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StrangerThan -> RE: Mass killings and underlying reasons (4/12/2009 6:24:51 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: hopelessfool
I can tell you i dont honestly believe any of them are crazy or insane or depressed. I think they feel they are doing the right thing.
I think that's the crux of the problem. I've been sitting here this morning sorting out these kinds of events in my mind and sifting them into different categories.
There's the attack against an entity type of killings - McVeigh, Unabomber, Eric Rudolph types. McVeigh cited Waco and Ruby Ridge as two of the reasons for the Oklahoma bombing. The Unabomber didn't like technological advancement or people in general. Eric Rudolph - at the time the hunt for him was going on, I lived less than an hour from the area where he disappeared. It was interesting to me that Rudolph had a lot of back-door sympathy from locals who felt he needed to be caught, but also were deeply distrustful of government. Many of those I talked to saw the hunt for him as evil vs evil, not as a good vs evil thing.
Couple of notes about these types. They're not expecting to die for the most part. It's not a final act of retribution in many of these cases. It is rather in their minds, almost a form of guerilla warfare. The breaking point isn't a specific group of people.
There's the Columbine type of killings - Columbine itself, McClendon in Alabama, that list can go on and on because there's been so many of them in the last few years. These target specific groups even though the result sometimes wanders outside of those groups in that innocent people are killed. I put that in italics for a reason. All of the victims can be considered innocent but not from the perspective of the perpetrator. The perp had specific people or a specific group of people targeted.
I think these people expect to die. Escape isn't a big part of the plan. Killing as many as possible before they die themselves is. The breaking point among these people is driven by people, by supposed or real wrongs.
VA tech, the church shootings in Tennessee are a little different I think. These seem to wander back into the vague world of entity attacks as both went against something greater than just a list of people. The church shooter specifically wanted to kill Democrats. The VA tech killer might have had a list but once it began it was just a matter of getting as many as possible and seeing most everyone else as the rich, wealthy, priveleged.
Someone else can break it down further if they want. I'm tired this morning.
But here's the deal. I go along with you hopeless. I don't see any of them as insane. For whatever reason, they feel like they're doing the right thing, and in all cases, the actions were not spur of the moment outbursts but rather derived from thought that encompassed years.
Think of it this way, for every person who breaks, there has to be literally thousands who harbor the same types of resentment, same types of thought, same types of feelings, who don't break. But obviously, we're pushing closer to the breakage boundary than we have in the past and part of the problem is that there are different boundaries. Some are driven by social issues, some by political issues, some by economic issues and you could argue I guess that social and political are often intertwined enough to make the dividing line between them hard to spot.
Interesting note on some of this. Depending on how you look at him, John Brown was either a terrorist or hero. Regardless of which view you hold, he used violence and death to advance his beliefs - which were shaped greatly by economics and religion. When he was captured and killed, some rejoiced, some rang church bells in his honor.
The Civil war began 16 months later.
I am exposed to an extremely diverse set of people from the far left to the far right and I see a lot of anger on both sides with little room for compromise on either. I see a lot of economic and social pressures on people. I see a lot of anger and hopelessness swirling around different parts of what hopeless noted above in her post. And I see a rising graph of killings that are driven by one or more of the above where the person or persons involved felt they were right in what they did. If you accept the idea that for everyone who does break, there may be thousands who harbor the same types of resentment and feelings, but don't break, the idea that we're pushing the boundary is the scary one, not what weapon they choose to use.
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