Home » Those 27 mass shooters and fatherlessness

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Those 27 mass shooters and fatherlessness — 26 Comments

  1. neo: Nice job. Turning back the tide of such misinformation could be one of the Buddha’s vows:

    The deluding passions are inexhaustible. I vow to extinguish them all.
    The number of beings is endless. I vow to save them all.
    The Truth cannot be told. I vow to explain it.
    The Way which cannot be followed is unattainable. I vow to attain it.

  2. Virginia Tech was probably not a conditioned assassin. The rest… they sound like prime candidates.

  3. A friend of mine came up with a category:

    Little known facts which aren’t true.

    Lot of those going around.

  4. Not everything can have a neat explanation. When it comes to explaining the motivations of mass shooters, the reasons they are the way they are, I fear the brutal truth may be that sometimes people are just born broken. Sometimes you can do everything right and still end up losing. Sometimes things are beyond our control.

  5. I’m sorry. I was one of those linking the article – and I clearly want it to be true, want fatherlessness to be common among the shooters, almost as common as them being males. But with respect to mass shooting, fatherlessness doesn’t seem to be as big a factor as the article indicated.

    I do claim there are many social problems with fatherlessness, as Neo says:
    criminal behavior, poverty, and substance abuse.

    That should be, and is, enough to be against broken homes, tho it doesn’t say what policies or culture should change to further support married folk only having kids.

    I remain against promiscuous sex, as advocated by young elite (and most college elite wannabees), but not so much practiced by them once they’re married themselves.

    In comparison, some 400 people were shot trying to leave communist Czechoslovakia in the 41 years from 1948-1989 (Nov 17, 30 years ago). A couple thousand more political prisoners died in prison. Each one killed is one too many.

  6. “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
    – Mark Twain

    “It isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so”
    – Will Rogers

    “It’s not ignorance does so much damage; it’s knowin’ so derned much that ain’t so.”
    – Josh Billings

  7. Australia’s mad feminists attract international attention

    Robert Franklin from the US-based National Parents Organization has been writing an excellent series of blog posts https://nationalparentsorganization.org/blog/24465-a-1990-s-retro-piece-on-domestic-violence-no-just-present-day-shared-parenting-opponents about the way the Australian feminists are “howling like banshees” over the focus of this new inquiry:

    “I’ve read article after article all aimed at the same thing – casting doubt on the latest Australian Governmental review of family law and courts in the Land Down Under. Those who oppose children having full, meaningful relationships with their fathers post-divorce don’t like the new review for the simple reason that they fear the truth may at last come out.

    Franklin points out that the previous review, by the Australian Law Reform Commission, was much more to the feminists liking. He’s written very detailed blogs about what was wrong with that review – and why the women’s groups were so keen on it. Franklin’s forthcoming blog will expose misinformation and distortions included in a dreadful article by Griffith University law lecturer, Zoe Rathus, published recently in The Conversation. Rathus’ title says it all: “Parental alienation: the debunked theory that women lie about violence is still used in court.”

    Former WA Law Reform Commissioner, Augusto Zimmerman, has published an excellent Spectator Australia article: “How abuse of violence orders corrupts our family law system”.

    Zimmermann points out there is an undeniable correlation between apprehended orders, false claims of domestic violence, and parental alienation. He mentions an analysis of NSW court files, which reveals that these domestic violence cases, on average, are dealt with in less than three minutes – a shocking statistic proving that absolutely no attempt is made to investigate whether such allegations have any validity. For the woman alleging violence the system is fool proof, with no risk at all that her lies will be exposed.

    Via email from Bettina Arndt: Bettina@bettinaarndt.com.au

  8. A statistic like ‘X out Y school shooters’ makes no sense without reference to a normal population. 100% of school shooters inhaled a mix of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 1% argon immediately before their mass shootings.

    As did 100% of victims and bystanders.

  9. Adding one more to what Tuvea on November 19, 2019 at 5:53 pm said:

    “It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant. It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.”

    ? Ronald Reagan

  10. I find it interesting that a cut-and-pasted – becomes a ? in the comment.
    If Edit was not on vacation, I would have corrected that.

  11. Just wondering; is there any data on how many of the mass shooters were taking medically prescribed drugs and/or were supposed to be on certain drugs but had stopped taking them as prescribed?

  12. I remember reading that factoid and thinking, with satisfaction, “Of course it’s true.”

    Then I thought again and thought “Someone should check this. It’s a little too perfect.”

    Thanks for stepping up to the plate.

  13. I have been struck by the number of these killers who were on SSRI drugs. Those drugs are known to cause suicidal thoughts in young people and it isn’t a very big jump from thinking of suicide to thinking of taking out those you hate just before committing suicide. These mass killings were very, very uncommon when I was young. The nation was shocked when the Texas tower shooter shot several people. Turned out he had a brain tumor. Now shootings seem all too common and instead of brain tumors these people are often on SSRI drugs. Possibly there is a connection.

  14. A comprehensive detailed study of mass shootings would be nice, and it turns out that the National Threat Assessment Center dept. of the Secret Service did just release such a study. This study, however, is limited to school mass assaults.

    I haven’t gotten very far beyond the summary section, but the only surprising thing so far is that a considerable number of these attacks are knife attacks. It is not possible that our media is giving us a biased impression of these events, is it?

  15. Rachelle:

    Somewhere I have a post on that; don’t have time to locate it now because I’m in a hurry. But the gist of it is that that’s another theory that circulates a lot online and yet doesn’t really hold water.

  16. Rachelle: That the Univ Texas shooter had a small brain tumor (somewhere near the pineal, if memory serves) has zero to do with the cause of the shooting. There are after all thousands of brain tumors in the USA yearly, some in the same intracerebral location, and none have to the best of my knowledge been associated with mass violence/murder.

    A Google search is unrevealing of brain tumors causing murder!

  17. well with all this research you were doing some links would have been nice. I didn’t recognize hardly any of these names and only had the patience to google the first 7 😛

  18. docweasel, You must be color blind like me. You need to roll your mouse pointer over the text to make those links pop their highlight color.

  19. From Wikipedia on Whitman:

    an autopsy was conducted by Coleman de Chenar … Chenar concluded that the tumor had no effect on Whitman’s actions.

    the [Texas Gov.’s] Commission concluded that Chenar’s finding had been in error. — Psychiatric contributors to the report concluded that “the relationship between the brain tumor and […] Whitman’s actions […] cannot be established with clarity. However, the […] tumor conceivably could have contributed to his inability to control his emotions and actions” …

    [Separately] Forensic investigators have theorized that the tumor pressed against Whitman’s amygdala, a part of the brain related to anxiety and fight-or-flight responses. [and emotions generally]

  20. Steve,

    “tumor conceivably could have contributed to his inability to control his emotions and actions”

    You mean that causation? “Conceivably contributed” and “equals” are synonyms? It is really a statement of “We don’t know.”

  21. What is implied by 26 of 27 mass shooters grew up in fatherless households? That the absence of the father contributed to the mass shooting.

    Interesting correlation? Maybe, but not demonstrably a factor in the commission of a mass shooting. So the headline, to me, is dishonest or a simple error of the type I mention.

  22. Interesting correlation? Maybe, but not demonstrably a factor in the commission of a mass shooting.

    Why not entertain the hypothesis that youths without fathers receive less discipline and less hands on instruction in processing their emotions?

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