Making the Connection
What do all three of these have in common?
A lot really. All of them are American citizens. All of them committed crimes using firearms. All of them were highly educated products of the best academic institutions. All of them were, or were training to be health science professionals.
Amy Bishop. “At the University of Alabama in Huntsville in Huntsville, Alabama, three people were killed and three others wounded in a shooting on February 12, 2010. During the course of a routine meeting of the biology department attended by approximately 12 individuals, a professor stood up and began shooting those closest to her with a 9-millimeter handgun. Amy Bishop, a biology professor at the university and the sole suspect, has been charged with one count of capital murder and three counts of attempted murder; under Alabama state law, she could be eligible for the death penalty if convicted.”
In March 2009, Bishop had been denied tenure at the university and was beginning her last semester there per university policy. Due to the attention Bishop has attracted as a result of the shooting, previous violent incidents that were somehow related to her have been reevaluated. She previously drew the attention of law-enforcement officials in 1986 when she shot her brother to death in Braintree, Massachusetts, in an incident officially ruled an accident. She, along with her husband, were questioned in a 1993 pipe-bomb incident directed toward her lab supervisor.
Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood Shooter. “Born in Virginia to parents who moved to the United States from a Palestinian town near Jerusalem, Hasan joined the Army while in college and became a psychiatrist at Fort Hood, Texas. Prior to the shooting, Hasan had expressed extremist views which had been brought to the attention of his superiors and the F.B.I. Hasan was discovered to have exchanged emails with Imam Anwar al-Awlaki asking for spiritual guidance regarding violence. Al-Awlaki has since been linked to other attacks by radical Muslims, and he quickly blessed the Fort Hood operation because it was against a military target.
The attack was described by a Senate report as “the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001.” General Jack Keane testified before a Senate committee that his first reaction was “…just how unacceptable the military’s failure to deal properly with Major Hasan’s radicalization to violent Islamist extremism was.” He also agreed with “…the report’s conclusion that Hasan’s open displays of violent Islamist extremism was .. a violation of military rules calling for good order and discipline.” He listed what he believed to be “…some of the obvious signs that Hasan should have been discharged…”
James Eagan Holmes, the Aurora, Colorado shooter. “Holmes was born on December 13, 1987, the son of a registered nurse, and a mathematician working as a senior scientist … In the summer of 2006 Holmes worked as an intern at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he was assigned to write computer code for an experiment. Holmes, who was described by his supervisor as stubborn, uncommunicative and socially inept, presented his project to the other interns at the end of the internship, but never actually completed it.”
In June 2011 Holmes enrolled as a Ph.D. student in neuroscience at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora. He received a $21,600 grant from the National Institutes of Health according to agency records. The grant was from July 2011 to June 2012. Holmes also received a $5,000 stipend from the University of Colorado, Denver.
In 2012, his academic performance declined, and he scored poorly on the comprehensive exam in the spring. The university was not planning to expel him. However, Holmes was in the process of withdrawing from the university. Three days after failing a key oral exam at the university in early June 2012, Holmes dropped out of his studies without further explanation.
What links the three persons together is America’s lax guns laws right? Or are there other possibilities? Why guns in preference to other factors? Wouldn’t it be possible to say, for example, that higher education causes mass murder sprees? The problem with that theory is that there are lots and lots of people who attend higher education and never go on to become killers. But on the other hand, there are lots and lots of people who own guns who never go on to become mass murderers.
Wikipedia describes the phenomenon of illusory correlation. A small minority in a large group commit an offense. What they have in common is membership in the larger group. Therefore their membership in the larger group is responsible for the offense, which is a fallacy. Which group you pick depends on your agenda.
Illusory correlation is the phenomenon of seeing the relationship one expects in a set of data even when no such relationship exists. When people form false associations between membership in a statistical minority group and rare (typically negative) behaviors, this would be a common example of illusory correlation. This happens because the variables capture the attention simply because they are novel or deviant. This is one way stereotypes form and endure.
Let’s see what Lou Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly have to say about what knits the whole thing together. Maybe the causality is what you want it to be.
Belmont Commenters
How to Publish on Amazon’s Kindle for $2.99
The Three Conjectures at Amazon Kindle for $1.99
Storming the Castle at Amazon Kindle for $3.99
No Way In at Amazon Kindle $8.95, print $9.99
And as near as I can make out, all three of them had given cause for worry among their nearest and dearest, neighbors, and coworkers in the period prior to them melting down and committing murder in job lots. In the cases of Bishop and Hasan, my impression was that very few of their acquaintences interviewed afterwards said things like, “such a quiet person, kept to himself/herself, who would have thought it?”
Only their hairdresser knows for sure.
Well yes, higher education is indeed a co-factor in such sprees of murder and mayhem.
The reaction of an individual to danger by experiencing stress is a biological mechanism for helping people not get eaten by tigers and leopards. The same kind of stress is experienced by our soldiers on the battlefield.
In our various kinds of workplaces — small business, large business, government administration, education — we manipulate that stress reaction to serve the needs of that institution. We give people grades and college degrees, we give people performance reviews and promotions, we fire people and we deny promotion or deny tenure. There are no people shooting at you (most of the time) as on the battlefield, there are no tigers and leopards to be seen except in cages. But we use the stress mechanism to reward and to punish people.
The University is maybe a “soft” workplace compared to a military post in Afghanistan or even the dangers of a steel mill. But the University comes with its own package of stress, where we reward qualified people with grades and degrees and tell them how intellectually gifted they are, and at various points, perhaps 20 or 30 or more years into this process, we tell people they are complete failures and have no future doing what they have spent their whole lives preparing.
I certainly “check my 6″ where I work.
To a murderer, gun registration requirements are but trivial things.”
Whatever might have been of their internal social barriers separating fantasy/theory from reality/action, were overcome, and they each succumbed to evil…I strongly suspect drugs played no small part in forming and solidifying their individual justifications for murderous nihilism as well.
