Posted on 07/11/2022 7:46:56 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
I will never get over the fact that our society seems to produce a steady stream of young men who think it is heroic to murder innocent people. I read their histories. I look at the social science research. I’ve tried to understand the typical pathway they take to get to their evil behavior.
The common thing to say about mass shooters is that they have mental health issues, but that’s often misleading. This has been studied in a variety of ways. A majority of mass shooters do not have diagnosed mental illness. It’s mostly the circumstances that drive them to do what they do, not an underlying disease.
The more accurate place to start is with something George Bernard Shaw wrote many years ago: “The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: That’s the essence of inhumanity.”
These young men are frequently ghosts. They often experience early childhood trauma, like abuse or extreme bullying. In school no one knows them. Boys and girls turn their backs on them. Later, when journalists interview their teachers or neighbors, they are remembered as withdrawn and remote. These young men often have no social skills. Why doesn’t anybody like me? As one researcher put it, they are not necessarily loners; they are failed joiners.
(Excerpt) Read more at post-gazette.com ...
“As one researcher put it, they are not necessarily loners; they are failed joiners.”
~~~
That phenomenon happens a lot more that people think. So does bullying, and unfortunately, so does abuse.
But even alienated loners with trauma in their childhood wouldn’t be able to commit the kind of violence we see from mass shooters. It’s more than just pain and indifference. When you see someone get shot, by your own hand or another, someone who is not psychotic will immediately have very powerful and visceral sense of sympathy and empathy for the victim. Normal human beings, even those with ‘problems’, would not be able to go through with a mass shooting.
theres always been mass shootings in America...but this big spike really started in the 90’s...just about when they started legalizing super potent marijuana and doctors prescribing SSRI anti-depressants like they were candy..a coincidence??...i think not...
“I’m not getting what I want, so I’m going to kill people.”
These young men (mostly), crave attention. They want to be famous. The media has told them, the easiest way to be famous is to murder a lot of people in a spectactular way.
The media has even told them what firearm to use: an AR15.
The media has told them mass murder with a firearm gets them more fame than mass murder by other means.
The dominant media could work hard to prevent these messages; they did so with a similar involving celebrity suicides.
Brooks is a moron. He has no credibility so why listen to him about any issue?
“Journalists” love to theorize and pontificate, based on stuff they’ve read in places like Esquire. But home made explanations will never capture the essence of the problem. The fact remains that the mass shooter is exceedingly rare in a population of hundreds of millions of people. For any social explanation you can apply to a given shooter, there are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, who match the picture precisely but never do harm to anyone.
This is why the popular game of “profiling” almost never gets anywhere. Remember the horde of “experts” who profiled the DC sniper. Very precise, but totally not accurate.
It seems for years Brooks has been behind the curve, telling myself and others what we already knew.
Old as Cain and Abel.
Crimo isn’t one of those ‘ghosts’ though. He had a substantial online presence and probably could’ve made decent money if he kept at rapping.
The band-mate that left him said on twitter that 2 years or so ago crimo lost his mind. He’s right at that age when schizo takes over, or doesn’t.
One would expect Brooks to conclude “big scary guns are bad”.
Some fail because no fathers are around to teach them.
Some fail because their weakness is recognized by most people around them and they are shunned.
Some fail because they were tested by some crisis or another and came up short.
But every single school shooter or mass murderer was a failed male who couldn't make the grade to manhood.
Broken home life. Prescribed psycho drugs. Video game driven fantasy life.
Mostly weed
Brooks omits another prominent factor that is common among these shooters; a disintegrated or troubled family.
IF MY KID was a cross dresser-—I would expect trouble sooner rather than later.
This is actually a good piece. I agree with much of what he says.
I too was a loner until my junior year of High School. This was largely a function of a) living out in the boonies and not having anyone my age close by and b) being geeky with poor social skills. I never thought of revenge, but often had thoughts about how much people would miss me if I died. At some point, though, I recognized this was just so much BS. I realized that if I died people would just shrug and move on. This was kind of a turning point in my life. I was also a high achiever in school, which helped me get over it too.
I’ve done a heck of a lot better than many of the “cool kids” in HS. But I’m sure that is a common theme for us geeks.
In most instances, mass murder is the last act of a desperate individual. Unlike the sexually-sadistic killer, who derives a perverse sense of joy from his hidden crimes, the mass murderer acts in a single, violent paroxysm of inexplicable rage, exposing himself to identification, capture, and often death at the hands of the police. The murders are acts of desperation, serving as vehicles for bringing the perpetrator into the public eye and drawing attention to his sense of impotence, his frustration, his anger and his hostility. The mass murderer is a psychologically troubled and deeply disaffected individual who often seeks to preserve his ego at the expense of his existence.
The mental state of such a disaffected person is, as the dictionary defines the term, one of fathomless resentment and unending discontent. By the time he acts out his murderous intentions, the disaffected killer has reached the end of a long metaphorical rope. He looks into the mirror and despises what he sees. He compares his life’s achievements with those of others whom he perceives as enjoying prominence and success. Green-eyed envy consumes his waking thoughts. Constant failure, or at least the perception of constant failure, imbues him with a sense of hopelessness that the future may hold brighter days in store. These feelings in their turn lead invariably to depression and despair. His ego, always precariously balanced, stands poised upon a precipice. Life becomes a prison from which there can be but one means of escape.
Ultimately, mass murder offers its participants two distinct forms of satisfaction. First, in committing violence, the disaffected killer assuages his pent-up anger and releases his hostility in a single, overwhelming act that exposes him to the risk of imprisonment or death. Second, and perhaps most significant, it affords him a stage upon which he can stand and make his statement to the world. Nothing, it would appear, is more calculated to arrest the attention of society and divert it toward a single individual than the act of murder in the mass.
From The Unabomber and the Zodiac.
I think a huge component is our ubiquitous 24 hour screen culture that feeds into both narcissism and alienation. Borderline personalities can find others to amplify their sickness while before they might have been in more stable isolation.
Freegards
Broken homes that lack an engaged father is the common thread, which have been championed by the atheist left.
It is telling that Brooks quotes George Bernard Shaw, atheist playwright, Fabian socialist, admirer of Mussolini, Stalin and of all things humanist, elitist, and collectivist.
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