White Lightning
The media attention focused on massacre of children at Sandy Hook has made it easy to forget there are two kinds of killers on the loose. Statistically most children killed are from the inner cities and mostly black. The Children’s Defense Fund notes that the firearm injuries rate for children and teens is 5 per 100,000 for whites and 51.1 per 100,000 for blacks. And most of the deaths don’t happen in Sandy Hook, in universities or theaters in Colorado but in (by descending order) New Orleans, St. Louis, Oakland, Newark, Baltimore, Richmond, Miami, Washington DC, Detroit and Cincinnati. About 2,800 children and teens are killed per year. Every year.
Representative of these child deaths is Heaven Sutton, 7, who was shot outside her Chicago home while tending to her lemonade and candy stand. Her killer is probably poorly educated and bought his weapon from the back of a van. It is doubtful that her killer actually intended to even harm her. Police she was killed gang related incident and we can surmise that the shooter, perhaps firing his gun sideways as shown on TV or arm weighed down by dollar store bling discharged his bullets more or less at random and they hit little Sutton. Statistically it is this kind of killer who is the most deadly to children.
But when we are talking about perps who kill big time in individual incidents the great majority of perpetrators are apparently crazy white boys, who to paraphrase Stephen Hunter are the “meanest, deadliest animal on the loose”. The good news is there aren’t that many of them, relatively speaking. The bad news is that they are almost impossible to stop.
If the massacre of children is largely black and their execution largely the result of nameless statistical violence, for reasons that are still poorly understood, most mass killers appear to be “white” — including in that category Asians and persons of Middle Eastern origin.
Their crimes, according to J. Reid Meloy, writing in the Oxford University Press blog, are meticulously planned and executed. He says that “research consistently shows that mass murderers research, plan, and prepare for their act of violence for days, weeks, and even months. The fantasy may have incubated in their minds for years, even though the time, place, and target had yet to be determined.”
There is no way to predict them. In fact, Melloy refers to them as basically unforseeable “rare events” akin an asteroid strike or lightning. They seem to come straight out of the clear blue. While the small time inner city gangster may often kill for a recognizably human motive — money, revenge, jealousy or the influence of drugs — the ‘crazy white boy’ by contrast, marches to a mysterious, unheard drummer, killing people he has never met for no apparent reason or for the most abstract or bizarre of motives. Melloy writes that:
I have forensically evaluated a number of mass murderers in prison or forensic hospitals, and with few exceptions, there was no evidence of a high state of emotional arousal when the killings occurred. Witnesses who have survived mass murders invariably describe the shooter as cool, calm, and deliberate — a lack of emotion that is a corollary of planned violence …
In mass murder, however, drug use is minimal … because the mass murderer does not want drugs to cloud his consciousness at the time. They could interfere with his planning, preparation, and most importantly, his tactical goal, which is often to maximize his casualty rate. We even found two cases where the mass murderer utilized therapeutic amounts of sedating drugs to help him remain calm during the shooting.
They did it as calmly as lighting a cigarette back when people smoked cigarettes. It is the combination of intelligence, secrecy, and cunning preparation that make the Lanza type killer so hard to head off except by lucky discovery.
This stopped Richard Reid from bringing down an airplane over the Atlantic in December 2001, when a passenger noticed he was trying to light his sneaker with a match. It contributed to the prevention of another ideologically driven mass murder in Times Square on 1 May 2010 when two street vendors noticed a suspicious van parked on a busy corner and alerted the police; two days later Faisal Shahzad was arrested as he sat on a plane at Kennedy bound for Dubai. Such situational awareness is critical to interdict someone in the final stages of an attack.
Accidental discovery may have almost stopped Jared Lee Loughner from shooting Gabrielle Giffords. “He was stopped by an Arizona Game and Fish Department officer at 7:34 a.m. for running a red light, but once the officer determined there were no outstanding warrants for Loughner, he was allowed to proceed to his destination with a warning to drive carefully.” Loughner then took a taxi to the scene of his intended attack, eliminating the possibility of another traffic stop. Why take chances.
For the crazy white guy, firearms seem almost incidental. In fact in the worst cases of mass murder, they are not even used. Andrew Kehoe blew up 42 people in a school with dynamite, including 39 children, in 1927. Timothy McVeigh killed “168 people, including 19 children in the day care center on the second floor, and injured 450 others” with explosive made from fertilizer. Jim Jones, killed 909 people by convincing them to drink poisoned Kool-Aid out of buckets. He only used firearms to kill Congressman Leo Ryan who had arrived to investigate the Jonestown site.
No guns in Japan? No problem. Shoko Asahara and his disciples manufactured sarin in a homemade laboratory to kill 13 people in the Tokyo subway. No guns in Europe? No problem. Anders Breivik killed 77 and injured 242 people by legally obtaining guns and manufacturing home-made explosives in Norway.
And of course, lest anyone forget, the September 11 attackers killed nearly 3,000 people and injured more than 6,000 people using box cutters obtainable for a few dollars you can buy from any craft store. The crazy white boy’s major weapon is his mind, very often magnified by a high level of education.
Intelligence was something that Breivik, McVeigh, Jones, Holmes, Lanza and Bin Laden apparently had plenty of. They gamed their attacks, maintained operational security and even created trails of disinformation. Lanza has for example even destroyed his computer to conceal his motives from the police even after his death. He’s so far ahead of the cops they can’t even begin to understand why he did it. Asahara’s men had a light automatic weapons manufacturing department and even possessed antidotes for sarin. The school-bomber Kehoe tried his devices out on farm animals for size. Breivik even started a farm to buy fertilizer to concoct explosives.
A black gangster might kill a child by accident. But a crazy white boy will kill people he’s never met for reasons of politics, religion, flying saucers or simply because he likes to. That’s what makes him so hard to stop.
Clearly anyone who expects an ‘assault weapons’ ban or simplistic limitation on firearms to stop the next 911 or reduce the massacre of black children in the inner cities is bound to be disappointed. It is ineffective against the one and irrelevant for the other. It might make us feel better. But for those who simply looking for some way to stop mass killings, reforming the mental health system may be the place to start.
A study in the Netherlands showed that “psychotic patients are 10 to 20 times more likely to commit homicide than persons in the general population. Internationally, the incidence of homicides committed by psychotic defendants is 0.02-0.36 per 100.000 inhabitants.” That means there may be upwards of 7 million psychotics in the American population capable of murder. Alas some of them are bound to be extremely smart; some very well educated and even worse, some of clever enough to pass for sane and rise to positions of responsibility and power.
If you are looking for a silver lining in the Sandy Hook killings consider this: what if Holmes or Lanza had grown up and acquired access to major labs and resources?
Clayton Cramer says that studies have shown that one of the biggest single factors accounting for differences in homicide rates between states is the way they treat the criminally insane.
The reason that more mental-health services and more relaxed involuntary-commitment standards make such a difference in murder rates is very simple: Mentally ill persons are disproportionately involved in violent crimes, including murder. As of 2002, about 26,000 inmates in state prisons across the United States who were convicted of murder were also mentally ill. A detailed examination of Indiana prison inmates convicted of murder found that 18 percent were diagnosed with “schizophrenia or other psychotic disorder, major depression, mania, or bipolar disorder.” Many of the random mass murders that have so plagued not only the United States but many other industrialized societies in the last few years were committed by persons with clear evidence of severe mental illness, usually schizophrenia.
Controlling weapons is one thing. But there is always the human factor which often proves more important. Which is a way, I guess of saying, that you are safer in alone room with a sane man with a 50 caliber machine gun than with Hannibal Lecter and a small shard of glass.
The Most Dangerous Game
Once you start looking at mass killings from a person-centered point of view your security model changes. The worst serial killer in British history — you know the Britain without guns — was Dr. Harold Shipman, MD, who killed more than 250 people. The biggest mass murders were committed without guns for the simple reason that guns are a poor choice for mass killing. Poison, fire, explosives, big kinetic objects or as in the case of Dr. Shipman — trust — were much more efficient killers.
The disadvantage of guns is they have to be aimed and their report warns other victims of potential danger. These deficiencies mean firearms are only capable of substantial mass killing when used in conjunction with favorable topology. Anders Breivik could shoot a lot of people because they were cooped up on an island. Similarly Lanza and Holmes exploited the confines of a theater or a classroom to obtain their effect. No favorable topology, no mass killing capability.
Malls, schools, auditoria and other limited access facilities should never be filled with people unless they are secured by armed guards. Every gathering of this type should be provided with security otherwise they are mere killing zones. Standard drills which exacerbate the fatal topology are potential catastrophes; thus procedures which emphasize herding kids or people into one place under the dubious protection of an unarmed teacher or designated person are disasters waiting to happen.
The reason guards are more effective than they might seem is because they put a man in the loop. They may not stop a killer but they increase the probability of accidental discovery by installing a set of eyeballs — however sleepy or rheumy — in the path of the killer.
If you simply rely on managing things — issuing a law decreeing the banishment of guns and then put kids in a limited access gun-free tower what’s to keep a person from burning down the the tower block? And if he does get a gun by manufacturing one himself — like a Sten — then you’ve simply created a target rich environment.
The logical thing would be to teach kids to scatter in a mass shooting situation and provide the exits through which to flee. This is a proven method. When there was no escort for a convoy what did they do in World War 2 when battleships or massed submarines attacked? Convoy to scatter. Don’t hang around for the wolfpack.