“Alexander G. Valentine, a former Harvey Mudd student, was 18 when he beat his mother, Diane Valentine, and his father, Kenneth Valentine, to death with a pipe wrench on August 2, 1996. According to a North County Times article, the murders took place at Diane Valentine’s water purification equipment business in north San Diego. Valentine was flunking out of Harvey Mudd and, after his mother found out, took all measures to make sure the information was not conveyed to his successful engineer father, the end result being the murder of both parents. He was sentenced in February 1998 to a life prison term without the possibility of parole, despite his protests that the police had fabricated his confession. Valentine attempted to obtain a new trial for himself in 2005, but was denied by the appeals court.”
///
My office was next door to Dr. Kenneth Valentine. He was a nuclear physicist. Dr. Diane Valentine was a chemist. I should add that they were really great people. I first met Alex during a dinner for the department. It was strange to be a pall bearer with other members of the engineering department.
“What links the three persons together is America’s lax guns laws right?” Yes, and access to pipe wrenches.
What response is appropriate after such events? Our actions to deter these crimes must not imperil our liberty that was purchased at a cost that is much more dear.
Years ago, we made a bargain. We’ll stop wearing sidearms in holsters, if you prevent us from being attacked by wild animals inside city limits. But the animals are back. The arrangement has been abrogated.
We’re in greater danger inside city limits, than we ever were out on the prairie. Unfortunately, the only way to stop the unannounced lone wolf attack is by being quick on the draw.
When they cannot grab headlines before being stopped by the hail of return fire, well, they will pursue another line of action.
Josh @ 2. Thunder stolen. Weren’t Ted Kinzinski and Charles Manson “bed heads”? Illusory correlation complete. Peace on earth. /sarc.
I too would really like to know the drug history of people who become murderers.
I suspect it may be parallel to the “smoking and cancer” connection. Drugs may make you more susceptible to ‘cooking off.’ They may not be a direct cause, and there will be people who go off even though they never took any drugs, but there may be a connection.
I find it surprising that after these things happen there is very little public inquiry as to what, how many and when the perpetrator had used prescription or illegal drugs.
Illusory correlation
Quite depends upon your station
For the people whom you know define your acts
If you are a Left Progressive
Then you are at times obsessive
Blaming murder on the Right despite the facts
But such claims fit the agenda
And if not then they’ll amend a
Statement made to then reflect the current theme
That the ones who do the killing
Are Tea Partiers who’re willing
To kill all who disagree and that’s their meme
And the Left, who like Rapunzels
Leave their hair down for their gunsels
And who murdered hundred millions to this date
Yes the Maos, the Stalins, Pol Pots
Who killed people by the job lots
Are beatified because ‘twas for the State
And the crazy Muslim killer
Has become the very pillar
Of the way of life the Left will force on us
He responds to Allah’s dictates
As he kills his eyelid nictates
And if militarys die then that’s a plus
Correlations thus are easy
And if some just make you queasy
Just remember that it’s for the common good
For the Left knows what’s good for you
And they’ll tell you till they bore you
That they’re pure at heart but just misunderstood
Only one of the three people in the images above looks uncannily like Ben Afleck. None of the above look anything like Matt Damon.
If you are terrorist the best place to attack is an airliner or a military base, where you can be assured that Federal policies have ensured both a disarmed populace and disarmed authorities. (Said the Secuity Police to me regarding the late night transport of one of our spacecraft, “Of course, you know that we will be providing escort but that we will not be armed?”)
If you are a absolute nutjob then the best place to be is within a university community, where your lunacy will be tossed off as merely eccentric and the obvious nature of your incapacity to handle as much as a slingshot in a responsible manner will be staunchly defended as being sacred nonjudgementalism.
Remember that a professor had the nut assessment on the VA tech shooter and just kind of lost it for a while. And we have learned the latest Colorado shooter mailed a description of his intentions and it just kind of got lost in the university mailroom.
Listen friends, and mark my words in this moment and this hour–
God is jealous for his name for his name is jealous.
Nor is this a charming flower to set before a man
nor one of his commands.
Yet, without Jesus, this is more than we can love as we desire peace,
and less than we can know as we desire joy.
For the sacred fire
that makes us liars–
I mean, that separates speech from dreams,
and separates our flesh from the future–
is God’s power manifested.
So, in the year and the hour– for his sake, invest your desire in Jesus.
Follow his holy fire for right now. Right now he intercedes for us in heaven!
Some will say we are people of the way.
We are people of the way.
We praise his holy name
Yahweh.
I am who I am.
I cause things to be.
I am the first cause of creation.
We praise his holy name
Elohym.
And say “Thank you Jesus for your precious blood–
better, so much better than the blood of Abel.
How then should we pray?
I pray bless me a lot oh God.
Show me your kingdom and righteousness
in such a way that my thoughts words and deeds
reflect your wisdom and power–
and that– for the sake of your honor and glory.
So that I will live in your presence
in this life and the next.
For your name sake
Let me hear my children praise your name
And their children too.
Let them woo 10 generations
coiled up in their dimensions
to the praise of your name.
Let my neighbors, friends, family, enemies
strangers praise the baby in the manger.
I pray all that in Jesus name.
The main argument for gun control is that since we can never know who’ll go nuts, the next best thing is to take away all the dangerous objects from easy public access. The problem is that the Second Amendment is precisely intended to guarantee the public’s access to dangerous objects as a counterweight to tyranny.
Similarly, the First Amendment is implicitly the right to think dangerous thoughts. Thus, people like Bishop, Hassan and Holmes are protected in their views up to a point.
Taking away the ability to own dangerous things or think dangerous ideas is itself dangerous. There’s a tradeoff, but nobody wants to address that cost-benefit calculation. They’d rather say, “it’s for the children.”
But in the current atmosphere, the thinking is that if you circumscribe hate speech and equip everyone with plastic spoons then things are going to be ok. What could go wrong?
People draw correlations. It is a natural survival mechanism. Twitchy white guys with orange hair are best avoided. A ranting woman with a 1,000 yard stare? Best to discreetly ask other women to do your thinking for you. A Palestinian who hates America and justifies murder in a conference? Best to schedule your parking permit review for when you’d otherwise be near him.
What markers are useful? Underwear on the outside is to rare. Underwear on the inside may not correlate. Commando would need somebody to play Inspector Detector. Can we draw up a list of Obama donors? They are clearly either criminal grifters or plain nuts.
“You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.”
