taxes, but that wasn't their primary contribution to the world of today.

Not to mention that the lucky ones who struck it rich had already been contributing in the form of taxes to our "unbelievable American system".