The right security model isn’t managing things, it’s managing the threat process. And that consists classically of the Four D’s. Detect, Deter, Delay, Defend. Detect the wacko. Deter the wacko. Delay, by guards or by obstacles the wacko and finally Defend. There was an academic recently who tweeted: “First fucker to say the solution is for elementary school teachers to carry guns needs to get beaten to death.”
There’s an example your crazy white boy right there. But I wouldn’t worry about him too much. He seems too stupid to be dangerous.
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It may be tinfoil time.
The father of the Newtown shooter is Peter Lanza, vice president of taxes for GE Energy Financial Services.
The father of the Aurora(Batman) shooter is Robert Holmes, lead scientist at FICO, a major credit-scoring firm.
There’s buzz in the blogosphere about both of them being scheduled to testify in the LIBOR scandal, but I’ve seen no official confirmation about that last part, other than blog posts quoting each other.
A majority of the diagnosed mentally ill do not belong in institutions. With medication and a support network they can function after a fashion.
But then there are the “others.” Determining who belong in the “other” category is relatively simple in some cases, but for many there is this maddening (is that a pun?) gray area that such individuals bounce around in. What to do with the “gray ones?”
The mentally ill with DSM-IV- (or is it “V” now?) defined disorders with a known propensity for violence, or a demonstrated passion and eagerness to commit lurid and spectacular acts of violence should be confined, and permanently. But first, a reasonably-arrived at determination has to be made as to whether there is a high probability that, if left among the general populace, they would harm people.
Let me be clear as to what I’m NOT saying: psychological experts have a dismal record of determining the rehabilitation rate of the criminally insane (it’s probably non-existent). What I want is a more aggressive application of the precautionary principle to be used against the violent mentally ill. This turns current policies on their head, where going overboard with treating an entire population as potential killers or terrorists is the twisted “norm,” and the genuinely disruptive are granted extra-legal “rights.”
Another thing that may have to be considered is the modification of Dr/Patient privileges in cases where the doctor is virtually certain that his/her patient is definitely dangerous. But how do you implement that? If patients know of this rule — and they will — they won’t reveal their most terrible thoughts and desires to their shrink.
Other than that, I don’t know how much can be done by way of prevention. Mrs. Lanza seems to, as far as we know so far, have willfully withheld knowledge from others as to her son’s state-of-mind and behavior over many years. “Anarchist Soccer Mom” from a previous post seems to demonstrate similar reckless disregard.
Ok, I recognize everyone but the guy in the bra…
In 1968 the National Institute for Mental Health’ director of planning stated, “The individuals’s mental health is formed by the total society in which he exists. The City is in pain. The totality of urban life is the only rational focus for concern with mental illness, our problem now embraces all of society.”
He als said that the mental health profession should be a “change element in society” helping to “construct a social system that produces mentally healthy indivduals.”
So it appears that key mental health professionals that formulated our current approach to mental illness would today say that Newtown, CT only got what it deserved. It is such a sick, twisted society that it produced Lanza the Killer, an understandable reaction for the human mind in response to such horrible oppression. It’s everybody’s fault and we are all crazy for living in such a society.
That all may sound absurd, but that is the real reason that Lanza and the VA Tech shooter and the Gifford shooter and the Batman theater shooter were not locked up somewhere. The Doctors decided they needed to fix the whole world instead of locking up the nuts.
The guy in the bra is former Canadian Air Force Colonel Russell Williams who was on track, perhaps, to head the entire Canadian Air Force. “Williams was also a decorated military pilot who had flown Canadian Forces VIP aircraft for dignitaries such as Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, and the Governor General and Prime Minister of Canada”
For years he had been breaking into women’s homes, raping them and in at least two cases, killing them, often posing for self-taken pictures in their underwear.
The problem of the capable and intelligent psychopath is a difficult one to solve. The next mass murder — like many in the past — may not involve firearms at all. It may employ something we have not even thought of. But clearly, the mayhem among children is a multimodal problem. It’s not as if some simple fix will address such disparate phenomena.
So my liberal friends living in the big city are now petitioning their legislator to repeal the 2nd amendment. When I asked them how laws restricting weapons were working out in Chicago, DC, New Orleans, etc., they told me that once we restrict all illegal weapons we would be safer. I replied that the weapons, much like Mexicans walking across the border, were not illegal but simply undocumented and that we needed to implement a “dream act” for these undocumented weapons. Because, you know, it would be unfair to punish them for being brought into DC without their consent. They haven’t spoken to me since.
Mom had gobs of money. Kid could have had any health care available. Young folks with no ambition, lost in a society of singleness and no substantive support, lots of other suggestions to fix – like suicide, kill – from video and outside media sources. Solution – go out in a flame.
My continuing question is why pick schools.
Easy pickings? A failure to get back at from prior years – ??
The killing of children must flow from a desire to wound the whole community in the worst way possible. It’s a particularly nasty revenge fantasy acted out. In Breivik’s case it was more politically focussed, like a mini “final solution”.
What politicians need to bear in mind is that perceptions of them tampering with the electoral system, either directly or (via the all-too-complicit sections of media) indirectly, could eventually draw the crabs, so to speak. Breivik proves that there are very dangerous nutjobs of that political complexion out there. In the final analysis, however, we rely on the common sense of the voters to throw out those who are headed in the wrong direction. Pity it didn’t happen, and Obama is back, baby, back!
Can someone explain to me the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath? I’ve read a lot of literature on the subject, including the Wikipedia entries, but I’m still perplexed. Also, in the case of mass/serial killers, does being mentally ill obviate the influence of evil, i.e. choosing to do/be evil? Which is to say, does their mental illness cause their evil (and thus, to a certain extent, render irrelevant considerations of evil as a motive force)?
When thinking along these lines I am always reminded of that marvelous scene in The Return of the King (extended version) when the Mouth of Sauron parleys with Aragorn and Gandalf. The Mouth of Sauron’s face is disfigured with disease–reflecting (and caused by), it seems to me, the disfigurement and disease of his soul by his embrace of evil. His facial disfigurement is the physical manifestation of a profound spiritual malady. Similarly, I wonder if serial killers and mass murderers and their ilk can be diseased both mentally and spiritually. Which leads me to ask whether the disease of the soul may cause the mental illness: i.e., the person’s choosing to be evil causes his mental illness rather than vice-versa.
I told someone once that anybody can kill for hunger, revenge or greed. But it takes a particularly well educated or intelligent person to kill for nothing. A mass killer arrives at place determined to kill everyone — yet he knows none of the victims from adam.
It’s not personal. It’s for an ideal. Or the mother ship (Jim Jones) or Allah (bin Laden) or to revenge Waco (McVeigh) or Batman (Aurora). It’s a little appreciated fact that most Communists are in fact killed by the party through purges. They are killed by their friends. Some friends.
Certain cultures, I think, are particularly susceptible to this madness. The more comfortable a culture is the the abstract, the more vulnerable it is to this sort of murderous idea. When I was a kid I knew ordinary criminals and revolutionary intellectuals. The ordinary criminals will kill by the ones and twos. The intellectuals will kill by the hundred. And there’s no way to dissuade the murderous intellectuals. They are often so enamored of their ideas that it’s really useless to dispute any of it.
One of least appreciated pillars of Western Civilization is the notion that ideas must never be contrary to common sense. Or as Pope Benedict argued in his Regensberg address, that God’s commands are never illogical or murderous and hence, religious injunctions to spread an idea “by the sword” are of suspect provenance.
We too often emphasized abstract ideas to the detriment of common sense. For a man to stay sane he must remain rooted in the world. Or as Tolkien puts it, he should remember the taste of strawberries.
The crazy white boys like Lanza have left this planet. They no longer remember food, or the wind, or the sound of the trees. All they have before them is some sick wheel of fire. I don’t know how we can re-teach common sense to civilization that seems to have lost its acquaintance. But we should.
Our response to these types of intellectual killers is to control more and more things. We’ve spent billions controlling to planes, searching for box cutters, limiting shampoo or fluids to 100 ml; we scan people for implanted bombs; we now track the purchase of fertilizer, probably we track the precursors to sarin and vx and tabun and mustard and … next it up it will be remotely controlled children’s toys, the maybe biological material and then …
Well where is the end of it? And when the next intellectual mass murderer strikes it will be with something we never thought of. And so here we are in the first decades of the 21st century taking off our shoes, being groped at airports, having body cavity searches, removing our scissors and if our betters have their way, surrendering our privacy to emails and online communications and yet we couldn’t stop a god-damned Adam Lanza from killing a classroom full of kids.
This Wiki article on the Polish Home Army–which operated in a horrifically difficult and brutal wartime environment–explains why any serious attempt to ban (or even confiscate) privately held firearms is doomed to failure in a country still governed by the Constitution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_Home_Army
Given the length of our coastline as well as our shared borders with Canada and Mexico, not to mention the fact we can’t even get a handle on illegal aliens and illegal drugs entering this country, what the hell makes Left-Coast-Idjits like Dianne Feinstein think they could ever control the flow of black market weaponry and weapons parts into the U.S.?
Here’s Exhibit B: Seems to me firearms similar to these could be quickly produced by any decently-equipped machine shop:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sten
…not to mention the fact we can’t even get a handle on illegal aliens and illegal drugs entering this country, what the hell makes Left-Coast-Idjits like Dianne Feinstein think they could ever control the flow of black market weaponry and weapons parts into the U.S.