- Robert Heinlein
Education was power to these intellectuals. Their degrees compensated for shortcomings in a society that mainly rewards politics and who-you-know (at least in their view).
“Hasan was discovered to have exchanged emails with Imam Anwar al-Awlaki asking for spiritual guidance regarding violence.”
If true, then the “Imam” could have stopped him. If untrue, then it needlessly casts doubt on something there was no need to question.
At least Anwar is gone anyway. The CIA saw him eating breakfast and blew him up with missiles.
The natural man will rest his soul in his retirement income, in a woman, in his bank account, in his house, in the power of the state, in his family, in his company, in his school–anywhere but God….
but because we come from God and finally go to God….we are always called by God to rest our souls in Him.
Indeed in the middle, as in the beginning and end, the safest, most sensible, most reliable, most secure — rest for the soul of any man is in God.
None of them were true Scotsmen,
because a true Scotsman would never do such things.
-> negative illusory correlation complete.
From my untutored lay perspective, the link is that their own self esteem did not correlate with how society esteemed them. For their own “perfect” selves the rejection was too much to handle.
Hasan turned to extreme Islamicism as the way to express his anger; the lady professor acted like a two year old having a tantrum and Holmes expressed his antipathy by copying a movie that was full of angry madmen with whom he identified.
The guns didn’t make them do it. They did it all on their ownsome. Is profound alienation in some people created when we scam high school students by making them think they are wonderful simply because they are breathing? Then later when the outside world says “no you are not wonderful” a tiny number go ape? I wonder what a good psychiatist who actually knows about this stuff would say?
If my dim memory serves, did’nt ol’ Classic Jimbo booby trap his apartment with home made bombs? So we were lucky, like with his neighbor who almost opened his apartment door, that there weren’t more casualties and this time not from guns.
Maybe we should outlaw nasty homemade bombs that kill people? Oh wait, I think we’ve already done that! I’m so cornfused. What’s an overzealous control freak Progressive Fascist to do?
The People’s Republic of China has strict gun control laws, only the authorities are allowed guns. It therefore stands to reason that Chinese society is uniquely blessed in being free from violence, since clearly guns in the hands of ordinary citizens drive them mad. And yet . . .
Last year there were in the land of the peace loving Chinese people a whole raft of men who took kitchen knives into pre-schools and kindergardens and butchered scores of children not their own. Oddly, the police were slow to intervene, perhaps they were on break. Who can understand this unless these knife wielding yahoos got a whiff of American gun ownership and took leave of their senses. Kind of a long shot, true, but how else are you going to blame America first?
Maybe what they need are big “KNIFE FREE ZONE” signs at school entrances, surely that will stop them. Perhaps more stringent knife legislation would help. Of course it is ludicrous to ban knives, what we need are whetstone controls, that’s the ticket! But there’s a great opportunity for government here. Sure we can ban knives, but since people still have to cut their food we would set up government run, Official Food Chopping Stations peopled with members of the Food Choppers Union. Government doing for the people what the people are not allowed to do for themselves. Good for employment too.
Just for the record, about 100,000,000 gun owners in the USA did not commit any mass murders today…or yesterday…or the day before…
actually there is a link: Some people become psychologists/psychiatrists, or go into research in neuroscience, because they want to find out why their own personality isn’t normal.
Which is why psychiatrists have one of the highest rates of suicide in the USA.
I don’t see Hasan as a terrorist. His target was a military target. His attack was on a military base. Him being a member in good standing in that same military makes the attack an act of treason, NOT terrorism. Any military target is fair game at any time. The Military calls it terrorism to cover their a$$. Every Officer in that chain of command needs to be busted a rank, docked a months pay and have an ‘unsuitable for promotion’ placed in their file.
The weapon is never to blame. I have a Baby Eagle in .40 that sits on a shelf just inside my garage door. One of my “Emergency” handguns that I keep at various locations around my property. Murphy’s law says that if something flaky happens it will happen while I’m at the opposite end of the place from my gun safe. So I have several hide out guns. I clean them once a month. So far they have not gotten up and wandered off on their own. I don’t expect them to.
That liberal fem was correct. It’s the people and the culture those people create.
Man is a killer ape;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_ape_theory
The Killer Ape theory isn’t trendy nowadays but it fits the observations better then the theories seeking to replace it. Wiki doesn’t explain the Killer Ape theory the way it was explained to me back in good ol’ Cow Flop U so many decades ago.
I was taught that violence was a survival trait in proto-humans. So it was selected for. Modern humans still carry the genes. Mapping the Human Gnome was SciFi back then, I have no idea if there has been a gene combination found for violence. The Bezerker Gene?
Celer, Silens, Mortalis.
Japan has a very low murder rate. And Japan has very strict gun control. I ran across a magazine from 1977 that had an advertisement for Japanese-made “non-guns”, exact copies of historic firearms that could be broken down and fieldstripped like real guns but which were made of materials that rendered them useless as weapons. The Japanese did not even want people keeping guns as objects’d'art.
And what happens to the murder rate among Japanese-born people who come to the U.S. to live, with our much more accessible firearms and “gun culture”?
The murder rate is lower than in Japan itself.
Peter Boston #23:
I am thinking of making bumper stickers that say “Ban All Firearms! Guns Are a Tripping Hazard!”
The problem with the Bill O’Reilly – Lou Dobbs tape is that neither of them knew what they were talking about.
O’Reilly’s choice of the term “heavy weapons” is about as amorphous as the term “assault weapons.” The weapons used by the U. S. military area properly termed assault weapons or “select fire” weapons because they have the selective ability to shoot one bullet per trigger pull, or three bullets with one trigger pull, or the “automatic” capability of shooting a myriad of rounds as long as the shooter continues to depress the trigger. While civilian versions of these weapons look identical, they are only able to shoot one bullet at a time – they are not capable of “select fire” – as true assault weapons are. There are some semi-automatic civilian weapons that look exactly like the military versions but fire even smaller and less lethal bullets. While all bullets can kill some AR-15 shaped weapons can only shoot a very small .22 caliber firearm bullet or the even less lethal (for small game such as rats or squirrels) air rifle standard of a .177 caliber pellet.
