Mass murderers and the politics blame game
The shooter was a Trump supporter! No, the shooter was a socialist! So many shooters, so much opportunity for politicians and pundit alike:
In the case of El Paso, the murderer’s writings are anti-immigrant, but also apparently socialist in some respects. In the case of Dayton, the writings reportedly are avowedly socialist, anti-Trump, pro-Elizabeth Warren, and sympathetic to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Who cares? These are deeply disturbed, evil men. Their political views deserve no attention.
But they do get attention, plenty of it, heaps and heaps of it, in order to pin blame on some politician or political movement or other. And of course, the MSM conveniently minimizes coverage of manifestos (or portions of manifestos) that express leftist views, and maximizes and focuses on those that express views that can be spun as being on the right, such as white supremacy and racism in general, whether they are actually on the right or not.
And on and on it goes. The attempt to pigeonhole a crazy sociopathic murderer into one political group or other, in particular in order to hurt Trump, is standard and predictable.
All of it is garbage.
And, if anything, all this attention feeds copycats rather than discouraging them.
Even if a certain shooter writes in support of a certain candidate, this isn’t what drives the person. Emotional issues are the drivers. These manifestos are typically a pastiche of ideas, cobbled together from this and that and the other thing, baked in the heat of their feverish minds.
Remember the old saying “Even negative attention is better than no attention at all”? Shooters want attention, and they get it. If they can’t be the best at something good, they’ll be the best at something evil and try to have the highest kill count. And if they die in the attempt, they think so be it on some level, because their lives are wretched anyway.
Maybe their lives wretched because they have no social skills, or because they have a lousy family life, or because they’re hooked on drugs, or because they aren’t very bright, or because they just were born that way, or some combination of all of those things. Maybe they haven’t a clue why their lives are wretched, but they know it’s somebody else’s fault and the world owes them something. Even if shooters write down their reasons for killing, we will never know the truth because they themselves haven’t a clue.
They often egg each other on to greater heights via the internet. Weapon bans will not stop them; they will find the weapons they need to do the things they want to do.
And it seems they value their lives not at all, so it’s no problem for them to contemplate throwing their lives away and taking the lives of others as well, in a paroxysm of revenge on the world.
[NOTE: If you want to read a disturbing article, see this at Vox, reporting on a recent poll about loneliness:
…22 percent of millennials in the poll said they had zero friends. Twenty-seven percent said they had “no close friends,” 30 percent said they have “no best friends,” and 25 percent said they have no acquaintances.
It seems that approximately 25% of millennials in that poll consider themselves extremely alone and socially isolated. In that same poll, the figures were far lower for other demographics.
If true, this amount of isolation among young people is very alarming. Of course, the vast quantity of those who feel alone never go on to harm anyone. But social isolation is definitely a factor for many mass killers.]
I’d be curious to know how many of these guys are virgins, or so-called INCELs (involuntary celibates).
…but if asked, someone might lie, because the answer would be humiliating.
https://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2019/08/04/media-and-politicians-dont-get-it-brian-cates-thread-on-the-gunmans-alleged-manifesto-is-a-must-read/
“a crazy sociopathic murderer”
I was just thinking of the effect these evil scum have on their families and others close to them. See this video by Sue Klebold, the mother of the Columbine murderer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXlnrFpCu0c
Think of the mother of the Dayton killer who murdered his sister. She lost both of her children in a most horrible way. I do not care what she knew about her son’s pathology, no one deserves this. I include her in my prayers along with the other victims.
Anti-immigrant, racist socialist? He sounds like a follower of Jack London to me.
Bravo, Neo! This is the kind of analysis that points us in the direction of solutions. Making it political leads to nowhere.
These evil shooters who make plans and then carry them out abruptly ending lives of innocent people who got up in the morning with plans for the rest of the day and their lives are not Democrats or Republicans or Socialist. The mental gyrations going on in their sorry sad minds are something else. I wish I had the answer and I don’t think we will find it as simple as political affiliation.
Isolation can be observed. Last summer I took the dogs for their aftenoon walk, a young man was walking towards us about half a block away looking at his cellphone. As he got closer he began to stray off the sidewalk and walked into a tree and was knocked down. We walked past him. At the end of the block I stopped and looked back, and sure enough he was walking on face glued to the phone.
The doomsday warnings of climate apocalypse have produced a religous cult, particularly in the younger generations. When all is hopeless why not give in to your inner darkest impulses?