Well, the pertinent difference here is that our elites don’t WANT to stop illegal aliens or illegal drugs. You could stop both in about a week if you really wanted. They WILL want to stop guns, because guns are the final bulwark between the elites and their total enslavement of the nation.
Berserker – urban dictionary
1.Although similar groups have been found around the world, berserker generally refers to the small class of Nordic peoples who could be found preforming inhuman feats on the battlefield. When in combat a berserker would fight nude and/or completely unarmored, sometimes taking the skins of bears, wolves or other beasts to heighten his appearance. Uncontrollable rage is the signature of the berserker. To enter this rage many would have pre-battle ceremonies in which they would consume alcohol, and work themselves up into a violent, bloodlusting mood through dance and similar actions, and then often take psychoactive drugs to make them, in combination with the mighty rage, immune to pain and personal hurt. As a result, these fierce warriors would not back down when injured or against overwhelming odds, and be completely numb to pain and the killing that they were doing. This is a lethal combination, and makes the berserker a plausible candidate for creating the werewolf myth, let alone a terrifying addition to the ancient battlefields of Europe and Scandinavia.
2.Used to say some one has flipped a shit and done something rash with no self regard
Weapons control is of ancient lineage. The rulers always want control of the “higher order weapons.” They realize criminals will get a hold of some of these and prey on the population. Criminals don’t have a political motive for this violence and are more of a competitor in the exploitation of the population than a threat to the ruling order. Indeed, an unarmed populace must look to the rulers for protection so the armed criminal is more of a feature than a bug — though, of course, they must be policed and pruned.
Muslim mass killers do so for Allah. Not necessarily a mental disease.
White mass killers do so different reasons not related to religion.
“A detailed examination of Indiana prison inmates convicted of murder found that 18 percent were diagnosed with “schizophrenia or other psychotic disorder, major depression, mania, or bipolar disorder.” ”
Given that depression affects 9% to 12% of the population, and the other illnesses a smaller proportion, it sounds like these inmates may have only a somewhat higher rate of mental illness than the general population. We should be very, very careful about laws that deny rights to citizens based on criteria that are not well defined and prone to error. Let’s not forget that the left has an entire cottage industry of pseudo-science devoted to proving that conservatives are mentally ill, and a media who fabricate “violent behavior” among Tea Partiers or anyone else who deviates from the politically correct line.
FWIW, Randall Collins, a sociologist who blogs at The Sociological Eye, posted on rampage killers after the Aurora killings (but before Sandy Hook). His theory is that the rampage killer is motivated in large part by the thrill of clandestine preparation:
“Mass rampage killers– and an unknown penumbra of wannabes– go even further. Their obsessive backstages have two distinctive features. First, their private obsessions concentrate on their vision of a personally inimical world: not the standardized war and fighting fantasies of mass-marketed games, but their own real-world hatreds and institutions. They become increasingly drawn into preparing their counter-attack.
A second feature is that a rampage killer makes his backstage into a super-successful ritual, while also keeping it ultra-private. It resembles a personal religious cult, with its own ceremonies, sacred objects, and moral standards. Of course, many innocuous pursuits can also be built up in private into a quasi-religious obsession. The would-be rampager’s success, in building an emotionally compelling world that is completely antagonistic to other people’s, is so extreme because he has found a unique source of emotional energy: clandestine excitement . . . . [which is] the energy that comes from successfully keeping other people out of one’s backstage. The backstage of the would-be mass killer is illicit; he knows it cannot be revealed to others without provoking severe condemnation. This distinguishes it from other kinds of obsessive backstages; boys caught up in video games and electronic cults do not generally hide what they are interested in, and multi-player games and on-line contacts subject them to a degree of social control, reinforcing a standardized construction of social reality. The would-be rampager is playing a much more exciting game, hiding from others his horrendous plans; and this excitement feeds the emotional input that drive his private ritual. His backstage ritual is in a deepening spiral, a unique source of emotional excitement: as the prospective rampager gets into increasingly serious preparations, the excitement level rises.”
Entire article is well worth reading, although some would question Collins’ analysis of suicide bombers: http://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2012/09/clues-to-mass-rampage-killers-deep.html
NB: the backstage/frontstage distinction is drawn from the oeuvre of Erving Goffman (1922-1982)– a Canadian sociologist known for his studies of social interactions and impression management.
2. Don Rodrigo
The forthcoming DSM is to be called DSM-5 rather than DSM-V: apparently Roman numerals are now insufficiently modern for the APA.
m @ 1: It may be tinfoil time….There’s buzz in the blogosphere about both of them being scheduled to testify in the LIBOR scandal.
LOL. If the Libor scandal were more serious, I’d give it a go, but I have a better idea, let’s turn the tinfoil around: if you want to know what kind of person it is operating today’s financial world, look for the fathers of psychopaths.
sbw @ 9: Can someone explain to me the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath?
Without actually looking, I presume the sociopath can function within society to his own benefit at least, and the psychopath is generally of the sort to be shot on sight. OK some of this may be after the fact along the lines of “because if treason doth prosper, none dare call it treason”, but there y’go.
12. peterike
…not to mention the fact we can’t even get a handle on illegal aliens and illegal drugs entering this country, what the hell makes Left-Coast-Idjits like Dianne Feinstein think they could ever control the flow of black market weaponry and weapons parts into the U.S.
Well, the pertinent difference here is that our elites don’t WANT to stop illegal aliens or illegal drugs. You could stop both in about a week if you really wanted. They WILL want to stop guns, because guns are the final bulwark between the elites and their total enslavement of the nation.
…………..
Cop murder spotlights crisis of killer aliens
No government agency tracks crimes by illegals, not even attacks on police
Published: 09/28/2006 at 9:18 PM
While no government agencies specifically track crimes by illegal aliens, there have been some efforts to quantify the loss. Last December, Mac Johnson set out to investigate the number of homicides perpetrated by illegal aliens. Since the federal government would not provide any useful information, he contacted all 50 statehouses. Three months later, he had fewer than a dozen responses. Only one state, Vermont, provided any useful information.
He then set out to statistically estimate the number of murders by illegal aliens based on available crime data and conservative estimates of the actually number of illegal aliens in the country – which, of course, nobody really knows.
He found that between 1,806 and 2,510 people in the U.S. are murdered annually by illegal aliens. If he’s right, that would represent between 11 percent and 15 percent of all murders in the U.S.
In one study of a sample 55,000 illegal immigrants serving prison sentences in the U.S., it was discovered that they are responsible for over 400,000 arrests and over 700,000 felony crimes.
According to Heather McDonald of the Manhattan Institute, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2006/09/38134/#KovoG8xSr6jKlKYO.99
Wretchard says : But a crazy white boy will kill people he’s never met for reasons of politics, religion, flying saucers or simply because he likes to. That’s what makes him so hard to stop.
Female rampage killers are rare, but both recent cases in the United States involve “crazy white girls”: Sylvia Seegrist, who shot up a shopping mall in Pennsylvania in 1985, and Jennifer San Marco, who killed six colleagues in a mail processing facility in California in 2005. Both seem to have had a history of a fascination with violence as well as previous diagnoses of mental problems (paranoid schizophrenia in the case of Seegrist): Seegrist liked to talk about spree killings and used to visit a local fitness center wearing green military fatigues. She also planned her attack, visiting the shopping mall numerous times, where she reportedly harassed customers on several occasions before the shooting. San Marco had worked as a police dispatcher at one time, frequently made racially charged statements, and also planned her attack on the Goleta postal facility in the belief that she was the target of a conspiracy masterminded by the other postal workers. She shot and killed a former neighbor before driving to the postal facility and shooting her colleagues.
There isn’t much that can be proved from a case study series of only two cases, but it would seem that two X chromosomes are not an absolute guarantee that a sufficiently intelligent and crazy person won’t go on a rampage.
Given the inevitable attacks on the 2nd Amendment, it’s probably time to re-post the link to “Democide” which proves conclusively that the biggest mass-murderer is consistently the state.
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/MURDER.HTM
An armed populace is the biggest impediment to the ritual slaughter of the citizenry by their government, hence the constant attack on the ability of that populace to protect oneself against said state.
The following link is of interest:
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/119408/why-israel-has-no-newtowns?all=1
The counter examples that confuse advocates of gun control are Israel and Switzerland. The populations of both countries are heavily armed with automatic weapons but don’t have rampage killings (Obviously Islamic terrorist will do rampage killings in Israel when allowed the opportunity). What’s working with Israel and Switzerland is they run their entire population through a military conscription process. The obvious screwballs are filtered out and rejected from military service. Everyone else is trained in the use of firearms and issued weapons. The baseline situation for Israel and Switzerland is everyone is armed except the screwballs. Under a gun control scenario you have exactly the opposite situation, i.e. everyone is disarmed except the criminals and the screwballs.
How many of these impressionable young, hopeless white boys have been sneaking off to the local mosque?
Rahm Emanuel Mourns 260 Chicago Children Killed By Violence (2011)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/02/rahm-emanuel-parents-mour_n_1071247.html
re: The Village: Chicago vs. Newtown Redux
http://stuffblackpeopledontlike.blogspot.ca/2012/12/the-village-chicago-vs-newtown-redux.html
regards
… and a very very merry WHITE Christmass
SF
Breitbart reports a possible motive for Adam Lanza’s rampage. He was angry at his mother for planning to commit him to an institution.