While we are all sitting around wringing our hands about how many people can be killed by a single shooter against an entire crowd of fear frozen people in a theatre, all one would have to use is a shotgun that can shoot “double-aught” (00) buck, which can dispense 9 fairly good size projectiles after each trigger pull. In the hands of an adept operator who because of the nature of the target (stationary, tightly spaced and relatively immobile), each round can be easily shot with one pump per second. If the killer walked in only with 1 shotgun that could carry 9 shells, he could empty 81 rounds into the crownd in about 10 – 15 seconds. If he had time to reload that would turn into 162 hits in about 45 seconds – maybe even less time if he was quite proficient. Now think back to the reported fact that he was in the theatre dispensing death for 21 minutes. To put that same number of rounds into the crowd with an AR-15 would take emptying the first magazine and then reloading 5 additional magazines before he could get that much firepower down range. Not to mention that the 00 buck is a much larger projectile than the round used by the AR-15 and is very close in size to a 9mm handgun round (around 8.4 mm).
That is the insanity of this gun control argument and with O’Reilly and Dobbs the ones duking it out (the blind leading the blind). Neither of them knows that every gun purchase (legal gun purchase – which is how law-abiding citizens purchase firearms) is conditional on a database comparison of the purchaser against the FBI database. Anyone who has a suspect background is denied the authorization to purchase. The dealer who sells firearms is under constant and close scrutiny by the BATFE. Screw up and they lose their permit to sell firearms and could have all the guns in their inventory confiscated. There is already too much government heavy handedness in the regulation of firearms.
EVERYONE WHO PURCHASES A FIREARM HAS TO PASS THAT FBI BACKGROUND LITMUS TEST. EVERYONE.
Of course, what is now coming out, is that a doctor wrote a warning letter to the school that James Holmes had made a rather frightful description about how he was on the verge of doing just what he did. However, the school let the letter sit undelivered for about a week before the shooter eventually committed his massacre. Now the doctor is probably scrambling and the school is scrambling to cover their a$$es and that (among other things that the authorities are now clamming up about) has resulted in a press black out.
If the doctor had called or sent the letter “overnight” or if the school had responded in a timely manner, this incident might never had happened.
Because I’m a cynic, I’m getting the feeling that the Obama Administration is now involved to spin this toward their anti-gun addenda because they may be finding, a la the Giffords shooting, that the assailant was crazy…and a big lefty. But just like Fast and Furious, we may never know the truth. With the press totally protecting the Obama administration, the American People are being kept in the dark about this scandal. Heck, even Fox has been tepid and uninformed – just like the Dobbs – O’Reily “for show” face-off.
Perhaps the best way to cut through all the bulconguava is to remember that Oswald shot President Kennedy with a WWI/II 6.5 mm Carcano Model 91/38 rifle. It was a bolt action rifle and no one today considers it a “Heavy Weapon” or an “assault weapon.” But that’s the point…the gun grabbers don’t really want the Heavy Weapons.
They want all the weapons so’s we are much better manipulated by government – something the founders knew and why they were so adamant about getting the 2nd Amendment into the Bill of Rights/
22. Tamquam
Sure we can ban knives, but since people still have to cut their food we would set up government run, Official Food Chopping Stations peopled with members of the Food Choppers Union. Government doing for the people what the people are not allowed to do for themselves. Good for employment too.
In such a world, eating with your fingers and wiping them on your clothing would be a sure sign of advanced civilization. Methinks an advanced group of star travelers would be quite perplexed with our “progress,” our “evolution” as it were.
What all three killers have in common is that were crazy and all were seeing therapists and- I believe- all were taking prescribed psychiatric drugs at the time when they murdered.
Psychiatry is a pseudo-science-family members and coworkers/teachers in all 3 case knew they were crazy.
However, anyone taking heavy psychiatric drugs should not have firearms.
In the Aurora case they guy seeing and incompetent psychiatrist who did not pick up her mail from the murderer in which he detailed his murderous plan–same situation with the Virginia Tech mass murderer.
Crazy people should not have guns, nor should active drug addicts and alcoholics.
So if they were all seeing psychiatrists it suggests that we shouldn’t limit access to guns so much as we limit access to psychiatrists. Aren’t they all ready licensed? Licensed to kill. Maybe they ought to tighten up their reporting requirements.
Wretchard said- “But in the current atmosphere, the thinking is that if you circumscribe hate speech and equip everyone with plastic spoons then things are going to be ok. What could go wrong?”
Meanwhile the Department of Education is buying shotguns and Homeland Security is buying a shitload of 9mm ammunition suitable primarily for semiautomatic pistols and submachineguns.
What could go wrong indeed!
What do all three have in common? They were all initially depicted as right wing extremist by the media?
Here’s the problem as described by the masterful Mr. Cash:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8tGCVavS5s
You can’t educate that sucker away.
15. Blast From the Past;
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/contrib.php?cycle=2008&cid=N00009638
A list of 0bumbler donors. It is by organization, click on the highlighted links to get detail.
God gives us All free will. Some make bad choices. The current system in place in the USA is a pretty good compromise between public safety and the 2nd amendment. It will never be perfect.
“I singlehandedly destroy actuarial assumptions.”
anonymous Duke student
@ 30. Annoy Mouse
I agree that psychiatry needs to conform to evidence based medical standards–it does not do so at this time.
Psychiatry is-in fact- ” voodoo medicine”
The families and colleagues of all 3 murderers plus those of the Virginia Tech and Arizona nut-all knew they were crazy.
Maybe there should be a evidence based mental competency test for possession of firearms.
In Wretchards home – Australia- almost no-one can by a gun-even if they are sane-
-what is W doing to improve gun possession laws in his own country?
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2012/07/27/too_many_guns_in_the_us__or_too_few_114920.html
“Campaign” Carl is the best!
If all MSM reporters were this good, America would be a much better place.
Haji can’t shoot.
Here is an interesting slant on the mass murder topic;
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/07/aurora_shooting_how_did_people_commit_mass_murder_before_automatic_weapons_.html
I would find it more creditable if the author knew the difference between automatic and semi-automatic weapons. On well, one can only expect so much from the far left.
“what is W doing to improve gun possession laws in his own country?”
Promulgating the ideals of liberty in the USA. If the USA is lost Oz has little chance.At least I find solace in the idea that Wretchard might think so.
