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Cont: Today's Mass Shooting (part 3)

JoeMorgue said:
Funny how every other country has stopped it.

To quote the Onion "'No Way to Prevent This' Says Only Country Where This Happens Repeatedly."
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There are a number of social trends that happen mostly within the United States. UFO sightings and alien abductions to name two. Once it gets started, it's hard to stop and is often culturally contained.
 
JoeMorgue said:
I dunno. Whatever legal language every other single developed nation has.

This is a problem that literally everyone else has figured out.
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But in the US, the constitution is sacred.* Not holy, i.e., never to be touched, but to be altered only with great circumspection. That's why a change in firearms regulation can only begin with a constitutional amendment.

BTW, "everyone else" includes, I think, only the more competently governed countries. Too many areas of the earth are dangerously ill-regulated.

* An observation by Rebecca West, and a new idea to me when I first read it. Initially, I took it for a piece of late-Bloomsbury snottiness, but soon realized that it's true, and a good thing.
 
Venom said:
I don't think we can justify this claim.

And it may be besides the point, if it's a copycat behavior not primarily meant to bask in the press coverage.
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I would love to know what goes on inside these guy's heads. I assume they are not like actual psychopaths, because serial killers try to stay alive. So do they just "lose it" temporarily, and kill themselves when the grief of what they did hits later? Card apparently planned to off himself from the start, so...why take out a bunch of random people first? I mean, it's trite to say "dude was cray cray so whaddaya expect", but I'd really like to understand how they are thinking and how the reality break factors in.
 
Skeptical Greg said:
Also in the story:



He could have been a little more specific regarding the safety of Maine residents.
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Biden: "....of course I meant safe from this one particular dude. There are approximately 18,000 others fitting his exact profile in your communities right now. Sleep well "
 
Thermal said:
I would love to know what goes on inside these guy's heads. I assume they are not like actual psychopaths, because serial killers try to stay alive. So do they just "lose it" temporarily, and kill themselves when the grief of what they did hits later? Card apparently planned to off himself from the start, so...why take out a bunch of random people first? I mean, it's trite to say "dude was cray cray so whaddaya expect", but I'd really like to understand how they are thinking and how the reality break factors in.
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I can't find it now, but there was a compelling case made in a psychology article attempting to link male status and spiteful behavior. The hypothesis has hints of evo-psych but it didn't sound ridiculous to me.

We commits small spiteful acts all the time and are curiously indifferent to the suffering we cause. Some among us go so far as to fantasize killing people over relatively minor grievances. Especially men. And especially men who have trouble controlling their emotions over loss of control in their lives. The reasoning is since killing has been an essential male activity over our evolutionary history, partly to "reduce the fitness" of rival human groups, this could explain why broke and rejected losers frequently take it out on random people when they snap. I agree they aren't necessarily psychopaths, probably not even most of them. According to this hypothesis from an evolutionary perspective these angry primates are trying to reduce the fitness of everyone else because they feel their own social status has collapsed.
 
Thermal said:
I would love to know what goes on inside these guy's heads. I assume they are not like actual psychopaths, because serial killers try to stay alive. So do they just "lose it" temporarily, and kill themselves when the grief of what they did hits later?
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In the vast majority of cases, I don't think they "just "lose it" temporarily." They plan ahead. Card bought this guns ahead of his psych evaluation. I also don't think they kill themselves because of grief. I think it's a murder/suicide-by-cop combination in most cases. They are trying to prove a point to themselves and others: that they are powerful. Proving it to humanity who didn't recognize the status that they feel they are entitled to, be it other students in school shootings or employers and colleagues when 'going postal'.

There may be an element of regret, but that would be when they discover that shooting other people doesn't give them the satisfaction they expected, which may be the reason why some of them stop killing at one point even before the police arrive. They don't feel like winners, they don't feel like characters in the movies.

An exception to this would be guys like Paddock, the Las Vegas shooter, maybe because of the distance between himself and the carnage. He was in his hotel room and not in the middle of a pile of dead bodies at a mall, a school or something similar.

Thermal said:
Card apparently planned to off himself from the start, so...why take out a bunch of random people first? I mean, it's trite to say "dude was cray cray so whaddaya expect", but I'd really like to understand how they are thinking and how the reality break factors in.
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In many cases, their social media posts make their thinking very obvious.
Many of them hope that they will be idolized as martyrs by their peers, e.g. incels, homophobes, racists.
 
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The Maine Department of Public Safety held a press conference Saturday morning at Lewiston City Hall to share more details surrounding the discovery of Robert Card.
Maine shooting | Law enforcement debrief with press conference after body of suspect found (NEWS CENTER Maine, on YouTube, Oct 28, 2023 - 55:15 min)
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Thermal said:
Only if you are a DOJ statician.

To anyone else, particularly those with bullets flying around them and bullet wounds or dead loved ones, it was a mass ******* shooting.
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We all have to decide which definition of "mass-shooting" we will follow.

I choose the DOJ's.
 
That's the problem with the term "mass shooting" being based on the number of victims within a short period of time. Or even spree killing. It's often used in place of rampage killing, which is more general. The kind of killing here doesn't have to involve guns. Guns are just the easiest tool to carry them out with. Suicide pilots probably have more in common with the Virginia Tech shooter than they do the Kamikaze or Islamic State.

But who knows how intertwined these acts could be really.
 
Hercules56 said:
We all have to decide which definition of "mass-shooting" we will follow.

I choose the DOJ's.
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Which is fine. But that doesn't make it factual, as in the statement "Not a mass shooting".

Everyone making their own meanings up is a bit of a Humpty Dumpty problem, unless they are particularly authoritative. The DOJ's internal classifying system is a far cry from that.
 
Thermal said:
Which is fine. But that doesn't make it factual, as in the statement "Not a mass shooting".

Everyone making their own meanings up is a bit of a Humpty Dumpty problem, unless they are particularly authoritative. The DOJ's internal classifying system is a far cry from that.
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"Mass-shooting", is a concept. A social construct. There is no "true" or "factual" definition. Its whatever you want it to be.
 
Hercules56 said:
Not a mass-shooting.
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Everywhere else in the western world would be horrified by shootings like that. Only in the USA would it not even be considered a mass shooting by some. It's all a matter of perspective.
 
Nessie said:
Everywhere else in the western world would be horrified by shootings like that. Only in the USA would it not even be considered a mass shooting by some. It's all a matter of perspective.
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And argued that, nah that's not a real mass-shooting.
 
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