Commit me, mom? What do you think I am? Crazy?
w @ 25: He was angry at his mother for planning to commit him to an institution.
That hardly explains shooting up a school full of six year olds. Yeah, we can construct some wacko rationales, and maybe even guess which one he followed, but it still comes to crazy. Obviously he didn’t plan to make it out, and didn’t even wait for suicide by cop. Are we comforted that there was at least some semi-rational trigger, no matter what irrationality followed from it?
sbw @ 9 also asked: Also, in the case of mass/serial killers, does being mentally ill obviate the influence of evil, i.e. choosing to do/be evil?
Theologically, no. Secularly, yes. Look at Loughner (Giffords, Tuscon). He didn’t know what planet he was on. It’s a mechanical malfunction. What can you do? I dunno. I’d take it at face value and execute him. Even if we had a magic wand that could fix him completely and permanently, it doesn’t undo the deed. Give him a nice meal and last rights and do what passes for justice. And don’t quote me Bilbo’s mercy, even Saruman got it in the end.
Public schools cannot be protected from every possible threat.
The solution is to close down the public schools and home school the kids. Home schooled kids learn more than those in public schools. They can learn over the internet. Or, the Department of Education can provide every kid a computer loaded with educational software. Currently the government follows up on home schooled kids to make sure they meet targets.
So everybody benefits except the mass murderers. No public schools means
1. no mass murder of students
2. all students get a better education
3. No bullying in school
4. No teacher-student sex
5. No school taxes
6. No students drop out of school
7. Education is fun and interesting because the teaching is done by
educational games that are fun and interesting.
Everybody has a super star teacher.
Of course, those that want to pay for it can send their children to private schools, even private internet schools.
If only the liberals were smart enough to think that one through. Not only is it a delusion to think that we can prevent such events through treatment, but in this case it actually caused the illness.
I’m sure that the jails are full of Paranoid Schizophrenics, but I don’t buy the link between that kind of madness and this.
We are reaping the results of years of trying to stamp out the very notions of right and wrong and good and evil.
What we have now is a kind of madman that takes that to its logical extreme. Among other things, this was a suicide, the ultimate repudiation of right and wrong.
“Female rampage killers are rare, but both recent cases in the United States involve “crazy white girls”: Sylvia Seegrist, who shot up a shopping mall in Pennsylvania in 1985, and Jennifer San Marco, who killed six colleagues in a mail processing facility in California in 2005.”
There was also Amy Bishop, a typical PhD/crazy woman. If you want to go way back, Countess Bathory of Hungary was also unpleasant and killed many victims.
There is a huge amount of black on white crime that is motivated by race and ideology. Some of these incidents, where black mobs hunt down a white person and beat him to a pulp, surely don’t match your portrait of the bumbling black youth who kills by accident. The MSM suppresses the “polar bear hunting” stories, but let’s not do that here.
Who really thinks of the 9/11 crew as “white boys”? Your point that the crazy white boy is a different type of killer is true, but Muslim fanatics actually aren’t like Lanza and the others, because, for one thing, Muslim fanatics aren’t mentally ill loners, but high achievers in their mentally ill culture. Also, white people don’t think they’re white, even though they are Caucasian.
30- Are you a bigot against Scientology too, or only different races? Now go back to “Anonymous”…
Nah, anon, when a crazy white boy sets out to unleash mayhem he really punches above his weight. I say that as a crazy white boy. I’m not one crazy enough to go on a shooting spree, don’t get me wrong. But I’ve heard that murderous call, those Satanic whispers, before, faintly. I’ve seen the path to casual, cold terror taken by Charles Whitman and many others since. Sidestepped it in a hurry, but seen it. Orgiastic violence has a siren call all its own. Tarantino’s made millions exploiting it.
It’s the lure of Satan, really, if you ask me. And it’s a shockingly easy path to tread. The wonder is that it doesn’t happen more often, frankly. What makes crazy white guys more susceptible than most, I can’t say. But we sure seem to be. Crazy white guys usually aren’t killers. But when we choose to be, we really go over the top.
…the content of much entertainment media, and the marketing of those media combine to produce “a powerful desensitization intervention on a global level.” …the modern entertainment media landscape could accurately be described as an effective systematic violence desensitization tool. Whether modern societies want this to continue is largely a public policy question, not an exclusively scientific one. —Iowa State University study, The Effects of Video Game Violence on Physiological Desensitization to Real-Life Violence; Carnagey, Anderson, and Ferlazzo; article from ISU News Service; July 24th, 2006
“the modern entertainment media landscape could accurately be described as an effective systematic violence desensitization tool.”
I think there’s some truth to that. Back in the day the Catholic cathecism used to warn about “occasions of sin” — the gateways to evil. The first step on the road to perdition was, we were told, were impure words, stories, images and violent thoughts. If you wanted to clear of evil, you kept your distance from those things.
Today we are looking for a similar vocabulary to justify doing the same thing, but all that modern sociology can come up with to denounce pornography and excessively violent entertainment is “inappropriate” or “misogynistic”. This is weak pap and sounds forced.
But people are jaded and are beginning to suspect that all this modern culture may have unanticipated side effects. So people looking to clean up their minds and “avoid temptation” to use the Oldspeak phrase. They are basically looking remove the obvious “occasions of sin” from their immediate environment, a moral laxative as it were. They want to stop cursing, drinking to excess, overeating and watching questionable entertainment because they suspect it might be good for them to clean up their act. In fact after a while many people feel quite the better for it, as when they stop smoking.
But they need a reason and modern culture has given virtue a bad name. And to mention “evil” or “sin” is the only remaining transgression in the liberal playbook. Maybe the time is ripe for some author of self-improvement books, or even Oprah to start a trend called “positive living” or something. They need to coin a term. Livingnetics or Dynalife. Something like that. Then people will know it’s ok to be virtuous again. Just don’t tell them what it is.
And before you know it we’ll be back to what was essentially the habits of mental hygiene prescribed by the old church fathers without the shame of knowing how square we’ve accidentally become.
WHY MOST SERIAL KILLERS ARE WHITE MEN
(its because of the greater diversity in the white population)
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/serial.htm
Any fencer can tell you that you will never win a fight by simply parrying blows.
Someone seems to have ignored those blacks who commit mass killings.
Perhaps because they invariably claim that their victims were racists and no one wants to appear to be sympathetic to racists.
But people are jaded and are beginning to suspect that all this modern culture may have unanticipated side effects. So people looking to clean up their minds and “avoid temptation” to use the Oldspeak phrase. They are basically looking remove the obvious “occasions of sin” from their immediate environment, a moral laxative as it were. They want to stop cursing, drinking to excess, overeating and watching questionable entertainment because they suspect it might be good for them to clean up their act. In fact after a while many people feel quite the better for it, as when they stop smoking.
But they need a reason and modern culture has given virtue a bad name. And to mention “evil” or “sin” is the only remaining transgression in the liberal playbook. Maybe the time is ripe for some author of self-improvement books, or even Oprah to start a trend called “positive living” or something. They need to coin a term. Livingnetics or Dynalife. Something like that. Then people will know it’s ok to be virtuous again. Just don’t tell them what it is.
Many years ago we started, as a culture, down the road of making rebellion cool.
“What are you rebelling against?”
“Whatta you got?”
If you look at what is depicted as the antisocial behavior of the biker gang in The Wild One, it is laughable. Literally. I guffawed at the “Hey! Let’s ride our bikes down main street and cause an old man to wreck his car! Toss back beers and leer at wimmins! Whoo hoo! BAAAAAADDDDD!” antics. They are tame and boooooring by today’s measures. (Don’t even get me started on Brando’s ridiculous hat.)
But it wasn’t the particulars of the behavior that were being sold at the time. It was the attitude. Content would be made up ex post facto. Like Nancy Pelosi on Obamacare, they had to make rebels out of the yoots before they could see what was in the yoots.
Which brings me to another movie quote which has gotten a lot of play on BC:
“You still think you can control them?”
And that is how we find ourselves arrived at 2012, where a real-life “Joker” psycho shoots up a theater full of moviegoers at a Batman movie. Somewhere along the way it became good (cool) to be bad and bad (uncool) to be good. Popular entertainment kept pushing the boundaries with characters re: who could “get away with” what (i.e. how antisocial a character could be and still retain some audience identification or sympathy). As with all boundary pushing, it takes on a life of its own, i.e. yesterday’s thrills are today’s yawns, requiring more stimuli at more intense levels. And there was never an agreed-on end point: “When we get here, THAT’S ENOUGH.”
And so Marlon Brando’s Johnny of 1953 becomes Heath Ledger’s Joker of 2008 — characters who are *cough* “bad” but cool; deliberately designed to elicit the audience’s fascination, and even some measure of admiration from certain demographic slices of that audience. In terms of their cultural impact in their respective eras, they are functionally THE SAME CHARACTER.
But the content has changed dramatically. While Johnny and the Joker are functionally the same character, their behavior is starkly different. Johnny was a punk. The Joker is a nihilistic butcher & a madman. (but a COOL butcher & madman!)