Psychotropic drugs are very profitable. The low level pain they suppress often lead to even worse side effects. Psychiatric medicine cannot ethically promote feeling good when it only serves to mask deeper problems.
BTW Victor, what is your take on Scientology?
I appreciate your examining the phenomenon of illusory correlation. However I wish you would hammer home that the primary cause of this is the mindless mainstream media that amplifies the noise with signal and then moves on to Tom Cruise’s divorce.
What’s the chance of getting shot in a theater? What’s the chance of getting in a wreck on the way to the theater? How come so few people understand this?
We over-stimulate ourselves as a society, and that causes our brains to shut down and vote Democrat.
s @ 36: Too Many Guns in the U.S. — or Too Few?
Good article, I agree good writer.
I don’t own a chain saw, or a gun, or a motorcycle. Don’t need the one, feel I ought to acquire the next, and always wanted the third but never thought it a good idea. On the gun, I’m just afraid I would be the kind to shoot myself or others while fooling around, but let the urban situation get a little worse and I suppose I’d arm up. Should I have one or more as emergency supplies? Mebbe. Meanwhile I stick to flashlights and water. Have a couple of fencing swords and a moderate knife or two, and if anything would like some instruction on knife fighting – though by all accounts I’d be better off with the chain saw and a good pair of running shoes.
All these ruminations come to the idea that maybe things are about right today on the gun laws, me being in Los Angeles fwiw.
Though as the insurrection approaches, maybe I should have a main handgun, a backup/drop pistol, a long rifle, and as much ammo as I can carry. Or maybe that’s for someone more optimistic than me about making it through any major social disruptions, maybe I’d rather fund my neighbor who’s on my side and feels a little more handy with such tools, and stock up on beans instead.
Though I should learn better how to use firearms at least, just in case. Couple of times I’ve tried with other people’s weapons I’ve been pretty fair at hitting what I aimed at. Damned things sure are noisy, you want to stay in practice with them, they have to be cleaned, and the ammo isn’t free. Lot of price to pay for fun or safety, I guess even freedom ain’t free. So until the LA City Council votes to require all citizens to carry automatic pistols, I’ll continue to dither.
–
dla @ 39: We over-stimulate ourselves as a society, and that causes our brains to shut down and vote Democrat.
+1
@ 38. Annoy Mouse
We think Scientology is very odd — but to each his own.
Wretchard should be concerned with AUS gun restriction as you cannot get any gun unless you live in the outback-even then the capacity and caliber is very limited.
We in the US have no influence nor control over gun laws in AUS- Wretchard lives there and votes there.
We like guns in sane hands-not in the hands of crazy nuts
BTW -Switzerland has the highest per capita private ownership of military grade automatic assault rifles-it is the law for all households-they have a tiny problem with mass shootings.
In AUS you even cannot own a pump shotgun without major restrictions and surveillance-that should concern Wretchard-but he never mentions the issue in his own back yard-strange
“Therefore their membership in the larger group is responsible for the offense, which is a fallacy.”
It is only a fallacy when there’s no ideological link between the group and the offense. Islam really does teach that Muslims have an obligation to dislodge unbelievers from the reigns of power, by any means available. Therefore, saying Islam is responsible for Hasan’s attack is perfectly justifiable: he was obeying Islam’s ideological imperatives.
If you read about some person who one day got fed up, and headed out for the mall with his rifle that person was 95% of the time a white person. Maybe an Asian. If the person spent 7 months meticulously planning his outing and has a 500 page manifesto then the odds are 100%. thats our genetic marker. show me a black person dressed up like mickey mouse with an ak47 and i will show you a man with a white grandmother somewhere.
its not a proud heritage but its us.
Guns are cool. I won’t have one , because one night I was sleep walking and dreamed a part of my house was an electrified monster and beat it up. Next morning had to replace the grate on my bedroom heater.
Josh you live in LA? I hate LA so much. I used to think it was beautiful. One day the 405 is going to just congeal into a frozen river of cars and all the tow trucks in the world won’t be able to clean it up.
You will have to evacuate by helicopter like in the fall of Saigon Josh. Or walk out. Of course you will miss the wonderful people that make it such a friendly place.
“I don’t own a chain saw, or a gun, or a motorcycle.”
The horror!
Attention RWE: Japan does NOT have a real low murder rate. At least it did not when I researched things and I do not believe situation has changed.
What is called the murder rate is (a) incident (not number of dead) of (b) premeditated murder (c) not involoving any other felony (d) in which the perp is known, did not commit suicide and has been apprehended.
Two anecdotal incidnets (years apart). In one a bank employee poisoned and killed 13 of his fellows in order to loot the vault. Under Japanese law no murder was comitted. Crime was “robbery resulting in death”. In the second some 20 or 30 people died when terrosits engaged police in a major shootout. Nobody was murdered. Instead the all-encompassing crime was “rebellion”.
and finally when two or more people get in a quarrel and serious injury occurs, the crime is “bodily injury”. Then we have “bodily injury resulting in death”. AMSM there were at the time some 130,000 bodily injry cases every year. I asked a member of the Okinawa Prosecutors Office (himself a native Japanese, not Ryukan, if 10% of bodily injury cases resulted in death. He replied that 10% was “too conservative”.
“Nuff said.
To continue Dave’s theme…the gun murder rate as reported in the US is almost always with suicides included – but not so in other nations like Japan.
If you were to report these things on an equal footing, disparities might not be so big.
no mo uro: Also in the US a significant number of murders are estimated to have happened. Many rural areas/small towns do not bother reporting to the FBI because nothing happens there. Those that do report have an exagerated “rate per 100,000″ simply because of rounding AND because some inner-city bodies get dumped on their turf. The exaggerated rate per 100,000
is then applied to the non-reporting populations. Hence estimated murders even no there ain’t no corpus to habeas.
38. Annoy Mouse
“what is W doing to improve gun possession laws in his own country?”
Promulgating the ideals of liberty in the USA. If the USA is lost Oz has little chance. At least I find solace in the idea that Wretchard might think so.