Well, now. I had thought it for a long time, but it was confirmed this morning. Facebook page where an old college friend noted that the Texas authorities were warning Antifa to stay away. “Quick change of subject,” she noted. IOW, the mean old white guy power structure–she’s white and well off in Texas–is trying to duck responsibility for the El Paso shooting.
I told her that Antifa had announced a ten-day op in El Paso. She challenged my sources. I gave her one and told her there were several pages of them.
She hid my comment and said that, going forward, she didn’t want to be “educated”.
Yup. Wants to believe so strongly that she willingly avoids contradictory facts and actually asks they not be provided her. I suspect she knows they’re out there, which makes them even more threatening than if she thought there were none and any affirmations to the contrary were entirely and inevitably false. They might be true and that’s worse.
She’s not alone. So the connection is people telling folks like Dayton shooter that merely believing is sufficient. No such thing as trying to figure it out. And the worse the thing is you believe, the better you feel about believing it. And while it might be, in an objective sense, a good thing to be wrong, the actual belief system requires you continue to insist to yourself and others that the really bad thing is true. That makes you moral or something.
I’d seen this before, but not so explicitly.
I’m worried for her and for how things are going these days.
Richard,
As Scott Adams continually notes: she has a different movie playing in her head, and facts that conflict with that movie (narrative) are not heard (or welcome).
She did not want to experience the cognitive dissonance that arises from confronting the facts. Thus, “shut up she explained.”
It is a scientific fact that the brains of liberals and conservatives are wired differently and react differently to the same stimuli.
“25% have no acquaintances” <== a truly amazing and disturbing statistic
We can probably guess nearly all of them are male gamers? Who else would say they know zero people?
Nobody? That cannot even be accurate, but to the extent it’s sorta-kinda accurate, I cannot even begin to comphrehend what that life would be like …
“In the case of Dayton, the writings reportedly are avowedly socialist, anti-Trump, pro-Elizabeth Warren, and sympathetic to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.” No mention of this in the MSM. I wonder why?
Remember the Islam-inspired mass killing at Fort Hood, the Orlando nightclub, and at San Bernardino? Recall the head scratching and the puzzlement on the part of the media, the government, and the military as to the cause? Recall the warnings about the dangers of Islamophobia? But now in El Paso, we have the perfect villain—a white man, a white nationalist, a white supremacist, a racist, a xenophobe—and of course it’s Trump’s fault. And we are doomed to hear this garbage from the media and the Democratic Party from now until the election in 2020.
It would be interesting to know what drugs these multiple killers have used. Strangely, this is almost never reported. I suspect that anti-depressants and marijuana play an important causative role in these terrible incidents and are the prime reason we are seeing more of these tragedies in recent years. In previous generations gun availability was at least as great as today, but marijuana and psychotropic meds were much less widely used and many of the meds didn’t even exist.
One professional complained that blaming drugs is wrong-headed. We give the mentally ill people drugs. If it doesn’t help them, they’re still mentally ill. The drugs didn’t make them so.
That’s okay as far as it goes, but the question of “mentally ill” needs to be defined. Is Ritalin to elementary school boys going to the “mentally ill”, and does a history of its use result in difficulties later on?
Edward. I sort of figured that was going on. But I’d never seen it so explicit. It explains a number of reactions I’ve gotten talking to liberals.
Given another day or so, I suspect that mentioning Antifa’s plan would be called right wing violence.
It’s not going to make the slightest bit of difference that the Dayton shooter was not wearing a MAGA hat; the media and the Left have no qualms about claiming that the cultural milieu is overrun with “right-wing ideas” that inspire such killers regardless of their personal beliefs. When defining “right-wing ideas” is left to the media and the Left in the person of almost every teacher and professor a kid will ever encounter, it’s easy to claim that every bad, stupid, or evil idea is in fact a “right-wing idea.”
Actual right-wing ideas like the sovereignty of the individual, the proper role of government, and recourse to the founding documents of the United States don’t enter the conversation. And our efforts to bring them in are futile; those actual ideas are routinely dismissed as unimportant side notes instead of fundamental to our **decision to be conservative.** I don’t know what we can do about this.
“I don’t know what we can do about this.”
Seize education back from the trolls. Aristotle understood this. Montesquieu understood this. Allan Bloom understood this. So too, the trolls. Men like Bill Ayers and Barack Obama have lived their political lives on this premise. Control the curriculum, control the political future of the nation. It isn’t outside our understanding.
We understand this. We require the will to turn the schools around.