If filmmakers had tried to push Heath Ledger’s Joker on a 1953 audience, the filmmakers would probably have gotten beaten and quite possibly lynched by angry citizens. “Corrupting the youth of Athens” got Socrates a hemlock cocktail. Corrupting the youth of America, by comparison, appears to earn you Oscar statuettes & millions of bucks.
There are no brakes on this train, friends. Never were any. Feature, not a bug.
Final movie quote:
“Who’s in charge here?”
“In charge? I don’t know, man, I’m just doing what I’m told. I’m just a working girl.”
l @ 35: (its because of the greater diversity in the white population)
(upon rereading)
Um. I should have looked some more before posting. On review, just … um. It’s a posterior analysis, it doesn’t even pretend to find root causes. Numerically interesting however. Still, the pure symmetric distributions are unlikely. I’m not sure I like any model where the midpoint is quite so criminal.
39. Josh
“Um. I should have looked some more before posting. On review, just … um. It’s a posterior analysis, it doesn’t even pretend to find root causes.”
You are correct.
It is merely descriptive.
“Numerically interesting however. Still, the pure symmetric distributions are unlikely.”
Those are the curves you get with large populations.
“I’m not sure I like any model where the midpoint is quite so criminal.”
Yes. There are lots of things in this world I do not like.
l @ 41:
No, symmetric normal curves are NOT what you get with large populations, more detailed data can show all sorts of other distributions. It is over-simple models that use such simple curves because they don’t have either an analysis or sufficient data.
And you seem to miss the implication of the midpoints showing so much criminality. That can’t be right by our social definitions. A realistic, meaningful model is going to have to be heavily skewed to the non-criminal side, and once you start skewing things you’d better have good analysis and good data to support it, because minor changes in the parameters can wipe out your conclusions.
This is not to say that the model isn’t interesting, for a first draft, sufficient to support a proposal for refining it. But merging all factors into an overweening “criminality” isn’t going to go far in the academy, nor should it.
–
w @ 40: sorry for the whiplash there wretchard, I made a post that it seems you caught, then realized I’d misread the numbers and changed it all around.
Laurie Dann.
Ritual, precision, obsession, and the creativity of the manic-depressive all often have a place at the table of genius. But then cross enough of those wires, pour testosterone over the fire, and watch out: obsessive-compulsive-disorder, depression, schizophrenia, and autistic spectral disorders with its unusual absence of empathy thrown in.
I tend to think that the ever shrinking Caucasian birthrate, dating from 1900, is reshaping the genome in ways we do not yet understand.
I’ve been fascinated by the idea of exiling criminals and the mentally ill since I read about a Native American tribe in, I believe Alaska, that banished two teenage members convicted of robbery and other criminal activity to live on a deserted island. They were left alone on two separate islands to fend for themselves with minimal tools, equipment, and supplies for a period of time until the tribe deemed them to be properly rehabilitated. The idea was to get their minds focused on something else and interrupt their downward spiral into criminality. This was about ten years ago, so I’m not sure how the experiment worked out, but I would be interested to know how those two young tribal members are doing today.
Additionally, I remember reading about The Isle of the Dead in Bernard Cornwell’s historical Arthur series. In Cornwell’s version of 5th century Britain, there existed a place where the “dangerous mad” were banished and left to their own devices in the wilderness. Knowing Cornwell, I’m sure there is historical evidence for the island’s existence, so I’m wondering if our ancestors didn’t have a better solution for dealing with violent mentally ill people. At least the exiles would have been relatively free, and perhaps with their own survival to focus their minds on, their maladies did improve. While that solution may sound inhumane, is medicating them into a stupor or unleashing them on an unsuspecting population any better?
TV crime shows, which is to say the community of TV producers directors and actors who are overwhelmingly of the Left, love mass murderer/serial killer shows. They populate the airwaves with crazy over-educated white guys, not with inarticulate urban thugs. For example consider “Criminal Minds.” There was one episode in which the killer was closeted homosexual black guy who with his standard issue crazy white guy partner preyed on teenage girls. When I saw it I thought about how it broke so many PC conventions that it might have been a deliberate anchor to windward, put out as a reference when any of 2000 other TV shows are mentioned.
You left out the Long Island massacre (black man), the DC “sniper” right after 9/11/01, and the guy in the ’70s or ’80s who was murdering a bunch of boys. Of course, the last two were one-at-a-time types of deals–just like the British doctor. I’m afraid the “crazy white boy” comes in all colors and sexes. For the time being, however, it does appear that the “crazy white boy” tends to have more access to resources and so is able to be more “successful.”
I told someone once that anybody can kill for hunger, revenge, or greed. But it takes a particularly well educated or intelligent person to kill for nothing.
Ah, but is it for nothing? What about afterlife currency? People in China burn joss paper, often called “Hell Bank Notes” to bribe the bureaucrats of Hades to treat their relatives well in the afterlife. Just think of the promised virgins of Muslims who die in battle as yet another form of currency. And even Jesus Christ talked of piling up treasures in Heaven.
What if a desire for Heaven were merely yet another form of a love of money? I remember a man who dieted and worked hard to get down to the right weight. The reason he gave was that he looked forward to indulging himself as much as he wanted at the end of his fast. Yet, how is that different from a man who refuses indulgence in this life so that he can indulge himself in his afterlife? Depictions of Heaven, from religion to religion (but particularly Islam), tend to be grotesquely self-indulgent; it comes across as an orgy in the sky.
I’m reminded of a refrain from ”The Preacher and the Slave”, written the notorious Joe Hill.
You will eat, by and by
In that glorious land above the sky
Work and pray, live on hay
You’ll get pie in the sky when you die
If there is anything to learn from the likes of Mohammed, Charles Manson, and Jim Jones, it is that once people regard a man as having control over their afterlife, he can tell them to do anything. Absolutely anything. Afterlife currency becomes just another carrot, albeit a highly abstract carrot that one can only eat after one is dead.
People need reason for virtue that does not depend upon a desire for a good afterlife, for the idea of an afterlife has become so utterly corrupted by charlatans. Besides, wouldn’t a desire for Heaven merely function as a transformation of greed? I like the idea that it is best not to care one way or another whether one goes to Heaven, for that is God’s decision and nobody else’s. Perhaps the question should rather be how one would please God.
Wretchard, you might want to take a look at this: “Of Course There Are Black Serial Killers.” http://www.theroot.com/views/course-there-are-black-serial-killers?page=0,1
“The Root” covers “Black News, Opinion, Politics, and Culture,” and the author of the article above, Lynette Holloway, is a former NYT reporter. She says she’s talked to experts who told her black men are as likely to be serial killers as white men; that most serial killers of whatever race aren’t that smart (it’s hard to catch them because there’s usually little or no connection with their victims); that the media [cough] don’t cover them as much.
Yep. Actually, I’ve read that, just as with common murders, black men are also more likely to be serial killers (per capita) than are Caucasian men. Be that as it may, it’s just one more anti-white “meme.”
My continuing question is why pick schools.
Because kids are too small to fight back. Because the killers know schools are gun-free zones where no one will be armed. Because the adults in charge at most schools today are not the most dynamic leaders, and the standard responses they have trained for are disaterously ineffective. Because the geography is, as Wretchard noted, ideal.
And because the typical young spree killers like Lanza are far more familiar with the school than with any other institution. Those of us with greying beards may forgot how large school looms in a teenager’s life today, when there is little work and few clubs or associations outside of school available to them.
As to the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath, well, both are highly anti-social, and the terms are often used interhcangably, but if there is a difference, it’s that psychopathic behavior is generally believed to be more genetic while sociopathy is more learned.
Psychopaths are marked by poor impulse control, shallow emotional responses (lack of fear, lack of empathy, high tolerance for stress), and structural anomalies in the amygdala, which is a critial part of the brain’s emotional hardware. The suppressed emotional response seems to create more erratic behavior (which makes sense if our emotions are the regulatory feedback mechanism for our actions).
Sociopaths on the other hand have functional emotional systems, but were subjected to significant negative feedback that caused them to form an anti-social personality. Their hardware is fine, but it’s running an operating system that learned to dislike people, to disregard their feelings, and to ignore the sociopath’s own conscience. You could say a psychopath is incapable of sympathy, while a sociopath grew up in an environment where symapthy was met with negative reinforcement, so he sees it as a bad thing.
Of the two, sociopaths are potentially more dangerous because they are more skilled. A psychopath doesn’t really understand other people, and has poor impulse control anyway, so has trouble carrying out any sort of plan. But a sociopath can be coldly calculating, using and manipulating the emotions of others, and controlling his own behavior to disguise his scheme. On the other hand, a psychopath is more likely to just randomly kill someone because they lacked the impulse control not to. A sociopath wouldn’t have any moral objecting to killing someone, but would realize it might cause problems and so make other choices.
But if a sociopath got to the point where he thought he was screwed no matter what…
And if he was on drugs that blurred his perception of reality…
Now, I think we have an occasional resident shrink who might be able to blast large holes in my definitons, but I get the impression the definitions are imprecise in any event, so I’ll use mine until I get a better set.
22. Eggplant
The counter examples that confuse advocates of gun control are Israel and Switzerland. The populations of both countries are heavily armed with automatic weapons but don’t have rampage killings.