Spot on Annoy! Australia is moving out from under the boot on their neck:
http://www.ssaa.org.au/media-monitoring/2011/2011-11-13_firearm-ownership-in-australia-on-the-increase.html
Here’s something else I recently read that is a clearly dated account:
“By September 1997, over 600,000 firearms were coercively purchased by the government following Australia’s worst mass killing of 35 people in Tasmania by Martin Bryant. On a humorous note, 40,000 Aussies used their government check to purchase another firearm. The buy-up merely assisted the “exchange of one gun for a better one.”
And this:
“Out of an estimated 7,000,000 guns, 40% (2.8M) fell under the coercive buy-up. Of those 2,800,000, only 640,000 (25%) were turned in for a government check. The other 2,160,000 (many of which are on the registration lists) have apparently been salted away for their Rainy Decade.”
Let see, if the original figures of 7M were correct, how many guns above the 2.8M are still out there? How many of those are the dreaded “Heavy Assault Weapons” so many lick their chops demonizing?
And then there’s this abject stupidity:
http://au.sports.yahoo.com/blogs/olympics-fourth-place-medal/australian-olympic-swimmers-criticized-facebook-gun-photo-154500136.html
You can take the guns out of Australia, but you can’t take the guns out of (some) of its real men. Gee willikers, they didn’t slander gays or say they were in favor of traditional marriage. All they did was pose for this incredibly un-PC photo. Think positively – if they had bought those guns, we could have put them behind bars for the rest of their natural born lives.
Gee, I’m starting to sound like stoicheion! Good company I think.
The real problem with all three of them is that they will be given a soft cell in a mental hospital.
There is no death penalty for any of them – or their copy cats. The problem is insufficient penalties to deter them from killing again.
Richard, you live in OZ. How many killers have been given the death penalty in recently years in OZ? I would speculate zero. It’s the same is true in many US states.
The penal institution has a vested interest in keeping killers alive so they can “rehabilitate” them along with getting a good salary. They need psycho killers to study and disturbed fancy reports. It’s a money maker. All of which does not solve the actual criminal problem.
These people are not crazy. The are perfectly rational liberals who have chosen to demonstrate the need for a totalitarian but humane state that has the power to prevent misdeeds before we do them.
These liberals want to ban all guns and knives and anything else that can be used as a weapon. And they are willing to let other people die for their cause. Get rid of knives, forks and spoons. They can all be lethal when sharpened. People in other countries eat with their hands. Why are Americans the exception.
Ban private cars and trucks. God gave us legs to walk and strong backs to arrry stuff. People in other countries walk and carry. Why are Americans the exception.
Everybody sould have a job. Those who don’t should be re-educated to learn their obligation to the common good. And everyone should have free healthcare so that the can be productive workers.
These people you mention are not murderers, they are progressives making martyrs to inspire the masses!
A blogger on another site added up the deer license sales in just a handful of states and arrived at a striking conclusion:
There were over 600,000 hunters this season in the state of Wisconsin .Allow me to restate that number:
Over the last several months,Wisconsin’s hunters became
the eighth largest army in the world.
More men under arms than in Iran .
More than France and Germany combined.
These men deployed to the woods of a single American state,Wisconsin, to hunt with firearms, and no one was killed.
That number pales in comparison to the 750,000 who hunted the woods of Pennsylvania and Michigan’s 700,000 hunters, all of whom have now returned home safely.
Toss in a quarter million hunters in West Virginia and it literally establishes the fact that the hunters of those four states alone would comprise the largest army in the world.
And then add in the total number of hunters in the other 46 states.It’s millions more.
The point ?
America will forever be safe
from foreign invasion with that kind of home-grown firepower.
Hunting….it’s not just a way to fill the freezer..It’s a matter of national security.
***************************************
That’s why all enemies, foreign and domestic, want to see us disarmed.
Overposted but Charles, how about a link?
This piece has been reposted in several places
http://www.nkyteaparty.org/federal/issues/813-americas-hunters-pretty-amazing
http://conservativetimes.org/?p=11416
Actually, this article was reposted dozens of times in different blogs. So its difficult to know the actual source. You can pull them up by plugging “600,000 hunters this season in the state of Wisconsin” into google’s search engine.
This article looks like it may have provided the research for the two links above–if only because the writing is not word for word. http://alcambronne.com/
Around 12 to 14 million Americans hunt deer every year. Deer hunting accounts for an annual $12.4 billion spent on travel and equipment, $7 billion in salaries and wages from 250,000 jobs, and over $2 billion more in license fees and state, federal, and local taxes. If deer hunting—not all hunting, just deer hunting—were a single corporation, its revenues would earn it a spot in the top 200 of the Fortune 500. The most conservative comparisons place it in the same pack as CBS, Sun Microsystems, ConAgra, Pepsi, and General Mills.
Every November, in just my home state of Wisconsin, over 600,000 hunters head out into the woods on the opening morning of deer season. Although equipped only with small arms, they’d rank as the world’s sixth-largest active standing army—just ahead of Pakistan, South Korea, Iran, and Turkey, and behind only China, India, Russia, North Korea, and the U.S. Add to their number the deer hunters just across the border in either Minnesota or Michigan, and they’d instantly vault into second place, behind only the People’s Liberation Army of China.
While I am not sure about the other two, what first struck me about Holmes was that he was 24 and in a Ph.D program. Having lived with someone who had an IQ of 160 – brilliant and very successful monetarily, but emotionally about two years old – my first thought was what wall did he hit that he could not surmount intellectually? I have worked with very smart people and found that they have zero to little skills to deal with an emotional blow of some sort – we put so much emphasis on intellect and little on emotional maturity (not talking about the ******** self-esteem nonsense), that when push comes to shove, the smarter someone is, the less able they are to deal with reality and the quicker they are to resort to self-destruct.
“If you read about some person who one day got fed up, and headed out for the mall with his rifle that person was 95% of the time a white person. Maybe an Asian. If the person spent 7 months meticulously planning his outing and has a 500 page manifesto then the odds are 100%. thats our genetic marker. show me a black person dressed up like mickey mouse with an ak47 and i will show you a man with a white grandmother somewhere.
its not a proud heritage but its us.”
