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cadenas -> RE: Mass killings and underlying reasons (4/12/2009 3:12:05 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: StrangerThan
slvemike's thread on Columbine is the driving force behind this one. Just about every thread on violence and guns devolves into a debate on regulation, registration, limits, something along those lines. Personally, I think that stance avoids the real issues of what drives the violence rather than the tool used to accomplish it. Columbine was an abberation at the time. In the past few years however, the abberation has begun to approach the norm.
My question is why now, at this point in history, has it become common to read about one incident after another where people reached a breaking point and vented their rage, desperation, hopelessness, whatever emotion you want to call it, upon other segments of the population? What drives it?
I suspect that your premise is wrong. These types of mass murders actually are fairly consistent throughout history. For instance, Timothy McVeigh predated Columbine (and 9/11). The abberation seems to be that this particular one stands out more in our collective minds. But I think that's more due to a combination of media attention, and the particularly dramatic way the events unfolded.
Fortunately, these events are also exceedingly rare to the point that you can't really make statements about "averages".
The huge majority of murders is a one-off situation.
quote:
ORIGINAL: StrangerThan
Personally, I don't think it's that mysterious. We have a segment of society that glorifies violence, parents who raise children feeding them a steady fare of violent films, a politically divided population that refuses to compromise - are a few reasons that come to mind. They're only part of it in my view though. I see a lot of anger in people in political venues, personal areas where progresssive-PC type pressures are backfiring and generating much of the type of thought or action they try to eliminate, in economic areas where people are stressed to the limit. In other words, I don't think there's a single issue. I do think that the sum of those kinds of pressures create enough strain to where breakage should be expected.
No gun legislation debate please. Only what you think is driving the violence.
Aren't these two things inseparable? One of the most common reasons given for promoting gun ownership is that it enables violent solutions to problems (usually phrased as "defending your home") The bigger question is, what is the cause and what's the effect? That said, I suspect that this glorification of violence doesn't make much difference in the end. What does make a difference is easy access to a deadly tool. And there is strong evidence to back this up. The evidence lies in international comparison.
A few years ago, I compared German and American crime statistics. Germany is a very similar country to the USA. Economically, slightly poorer, always had a little higher unemployment, but not excessively so. A moderately democratic country. Germany, like the USA, has drug problems, gangs and organized crime (the Russian Mafia is big there). Very similar crime rate. Not just in the big picture, but even in detail. For nearly every single type of crime, the two countries have very consistent crime rates; Germany always had a somewhat higher crime rate than the USA. That's true for fraud, car theft, drug dealing, tax evasion - you name it. Germany also had two Columbine-style high-school mass murders. So these countries really are very comparable.
There were two exceptions that stood out. One was rape. The rate for rape was about the same in Germany and in the USA.
The other crime that stood out was murder by firearm. Interestingly, murder with any kind of alternate weapon followed the same pattern as other crimes. ONLY murder by firearm is through the roof in the USA; about ten times the German rate.
I've heard people argue that "yeah, but the cultures are different.' Except they never managed to explain why all other crimes were so consistently comparable.
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