The fact that they don’t have rampage killings doesn’t tell us much. There are 38 Americans for every Israeli, and 38 Americans for every Swiss. Without additional information, we should expect the U.S. to have 38 “average murder incidents” for every such incident in Israel or Switzerland. By “average murder incident,” I mean a murder incident in which the number killed is the average across all murder incidents. For “rampage killings” (large number killed) we should expect the ratio to be much greater than 38-to-1. This is similar to the fact that the ratio of white geniuses to black geniuses is much greater than the ratio of IQ-100 whites to IQ-100 blacks.
And that’s only if the U.S. and Israeli or Swiss averages are similar (as a percentage of population). If the U.S. average is greater, we should expect the rampage ratio to be even greater than what I’ve just indicated.
Of course it is possible that additional information would change the picture, but without it, I don’t see a reason to find the absence of rampage killings in Israel or Switzerland remarkable.
I think “sociopath” is just a modern word for “psychopath.” I don’t think psychiatrists and psychologists use “psychopath” nowadays. I have read the classic book “The Mask of Sanity” by Harvey Kleckley (sp?). He used “psychopath,” but the people he described would be called “sociopaths” nowadays.
It’s just that sociopathy comes in degrees. A few are killers, but most are people who do various things like committing fraud, stealing from their own families, obtaining employment and marriage with fraudulent presentations, etc. This doesn’t mean that they’re not much trouble. They’re BIG trouble, because, all their lives, they create one problem after another requiring them to be rescued by others. “Others” are their families but also kindly or naive people who are not related to them.
Sociopaths do these things partly because they are incompetent at the things that are required for real accomplishments.
I believe that evil exists, but it’s important to have a framework of facts in talking about it.
@50 Smoking Frog
Ignore “(as a percentage of population).”
There is only ONE way to eliminate public school violence.
It isn’t what you might think.
MichaelC @ 1 and geoffb @ 42 – Putting on our tinfoil hats consider that Laurie Dann was a product of the North Shore of Chicago, a toney neighborhhod that is home to a bunch of financial “wizards” of the general sort once depicted in The Bonfire of the Vanities (The Baby Boomer Generation).
Their offspring, the Yuppy-Puppys are Gen X. This is the generation of Adam Lonza’s parents. From my experience with SOME of them, I’d call them The Brat Pack http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brat_Pack_(actors)
The shooters are the next generation (Gen Y).
To get a flavor of the progression think of this
The patriarch starred as POTUS in The West Wing
His relatively sane son is Emilio E. His crazy son is CHARLIE SHEEN!
Can you imagine the spawn of CHARLIE SHEEN?
Also note that this Baby Boom Generation group are huge donors to the Mayor of “The City Al Capone Made Famous”, The Rahmfather. By extension, that makes them also big donors to BHO II. They make their big bucks on LaSalle Street or at the CBOT or on the “Chicago Climate Exchange” trading carbon credits.
And the location for The Dark Night was that very same city.
Perhaps those rotten acorns did not fall too far from those rotten trees.
Global Warming Deniers would be enough to drive ANYONE nuts!
The love of money is the root of all evil.
Public school teachers in Israel tend to carry nasty “assault” weapons. They’ll have them on slings with an extra magazine strapped to the stock. They seem to have a real, low incidents of lone gunmen trying to kill the kids.
I notice that the UK has one of the highest amounts of gun crime coupled with the most draconian gun laws. Funny how it is always that way.
I notice the little crap weasel in Sandy Hook was living a pretty good life. He was living in his mom’s basement, had expensive computer equipment, free food, didn’t have to cook it, no rent, probably didn’t do his own laundry and didn’t have to work, Gee and they wonder why he was upset that he was going to lose all of that.
QUESTIONS
1) Is Newtown a blue town in a blue state?
2) Was the school in a blue neighborhood, in a blue town, in a blue state?
3) Are the parents either donors or bundlers for BHO II?
OBSERVATION
Six kids who survived gathered in a semi-circle at the end of the driveway of the home of a retired psychologist, Gene Rosen http://tinyurl.com/dxsgbt2
Parents are Blue Staters, bus driver and grandfather are Red Staters?
OBSERVATION
Note that the kids gathered around their BUS DRIVER! Yes, the lowly bus driver was their safe port in the storm.
Extending the “Berserker” meme from before
Valkyrie
One of the virginal women in Norse Mythology who searched the battlefields for the souls of dead men fit to become einherjar (pronounced ine-hair-ee-are), which were then taken up to Valhalla (the equivalent of heaven) and trained to fight in the battle of Ragnarok (equivalent of apocalypse). Also served wine and food to the einherjar in the great hall.
Perhaps Valhalla needed 12 new Valkyries to serve as a jury to pronounce sentence upon the cowardly.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGU1P6lBW6Q
The local CT news reported for several hours that 2 handguns were found in the school and the shooter was buzzed in, presumably after being recognized. Then a Bushmaster was found in the car trunk. Then the coroner stated that “all wounds were from the long gun”. Then the Bushmaster was used not only to do all the killings, but to shoot through the glass to gain entry. Now we have a renewed call to ban the black rifle. Doesn’t help the dead but sure helps those who don’t want a good crisis to go to waste.
“But understand this: there will be terrifying times in the last days. People will be self-centered and lovers of money, proud, haughty, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, irreligious, callous, implacable, slanderous, licentious, brutal, hating what is good, traitors, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, as they make a pretense of religion but deny its power. Reject them. (2 Tim 3:1-5)
regarding “banishment” as a proper response to mental illness: with any idea, it’s important to be honest about what it really means and not hide behind wishful thinking. Whether we’re talking about the 5th century or today, banishment into the wilderness (or a remote island, or wherever) is a certain death sentence for all but a tiny fraction of extremely resourceful individuals – and people back then knew that perfectly well. It’s just the kind of a death sentence by which people can remove themselves from personal responsibility for the deaths with the false belief that “well, they had a chance”. No – they don’t. It takes a supremely confident and capable adult to survive in a wilderness even today; someone who is mentally ill has no chance of lasting more than a couple of weeks, then or now.
And that was always the point. Again, it’s just a fairly guilt-free way to kill someone. The ancient practice of exposing unwanted infants to the elements was much the same, and no one disputes how monstrous an act that was today. Some of the most reprehensible people I know of today are those who take their unwanted pets out into the woods somewhere and just dump them, rather than dealing with them mercifully. Those urban pets have no chance; they will starve, suffer, and quickly be eaten by wild things, because that is what wild things do. Treating an animal that once loved you that way is cruel and vicious; how can treating a human the same way ever be justified?
If someone needs to die for the good of the society he’s in, then men need to show the courage and mercy to execute them publicly and quickly. It is the only truly honest way to deal with threats, and if men don’t have the confidence to do such a thing openly then it shouldn’t be done.
sidenote – whenever a society *does* allow this type of sentence to be enacted, it has quickly become a tool of political oppression – take note of ancient Rome, where the sentence of banishment with denial of food, water, and shelter came to be used exclusively for political opponents of the Emperor.
If Lanza killed himself after killing his mother, we never would have heard of him. No one would have cared.
School security in these environments give a false sense that the school is secure, because most people see Lanza’s actions as “unthinkable” and therefore do not consider it. Events like this make us think about it. The answer? Get rid of the Bushmaster. Then we can return to something like this being “unthinkable”.
School security is a fascinating thing. Most well off public schools and private schools have a real challenge in that it is a huge turn-off if they look like Fort Apache, with a hardened walls, administrators with jailer mentalities, “buzz-in” gates, metal detectors, armed security available.
The well heeled school has to appear a clean, retreat-like, peaceful, loving place – as it is proven these are the types of settings where young minds improve best.
But 9-11, and events like this one cause a huge problem in that modern schools have found it important to create a secure environment to keep up with the competition, while operating on a tight budget. This results in schools creating a false sense of security with a naive approach that they are protecting the children from an invader that really wants to get in.
Many schools have an elderly lady at a desk as the sentinel. Sandy Hook had better, albeit still inadequate for this assault. Lanza may have been scouting the day before when he showed up there to see what their defenses/barriers/protocols were, and returned equipped for the task.
some say that these sort of shootings appeared since the seventies with some medecines given to teens with problems in the US and in the northern EU countries
http://www.contrepoints.org/2012/12/19/108575-tuerie-a-lecole-la-piste-pharmaceutique (in french)
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting
Cowboy #32:
I don’t think there is anyone who has not heard that “murderous call.” Just yesterday I was driving down the street to my home and there was an old man behind me, tailgating me very close, and even blowing the horn when I stopped, and, I could see through the mirror, yelling invective at me. I was following a school bus that was stopping to let off kids and he appeared to be enraged that I was neither tailgating the bus close enough nor failing to stop when it did. This led me to fantasies involving aviation safety wire pliers and a loop of stainless steel wire around his neck. But which one of us was in danger of was losing it? Him or me? He had already lost it, to a degree.
Possibly even more shocking than the Sandy Hook shootings were those that occurred at a school in Arkansas in 1998. The two shooters were 13 years old. One stole some guns from his grandfather, then they pulled the fire alarm and shot people as they came out of the building. The reason was that one of the kids felt jilted by a girl. I could only think that the absolute worst kid I could think of in my elementary school would never have ever even considered pulling the fire alarm as a prank. And what the hell is a 13 girl doing being interested in girls, anyway? At that stage you are supposed to think most of them are “icky.”