Two words: Omar Thornton
Doesn’t look like he’s gotta lot of white in his background. I’m sure it’s whitey’s fault somewhere along the line.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartford_Distributors_shooting
Knight1, you are referring to emotional maturity. Consider that the patriarchs of the bible lived to be hundreds of years old – over 900 years in some cases. People try to explain this in silly ways, asking “What was a year like?”
The fact is: some people lived longer back then. This must have made them very wise compared to today’s grownups. It seems like modern people don’t learn wisdom and discipline until we are too old and feeble.
In Star Trek episode 8, Enterprise discovers a world ruined by a disease that only kills the adults. The kids who are still living can barely take care of themselves. This is somewhat like our world today. It would not surprise me to learn that the show’s writers were inspired by biblical knowledge (or somebody’s interpretation) of a virus that affected humanity in our distant past, causing shorter lifespans and making adults behave as dumb children.
k @ 55: what wall did he hit that he could not surmount intellectually?
Oh, it doesn’t have to be anything like that. I remember watching Magic Johnson in his first couple of years with the Lakers, nice guy, great player, but couldn’t talk. As a great athlete, he’d been rewarded for playing, not talking. When he was forced into retirement he finally found the time to talk, and who knew, he was good at that, too – and has made a pretty penny in business since then as well.
If Holmes was breaking down at school, it may be that his focus and ability with intellectual exercises was just not enough in the world anymore, or that it was derailed into crazy channels by other changes in his life, in his head, in his brain chemistry. There are accounts of his anti-social behavior years earlier. A high-functioning autism perhaps. His “intellect” let him plan and execute the outrage. Maybe, from his perspective, school just wasn’t “fun” anymore, he couldn’t make himself care about it anymore, it wasn’t making the ol’ dopamine flow, so he went and found something else that did.
That’s a common enough pattern, many people fall to it in one way or another. In some ways, socialization gives you another option, diverting you from questions you should not ask like, “Wouldn’t it be fun to shoot up a theater?” or at least biasing you heavily to answer, “No.” If you’re smart and spent all day at science, maybe you missed that day in socialization class, and maybe it’s not as easy as you might think to reason to the right answer from first principles. Call that good and evil if you like, and that you need to be taught, and learn, and practice whichever side it is you’re going to live on.
56. Dack Thrombosis
Hunter kills six, wounds two after tree-stand dispute
http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/2004/11/22_kelleherb_huntershooting/
Read about this a while back, and it dawned on me: “Whenever I get within 10 feet of any weapon my brain immediately flips to the Four Rules for safe gun use (the Australian Shooting Sports web site has a longer and a good list to consider). One of the things not on that list but that came with my birth certificate is —DON’T START A FIGHT WITH A GUY HOLDING A RIFLE—.
I don’t know if any of the white hunters had been drinking or not, but I had a friend once tell me, “Don’t ever tell a stranger – no matter how irritated they might make you — that you are “going to kick their butt.” He said he learned that the hard way once and it was quite a painful mistake.
The same goes with giving people the finger, or using racial epithets. First, it’s more of a reflection on your level of class, and like the example above, it could end up very badly for one of you. Six people didn’t come home and one is now in jail for the rest of his life because a couple guys wanted to spread ther lats. Worse, to do that to a person from a culture you don’t understand means you have no idea how they will respond, and like the white hunters – far beyond what they had expected.
This is what Chai Vang had to say:
“Vang told the jury he feared for his life and began firing only after another hunter’s shot nearly hit him. He detailed for jurors how the other hunters approached him, and how he responded by shooting at each one. He says he shot two of the victims in the back because they were “disrespectful”. He recounted with clarity how he killed each victim. While saying on the stand, “(he wished) it wasn’t happening,” Chai Soua Vang contended that three of the hunters deserved to die:
“Did Mr. Crotteau deserve to die?” Wisconsin Attorney General Peg Lautenschlager asked.
“Yes,” Chai Soua Vang replied.
Vang further testified that Joseph Crotteau deserved to die “because he accused me of giving him the finger and tried to cut in front of me to stop me from leaving.” And Laski deserved to die because he had a gun, he said.,[2] Vang re-enacted his deeds while on the stand, using his hands and arms to imitate the motions of firing a rifle. Vang’s lawyers commented that some of his abnormal remarks were possibly due to the language barrier. Therefore, when Vang responded affirmatively to the question that Mr. Crotteau and Mr. Laski “deserved to die,” his meaning implied that the men contributed to the circumstances that led to their deaths.”
And these guys were supposedly sane.
I don’t remember the concept of being “dissed” when I was a kid, but that seems ubiquitous today. And boy, if your dissed, that’s a killing offense to some. Like, “Who you lookin’ at?” That requires a really short fuse. I think my fuse is about a yard long…
You grow up in a culture of tribal rules and such behavior is seared into your brain. Mr. Vang and others like him seem to us to have massive chips upon their shoulders. But to Mr. Vang and others who are raised in such cultures will tell you that there are consequences to one’s actions. Be polite and most will be polite back. Those that aren’t deserve what comes their way. Show respect to those who show you the same.
“I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, and I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people and I expect the same from them.”
A line from a movie but with real life roots.
“Stupid should hurt.” My Dad
Just two of the many things that the “protected” people of this world do not understand or know how to inculcate into their lives.
There are fewer hunters in the woods now than there were 40 years ago. The result is that the deer herds are much bigger than they used to be. I used to never see them in the DC suburbs. Now they are all over the place. My sisters up in montgomery county in Maryland say the county there is deluged with deer because they are protected. They can’t be hunted and the country does not cull them. Trouble is, they carry lime disease–which is a miserable wasting disease that doesn’t go away. Whole neighborhoods come down with the disease. Its terrible. And unreported.
Bill O’Reilly is a horror of a host. I do not understand why anyone would agree to go on his show so that he can ask you a question regarding you field of expertise and then interrupt your answer to explain why you are a fool about your field of study.. which is why you were ostensibly invited in the first place. Jackass is too kind a word.
Each of these three–along with several others–was originally thought to have been a member of the tea party or else some other right-wing nutjob. http://minx.cc/?post=331245
In the “Mail Online” Peter Hitchens opined that a common factor in perpetrators of mass violence in modern times seems to be drug abuse. He includes cannabis in his list of drugs. He says its reputation of inducing passive behavior is not based on sound study. It has long had a reputation as a “gateway” drug but I now wonder if it reduces the inhibition to do violence in some people???