Liberals buy the left’s lie that if only guns are restricted enough, gun violence (a misnomer) will become a distant memory.
Leftists know that to become a one party state, the 2nd amendment has to become a dead letter.
I think we are seeing something playing out here, not Germany going Nazi or France cutting off a lot of heads, all sort of Empires and Governments reach a tipping point, even Russia when it kind of fell apart and however Russia is still there. I don’t know but, I think we might end up with people in power who want to do away with all of the guns and people with guns who say, “No, we are not going to do that !” and then things will become real interesting.
I hope I am wrong and things will play on out and settle down but there are so many stressors on this whole culture with; failed cities and states and governments spending and owning so much more than they can repay, it makes me sad. Who has the answers to these band-aid governments where we just keep patching things up?
I was talking to my grandsons today, 19 & 22 years old, and I told them about doing business when the Fair Trade Acts were in place and profits for the little people were protected, there were some mega-wealthy people but not many and nothing like we have today when the entire merchant class in towns and cities were destroyed so Walmart heirs and the Amazon folks could own most everything and sell us cheap, really cheap, stuff made in China that will never be as good as what we made in the U.S. except it’s not really so bad which is a problem. Stain a shirt and buy a new one, rip a shirt, don’t mend it, buy a new one, darn a sock, what the heck does that mean? Most of us live in a world of plenty.
Then I told my two wonderful grandsons, what the heck are you going to do as you get older and all of the jobs are automated, freaking cheap, cheap computers will make products, robots will pick them out of warehouses and ship them to mega-stores where robots will shelf them, exactly right and who will have a job to make the money to spend in the stores and buy the stuff?
And my point, as I work on down through this, is that these sorry people who do this shooting don’t see a life with a lovely, loving wife, two or three kids and the future is more grief, sadness, frustration and bad mental process. I hope I am wrong but we need to give young people a positive future, sense of being part of a strong vibrant nation, fairness and opportunity for everyone, not being a Micro-serf or Amazon-Picker, and I am off on a tangent but someone, somehow, needs to give young people and stalled-out people some hope for a fulfilled life. These killers, and that’s what they are, are not stupid which is even more sad.
I don’t know what the answer is but, I know there are smart people in the world who had better figure it out before too long. The answer is not taking guns away from regular old people who still like this country.
If it bleeds, it leads.
This story, didn’t bleed but almost seems like a “man bites dog” story in today’s world.
A Lubbock grandson told his grandmother that he bought an AK-47 style rifle and was going to do a mass shooting. She strongly encouraged him to check himself into a mental hospital, and he did.
It makes me wonder about how impactful rather modest influences might be. Also, that we may be moving from the highly motivated perpetrators of chaos, towards the more ambivalent ones.
WHY do we never, ever hear what drugs the shooters had been given? It’s a known fact that some drugs, like Ritalin and amphetamines. dampen empathy. The Andy Neidell series on WWII had an entire episode about the speed NAZI soldiers were given. The presenters even speculated whether the einzatzgrupen were on speed as they went about their evil business. Nevertheless, we never hear. I have read more about the El Paso shooter, perhaps because he was in Texas, so we have more interest. (Plenty of Texans are also asking ourselves why someone with a concealed handgun did not take him out before he had done so much damage. Is El Paso that different from the rest of Texas? )
Of course, the usual suspects are using this as an excuse for increased citizen disarmament. I realize that some of them like Slept-her-way-to-the-top Harris are pretty dumb. However, citizen disarmament has NEVER reduced crime, anywhere it has been tried. So, just what are these people up to? The Germans completely disarmed France as soon as they got there. (They knew what they were doing.) The death toll from government actions has always exceeded the toll from individual criminals, by several thousand times.
We are now seeing otherwise level headed politicians favoring “Red flag laws.” These are built on very shaky Constitutional foundations. Reading comments on other blogs,I know that they truly believe that most of the mass shooters are “Right Wing crazies” The facts are very different, of course, but you can’t convince a Democrat that the rain is falling from a grey sky. Of course, believing that Conservatives are crazy or really stupid, they’d feel perfectly justified in disarming every one suspected of Republican sympathies.
It is not a scientific fact that the brains of conservatives and liberals are wired differently.
RE: “But they [shooters] do get attention, plenty of it, heaps and heaps of it, in order to pin blame on some politician or political movement or other.”
The MSM promotes the shooters for another reason: to promote more killings. No matter how stupid the MSM may be, they must know by now that releasing the names of the shooters and making them famous (i.e. infamous), encourages others to do the same. They do this to have sensational news to report and to create incidents that further their political agenda — especially gun control.