E2 #44:
I recall hearing that Richmond, VA came up with what they said was an effective way to deal with criminals back in the late 80’s: banishment. They could not come back to Richmond, ever; if they did they would be tossed right in jail. I guess they are inflicting their problem on others, but I guess that for certain types of criminals being taken away from their familiar surroundings that is about the worst thing that can happen.
JMH #49:
The Left always picks schools as a target for everything they want to do. Why would not the crazies?
“Public school teachers in Israel tend to carry nasty “assault” weapons”
I wish somebody would explain to me why we need so many conceled carry permits.
If you want to use Israel as an example there are very few conceled weapons but lots of open weapons. People do not have or carry around those for sport. They are tools for security. People there would not understand what Lanza’s mom was doing with an AR-15. Some of the armed security at Israeli schools might also be teachers but these are designated individuals with specific permits and jobs.
These conceled little handguns we carry around are not good for much. We keep invoking Heinlein’s polite armed society “When everyone has a gun, guns are no longer seen as talismans by weak, frightened, and unstable men seeking a sense of self-validation, but as killing machines that are to be handled with the utmost caution and care.”
That doesnt work here because there is no deterrence when you can’t see the guns.
I just want to add a personal anecdote to what is being discussed about drugs. I once had a boyfriend who was prescribed xanax because of anxiety about a cancer diagnosis. He told me the xanax caused him to have nightmares and extreme anger. He then went back to heavy drinking, an old issue he’d resolved long before. He ended up dying of cancer, but I thought at the time, it was xanax that caused his personality to go out of control and led to the other things.
I’m not offering this story as “proof” of anything, except I think there are many individuals like me who have witnessed a high-functioning person lose it as the result of prescription “therapy” drugs. And my late friend was a pleasant, mellow, successful adult. I can only imagine the effect on a teenager with a few issues. Maybe, before drugs, people like Lanza would have grown into reclusive geniuses, joined the French foreign legion, and the like, but drugs weaponized them.
RE: #10 — “Or the mother ship (Jim Jones)…”
God forgive me for correcting the incomparable Wretchard, but I did feel I needed to chime in. I think the “Mother Ship” reference applies more to ‘Heaven’s Gate’ suicide cultist Marshall Applewhite rather than Jim Jones, who never mentioned any kind of spacist or otherworldly motives (other than a twisted version of Christianity), and led far more people to their deaths than Applewhite. It’s a point worth mentioning, because I think Jones’s earthbound socialism was far more of a factor in his works than his “Christianity”, and his murder/suicide response to its inevitable failure, his rabid paranoia, and his totalitarian personality cult rule, were all endemic to the very DNA of socialism. North Korea is Jonestown writ large, and a Jonestown/Waco with nuclear weapons in Korea is a real and profound concern.
It’s a minor point (the “Mother Ship”), but worthy of mention, given that, if you described the ideals of Jonestown in general, millions of Americans, as they have shown, would sign up in a heartbeat — they have said so with crystaline clarity. And when you point out that the almost inevitable and inescapable end is hundreds of blackening, rotting, men, women, and children putrefying in the sun, they will simply say “Oh, well, I’ll do it right this time” and rocket on into the abyss, a la Thelma and Louise, but with the glittering eyes and beautific smiles of just about all socialists and cultists (redundant).
Jones (and 900 others) died underneath a sign that read: “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it”. I’m not even sure what to make of that fact.
“joined the French foreign legion, and the like, but drugs weaponized them.”
not a chance, the kind of person would have been detected with a psychologic weakness through Psychotechnical tests
http://www.legion-recrute.com/en/chronologique.php?SM=0
66- Nearly all of those items were hoaxes. Only Jonestown seems probable, although less likely than motherships.
You hinted at it, Wretchard. I’ll say it! The media/Democrat complex is the front guard for the Democrats’ failed urban administration model.
This model has failed miserably by all objective standards. Its “Creative Industries” business plan for its failed enterprises in Detroit, Chicago, LA et al does not work. Its alliances with environmental groups and NGO, third-party payors only served to shut down manufacturing, inflate housing prices and elevate energy costs. Its cronyistic ventures led it to engage in Kelo-type land seizures laying waste to property rights and the sort of entrepreneurial risk-taking in real estate that would provide cheap, available housing. And its social taboos against criticizing the rise in single mothers and the cascade of children born to them has promulgated a vicious, punitive climate for anyone who dares to suppose that the cities’ social promiscuity my play a role in the cities’ economic demise. In this poisonous climate anyone who might hold their urban administrators publicly accountable for the pitiable plight of their wards is called “racist,” or labeled “inauthentic,” or worse.
Any system which abhors accountability will do at least two things to avoid it. 1. Expand the municipality’s reach. By expanding out from the rotten center, the focus of a paid media can be distracted to peer at the peripheral interface with the city’s rural surroundings. This keeps the focus on the “racist ‘burbs,” and not coincidentally fuels the urban-planners’ agenda of “Regionalism,” while keeping the focus off the city’s wards, aldermen and mayor. 2. Expand the municipality’s media operations. By blaring its own story from every rooftop, a municipality like Chicago can generate a fraudulent counter-narrative that hypes its shiny buildings and ivy-draped boulevards, while undermining memes that might redound negatively to the city and its administrators.
Right now, this unaccountable, urban machine is at its apogee. It owns national media companies that unthinkingly will tout its “values” (remember Chick-Fil-e?), level charges of racism, peal for Chicago-like gun-controls, and hide its crazy relatives like Reverend Wright from the nation’s sight. And the machine’s unnaccountable, failed candidates run roughshod over the carpets of our Republic right now: Oakland/Berkeley’s comrades people DC’s bureaus and high-rises, a do-nothing senator from Chicago is our nation’s CEO, his AG is a college radical with a Black Panther’s pedigree, and his Secretary of State is a communist attorney who married an Arkansas political hack. Given how many clowns are swinging from Washington DC’s caboose right now, it must be that the lurching trolley of flim-flam men is nearing the end of its line.
When urban politicians are well and truly held accountable for the 2000 children killed inside their jurisdictions each year, and when the people find that their rulers fiddled for thirty years while their tax-base fled to the ‘burbs, Jesse Jackson visited Saddam Hussein (to release “hostages”), Daley built another airport, and their unionized welfare administrators hacked 30-40% off the top of the citizens’ benefits to pay themselves posh bonuses and pensions, the resultant flood of accountability will be sudden and shocking.
So much better to avoid it, huh? And kick the can down the road for another failed generation.
No wonder Chicago Democrats want to take away the nation’s citizens’ guns. The conman knows when his gig is up. But if he’s going to make a clean getaway, he’ll need to disarm the mark before he wakes up!
#67 Marie Claude, you’re right, I wasn’t really referring to the real FFL, which I know nothing about, I meant the FFL of the old movies, which was a fantasy adventure for maladjusted men who needed to go away. This theme used to be very popular in movies, and my point is really that there is a place in this world for almost everyone, and some people should be allowed to find it, not necessarily in my neighborhood or yours.
Re: #60 WWS
The USSR had a version of banishment called internal exile. I very good description of it was “The True Horror of Soviet Internal Exile, from Dissent to Docility” by Victor Herman and Fred Dohrs in the July 25th 1980 issue of National Review and reprinted in the paperback “Survival of Freedom” edited by Jerry Pournelle. The idea was to keep the dissident so focused on survival that they had no time for the political and eventually they would “get their mind right.”
Further to my comment above, for the nation’s press to be asking the question “What should we do about the Nation’s “epidemic of shootings?” is to succumb to the urban machine’s insidious dodge.
As such, discussions about the nation’s policy towards this or that segment of our population, be it gun-owners, or “the mentally ill,” only play into their hands.
We should be asking the people in the Democrats’ urban machines what they are going to do about their own, specific, urban problems. Or asking Kanye West why do the urban Democrats “Hate” black people! And prodding half-White race-baiters like CNN’s Soledad O’Brian to invest in a home in crime-ridden Detroit, or else she’s “racist!”
The shooting in Connecticut is not America’s problem. It is a Blue-model problem, and it’s time stop letting Blue cities avoid that inconvenient truth!
Reminds me of suicide bombers. Very very hard to stop. We’ve got a hundred thousand people armed to the teeth, with tanks, helicopters, fighter jets and drones…and we still get hit and lose people to suicide bombers. Of course, our soldiers don’t take off their armor and throw down their weapons and shout “bomb free zone!”
Not that I expect anybody on the Left to use any sense, they’ll try to ride the hand-wringing emotion till they can get some law passed or reinstated.
BigR @7 hinted at something that has not otherwise been addressed here: the (ab)use of hyper-violent, hyper-real video shooting games that desensitize the shooter for the real thing. In effect, there are hundreds of “rehearsals” before the actor picks up a real gun. See the work of Col. Dave Grossman, including “Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill”. He has debriefed a number of mass shooters, and in the Jonesboro AR (Grossman’s home town) shooting, IIRC the shooter had never fired a real gun until the day of the killings.
Couple this “practice” with several varieties of mental illness and you’ve got mentally-incompetent, firearms-competent whackos on the rampage.
Spindok @64: Concealed weapons are vital because the criminal element does not know who is carrying and who isn’t, except in “Gun Free Zones”, aka “Target Rich Environments”. Open carry only ensures that the bearer is the first one attacked, both to neutralize and to seize the weapon. In general, violent crime rates are lower in states with a large number of CCW licencees than in more restrictive Nanny states. As far as “the little concealed handguns we carry” being useless, it’s quite a bit more useful than the rifle or shotgun still at home in my safe. The mall shooting near Portland OR on Tuesday (I think) was ended when the shooter (with an AR style rifle) was approached by a CCW holder with his pistol in hand. The good guy didn’t fire a shot because of innocents in the background, but the shooter, seeing he wasn’t the only gunner at the mall, next shot himself. Case closed.