Read on Drudge this morning. USMC buying 12,000 M1911′s for spec ops. Spooks not happy with Beretta. MMMMMMMM. More .45 ball on the market soon.
Sgiah Dubh@27: “If the doctor had called or sent the letter “overnight” or if the school had responded in a timely manner, this incident might never had happened”
The doctor may or may not have a problem, depending on facts we don’t yet know. But the school?
If you didn’t know before VA Tech, you should certainly know now that schools, churches, and places of business can do NOTHING about crazies other than (possibly) expelling, excommunicating, or firing them. Suppose the school got the letter? Suppose she hand delivered it to the Dean?
The law in Colorado permits psychiatrists (but not Deans) to apply to a court to hospitalize someone who is a danger to other people. The state (and the Feds) also fund a raft of crazy rights organizations who stand ready to sue the psychiatrist or even in some cases charge the psychiatrist with a crime. In most cases, the crazy person can walk after 48 hours.
OT but, I wonder how someone breaking in to your house would react if he heard you start up a chainsaw.
There are varying estimates of gun numbers in Canada. When we had a long gun registry (now discontinued), about 7.6 million long guns were registered. However, when the gun registry was created in 1996, I have heard that many Canadians registered one or two of their guns and buried/hid the rest for some future time. Now the registry has been discontinued any long guns that were hidden have presumably been “found” by their owners.
For reasons like this, a gun registry may not be an accurate estimate of gun numbers.
According to gunpolicy.org, a website hosted by the University of Sydney (Australia), the estimated total number of guns held by civilians in Canada is 9,950,000. The website also notes that, with a ratio of 23.8 firearms per 100 people, Canada is the thirteenth highest gun-owning country in the world.
Every figure I have heard as far as deer hunters in the US have been somewhere north of 10 million. In fact, I believe I read that here on one of the previous threads so it must be true!
“How many hunters are there in America today?
23 million to 43.7 million
The total population of registered hunters in America today is ranging from 23 million to 43.7 million individuals. This estimate came from the 2001 National Survey Of Fishing, Hunting and Wildlife-Related Recreation, which was based on the annual data provided by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.”
http://www.numberof.net/number-of-hunters-in-america/
{}
A small sampling
Intentional homicide rates per 100,000 population 2010
Southern Africa – 32
Central America – 25
South America – 21
North America 4.7
Europe 3.5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
North America does not have a particularly bad record considering how many “gun crazed” maniacs must live here.
I do not believe that there are liberal gun ownership laws in Central America. Lotsa homicide going on though.
Mexico has some of the strictest gun control laws on the record;
Mexico – 18
The multicultural paradise of the US is considerably better;
United States – 4.8
It would be politically incorrect to question how many of those are at the hands of foreign drug cartels and their soldiers in arms in the form of neighborhood gangs.
Horrible as homicide is, it is a price to pay for freedom just like we justify death of American soldiers as the price of freedom. Freedom has a cost and sometimes it is at the expense of the state not being able to control every evil in the world.
62. Steve D
Bill O’Reilly is a horror of a host.
I agree with you. Perhaps you saw the interview with Congressman Jason Chaffetz on “The Factor.” It occurred before the one above:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSsJgkg1WUM
O’Reilly starts by being condescending about “heavy weapons” and then uses “spin” (Is that possible in the “No Spin Zone?”) in his argument by inflating the number of rounds in Holmes apartment from 6,000 to “60,000.” He continues his rant completely ignorant about the FBI database check that approves or denies the purchase of each firearm. Not just “heavy weapons” – all of them.
Next…Watch the Fair and Balanced in this interview:
Piers Morgan And Alan Dershowitz Get In Heated Argument With Anti-Gun Control Advocate (John Lott):
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/piers-morgan-and-alan-dershowitz-get-in-heated-argument-with-anti-gun-control-advocate/
That wasn’t a heated argument – that was a pistol-whipping. The Lame stream media in all it’s thoroughly condescending glory. Oh yeah, and “tolerance.”
John Lott – a thoroughly vetted academic was the expert that Duche-awitz and Morgan literally attack using tag team tactics during the whole program. Lott’s work is not “Junk Science.” It is a peer-reviewed academic study.
By the way, here’s what Professor Lott told Laura Ingraham about president Obama:
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2012/07/27/Fellow-Chicago-Professor-Says-Obama-Told-Him-He-Doesnt-believe-in-gun-ownership
Ooops. Deleted – already over 4 posts.
Pink Floyd
Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In a Cave and Grooving with a Pict
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_MvZxpE7YU
#67. Aha!
I’ve daydreamed about writing a simple “play to” / panic-button-app for smart-phones where the smart-TV or stereo (or PC connected to speakers) blasts out the sound of a shotgun being pumped, followed by the voice of a clearly burly 6’6″ male loudly whispering “get around behind ‘em Mike” with the sound of multiple heavy footsteps on creaky wood, followed by another shotgun pump followed by silence – where the next button push unloads two rounds (from seemingly different locations) with the hiss/crack of pellets passing by your ears and hitting walls and windows behind you, followed by another set of pumps.
If I could find a way to cheaply trigger a high intensity Xeon single pulse flash (that many apartments already have for exit/fire alarm use), I’d synchronize that too. With a selection of cocking sounds, and if the speakers can take the abuse, a hint of physical concussion. (note, like computer games, the sounds should be exaggerated, with timing and physics not a true mimic of real life – purpose built to amplify the psychological effects).
Unsaid is how dead I would be if those committing the (no-knock or not) home invasion were the police. Perhaps have the same app & its cloud-service do an auto-911 / sms call notifying the police that someone has broken in at this address and I’m about to respond (and it better not be them who neglected to knock). Encourage the police to connect to that app’s cloud API so they can get real-time notification if it turns out they are the ones breaking into a specific address (on purpose or in error).
(given the millions of apps in these phone stores, it probably already exists)
Perhaps package it with the late-late-show advertisements for “I’ve fallen and can’t get up” alarms – or a “RonCo” this-or-that. (Do they still have late-late shows? I haven’t had a TV at home since 1993).