“As one researcher put it, they are not necessarily loners; they are failed joiners.”
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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.
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.
Brooks omits another prominent factor that is common among these shooters; a disintegrated or troubled family.
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.
If they arent diagnosed why are they all on psych drugs?
It is the price of a Godless society. From that void all the other ills rush in.
Mass murder is a time for political posturing by politicians. Liberals tend to focus on the tool used to commit the crime. Conservatives are willing to look at factors which contribute to the mass murder mindset but, usually, only to propose ways to identify the killer before he or she acts.
Both of those approaches, while politically convenient, are johnnie-come-lately methods which ignore factors which built for years, even generations. They are unwilling to look at those factors for fear of offending voters like divorced parents, single parents, moviemakers, poverty pimps, atheists, educators, sex libertarians, drug legalization advocates, video game makers, rappers, social media mavens, progressive prosecutors and judges and many more.
So social pathologies grow like mushrooms in dark corners, invisible until they erupt in violence from vandalism to mass murder. The problem is, ignoring the precedents to violence is like putting it in a pressure cooker with law enforcement the steam release valve. It works to some extent so long as the valve is operating properly but bad things happen when the valve is jammed or tampered with. Rather than facing up to our societal failings which create the pressure in the first place, we are counting on containing the pressure but that means society is just one natural or man-made disaster from exploding in our faces.
One word; psychopath
Society is manufacturing really screwed up people. It will be much worse when we start having five year old children questioning their sexuality.