To determine how serious and widespread a problem is and, thus, what level and type of actions need to be taken to correct that problem, it is obviously essential to get some accurate measurement of the problem at issue.
On the contentious issue of “gun violence” and the deaths therefrom, the statistics put out by the anti-gun folks are, it seems to me, always cooked, and the occurrences of such mass shootings are always hyped and magnified by the MSM.
Thus, according to the New York Post article linked below, which quotes the Crime Prevention Research Center CPRC), the chief source for claims of the U.S. being “number one” among nations for mass shootings (defined as the shooting of four or more people) apparently comes from an unpublished paper by criminologist Adam Lankford, a researcher who refuses to let other people see and examine his data, which he claims covers the 47 years from 1966 to 2012.*
To quote from the article linked below, the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) said that …“We know of no way to discover most of the cases where four people have been shot to death in an incident in Africa or many other parts of the world during the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s or even 1990s, and that is the reason the new study just looked at the last 15 years from 1998 to 2012 of the 47 years he (Lankford) examined.”
Moreover, …”Of the 86 countries where we have identified mass public shootings, the US ranks 56th per capita in its rate of attacks and 61st in mass public shooting murder rate. Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Russia all have at least 45 percent higher rates of murder from mass public shootings than the United States.” *
* See https://nypost.com/2018/08/30/america-doesnt-actually-lead-the-world-in-mass-shootings/
P.S.—As someone who has had to search material on NEXIS, and spent many hours, over the course of several years, in an attempt to compile somewhat similar statistics, I can attest to the fact that—reliant as you are on those describing such incidents to include the specific, essential details you need that would allow you to determine that this or than incident is one you should count—it is almost impossible to come up with a list that you can be confident captures anywhere near all such incidents.
Whoever said that probably did not mean that quasi-literally, in the sense of the architecture and operation of the neural networks being radically unlike.
But there is a significant amount of literature on psychological differences in people with conservative and modern liberal views; which some people claim are the result of supposedly statistically significant differences in the sizes of different brain structures; and, which they further relate to attitudes and dispositions which correlate (perhaps even causally) with (what we come to call) “political” views and preferences.
The internet virtually screams with the Great Political Amygdala Debate.
The “statistics” are there, very nicely printed in black and white, and published in very official looking sources.
How could they not be right?
But, as totally justified by recent experience, these are not trusting times.
I’ve written on this site recently about just how accurate statistics may or may not be, and how easy it is to cherry pick among a number of differing statistics, or to manipulate statistics, in order to prove just about anything you want to prove.
I’d imagine that having a lot of mass shootings occur in your country is not something that you would want to have happen, or to publicize.
So, what is to say that, if there are national level statistics gathered about mass shootings, that those statistics are, in any way, complete and accurate?
Isn’t the incentive to minimize, to just not collect statistics on, or to refuse to report such a negative statistic?
As an example, take Malmø in Sweden, and the reports of an apparent “rape epidemic” there; the horrific and astronomical rise in rapes of young Swedish girls by overwhelmingly Muslim “immigrants” that, according to reports, both Swedish authorities and Swedish news sources have been refusing to report on, trying to conceal, to obfuscate, or to minimize.
Or, take the reported horrendous decades long grooming, rape, and prostitution of more than fourteen hundred young English girls by a gang of Pakistani Muslim men in the Rotherdam, England area that the police, local municipal authorities, and social workers were well aware of, but didn’t report or break up, apparently for fear of bringing “multiculturalism” into disrepute, or being tarred as “racists.”
These, it would seem, were not cases in which statistics enumerating these massive numbers of crimes would have been added to any national statistical compilation.
How accurate and complete, then, can we expect many country’s existing statistics on mass murders in their country to be?
My cynical guess is, not very.
I grew up around guns my entire life.i wont list all the firearms I equaled with in the Navy (yes we use guns). I also qualified as a back seater in.F14 Tomcats.
Despite all the firepower I had it never occurred to me to commit murder.
No, you can’t take my guns. I have used guns since I was 9. I have owned at least 1 shotgun since I was 15 (but I couldn’t use it without my parents permission). Now I am 57 and I have never murdered anyone in what like 4 decades
.
What good will that do the world?
If I had committed murder you wouldn’t be reading this right now because i would be in prison where I belong.
This isn’t to say I haven’t been in on a few killings. Dont get the wrong idea. I am not a tough guy. I was Intel. I supported tough men so I know the difference