Fonman
Well, the latest word from a friend of the family is that Lanza’s Mom was going through the process of having her son declared incapable of handling his own affairs. And he was very angry about that.
And it seems that while she was not a teacher at the school she did volunteer to help with first grade classes there. Her son thought that she cared more for the kids in her school than she did for him.
So it appears this was mainly about killing Mom and getting back at the people she loved. The foolishness of her not securing the guns in the household is now evident, but for all we know she did secure them and her son managed to break that security.
And it also appears that if not for the mental health profession’s self-invented de-institutionalization efforts the crazy son would have been locked up some time ago. Johnson’s Great Society claims another batch of victims.
RE: 66- Nearly all of those items were hoaxes. Only Jonestown seems probable, although less likely than motherships.
Um, you’ll have to forgive me, but I assume this is a response to #66.
I haven’t the foggiest clue what you are saying. What “items” were “hoaxes”….??? I cannot fathom what you are referring to.
Re 50. Smoking Frog
“The fact that they don’t have rampage killings doesn’t tell us much. There are 38 Americans for every Israeli, and 38 Americans for every Swiss.”
The comparison is relevant because both of the smaller countries make fully automatic guns available to a large portion of the population, which would arguably make those countries more prone to gun violence. However, it has the opposite effect – more machineguns, less murder.
The Israelis and Swiss have almost 0 incidence of mass killings. It’s not a ratio of 38:1, but a ratio of 38:0.
Israelis don’t shoot fellow Israelis, despite all the M16s and Uzis around, and the government teaching 18 year old boys to shoot them.
The only comparable shooting in Switzerland was in Zug in 2001, and from the descriptions the guy was crazy and went after the local parliament, which he thought was plotting against him. The local court had jailed him years before for “repeated participation in organised theft, receipt of stolen goods, business fraud and a sexual offence against children”. Not clear if he was targeting people he knew, but it seems that way.
Re 64. spindok
“If you want to use Israel as an example there are very few conceled weapons but lots of open weapons.”
If you spend some time on busses in Israel you will start to notice that there are many concealed pistols. You can tell if your fellow passenger if right or left handed by the position of the bulge above his belt line, which is usually (but not always) concealed under a shirt or vest. I would guess in America carrying openly would invite negative attention, and frantic calls to the police, since in contrast to Israel it’s not normal.
AFAIK, teachers and parent chaperones who carry on field trips have no special permit. I was told they borrow the weapons from the police station like borrowing a library book. They are simply teachers and parents who happen to carry a weapon because they are protecting children.
Every mall and pubic building also has armed security whose job is to be armed security. The advantage for them to have both overt armed guards and teachers/parents with concealed weapons is obvious – even if a terrorist sees no guards, he has to worry about armed defenders he didn’t see.
some say that these sort of shootings appeared since the seventies with some medecines given to teens with problems in the US and in the northern EU countries
Indeed. I saw a chart of mass killings by decade (by decade because, prior to the 70′s, it was uncommon to have more than one per decade, er, “mass killings” organized by governments under the lable of war excepted). The rate in the US spiked in the 70′s, after mass de-institutionalization of mental patients, then spiked again in the 90′s after widespread adoption of drugs like Ritlin and Prozac. The guy who made the chart was arguing that bungled treatment of mentally unstable people was the cause of the increased carnage.
I agree, but I noticed something else. The inflection points in the graph also corresponded to anti-gun legislation. In the late 60′s the US restricted the civilian purchase of automatic weapons, and in the late 80′s and early 90′s the various Brady-inspired handgun restrictions were adopted (at the Federal, State and munincipal levels).
So, it turns out, that letting crazy people roam free, dosing them up with drugs we don’t really understand and that sometimes make the problems worse, and then restricting the ability of the sane people to defend themselves, is what’s technically known as a bad idea.
@JMH
That would be a good chart to reference if you can find it. Overlay the gun facts data/charts noted in:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-15/newtown-shooter-had-asperger-syndrome-and-some-us-gun-facts
JMH @79,
The reason why prescriptions of pharmaceuticals to young adults correlate to statistics for youth violence may be that the pharmaceuticals are only masking the young man or woman’s mental condition. The system that encourages this has turned the entire Gregorian calendar into one, long Halloween.
Cure is rarely the objective with pharmaceutical brain and mood treatments. The goal is “manageability.” Which boils down to, can the patient’s care-taker(s) minister to the ward, and can the ward “control” its behavior in public places. This bias towards maintenance is easlily explained: it is attractive to the mental health professional because it presents a much lower bar to success than outright cure does. And it appeals to the urbanized, remote-control parents who expect their insurance policies to “manage” their childrens’ health for them, and who like the “red-pill, blue-pill” approach to healthcare that was heavily popularized in the fifties’ push for “Better Living Thru Chemistry.”
The result of this progressive bias is, another moat gets lodged in the Blue-Model’s eye: incurable psycopathy walks unfettered amongst us, coddled, cogniscent, hungry and angry, but hidden from us. It is veiled under a burkha of opioid “control,” whist the list of mental health ailments grows, and a Federal bureaucracy prepares to regiment 300 million citizens down the same health-maintenance halls that “managed” Mr. Lanza’s malady so well.
Yes, it’s time to have a conversation, Eric Holder. Let’s talk about New England’s (and California’s and Oregon’s and Michigan’s (to name a few)) administrative models, and their attendant political malformations for a change, why don’t we?
I’m going to take a position contrary to just about everyone and say that my thought is that the Newtown massacre is not a particular indication of any kind of cultural failing, whether you want to pin it on the so-called “gun culture” or the popular American culture. Man is a fallen creature. Has been since being expelled from Eden and always will be as long as he dwells on the mortal plane. I’d say this post from Prof. Reynolds sums up my feelings pretty well.
http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/159934/
Lest you think I’m insensitive, I’m the father of two young children, so this is an extremely difficult story for me to hear about and process. But I’m damned sick and tired of the majority of the media and punditry trying to use the blood of these poor innocent children as some kind of weapon against their political enemies. I’ve more than had my fill of collective guilt and I’m about ready to shove it right back at those dishing it out.
I don’t recall who originally said it, but it’s an ancient axiom that there’s no way to stop an assassin who is willing to die. The only discussion we should be having is how to bring greater security to the soft targets in our society such as schools.
As for the politicians’ responses (f’ing bravo Buraq, for tying the massacre to the “fiscal cliff” negotiations…you’re a shameless piece of shit), allow me to drop two quotes:
I’d like to end with an excellent article from Daniel Greenfield. It pretty much sums up my feelings on the matter.
Gun Culture and Gun Control Culture
Question..the President’s children are protected in school with people who know how to shoot, of course this means guns are in that school..Are his children more valuable than mine???..
Question…Walmart has their money escorted in & out with guns, is this money more valuable than life???
#27
In noting that you forgot to list “No more teachers’ unions”, I hope these now mobile free-lance teachers no longer bound to building dont evolve into a trade union with monstrous per-hour rates (though Math and Science teachers could presently screw the existing teachers unions by creating their own separate unions that would be more like the skilled trades).
“Can someone explain to me the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath?”
Sure, let me take a stab:
A sociopath believes in an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy…
A psychopath advocates a revolutionary socialist movement to create a classless, moneyless and stateless social order structured upon common ownership of the means of production, as well as a social, political and economic ideology…
For example, sociopaths advocate nationalized healthcare and taking over the auto industry and giving it to corrupt union bosses whereas a psychopath is an opponent of the 2nd amendment and advocates “spreading the wealth around” usually as a thin guise to abscond with private property.
FWIW:
I see this page infested with “End Gun Violence” ads.
The notions that the MSM is “dying” or “weakened,” or that we are witnessing “the last gasp of the Left” are delusional.
Maybe Marie Claude could help us. What would you call a Parvenu-Puppy?
Scion of the Nouveau Riche?
The ads are localized by your IP. On my browser the ads offer cheap reading glasses and low card rates. The ad server throws up what it thinks your locality most desires. I guess there must be a lot of retirees where I live.
Western “culture” continues to celebrate death:
Belgium looks at euthanasia for minors, Alzheimer’s sufferers
http://www.france24.com/en/20121218-belgium-looks-euthanasia-minors-alzheimers-sufferers
Yes, killing minors with officially-administered poison is OK, and NOT barbaric like shooting them.
“But I’ve heard that murderous call, those Satanic whispers, before, faintly…”
I think everyone has a voice that whispers evil thoughts in one’s ears. Not heeding them is what mental health is all about. Understanding the difference between right and wrong is what socialization is all about and if one does not feel the least encumbered by society, feel a part of it, then they are likely to act strictly out of selfish purpose and listen to that inner demon. That is what I suppose to be a sociopath. A psychopath has the added dementia of not only being unmoored by society but also being the spiritual center of a universe that is manifest with those dark voices. So in my estimate, both are taken by evil whether by choice or infliction.
Robert Bork has died.
Actions have consequences. Who can assure mhat Edward Kennedy is now experiencing the Divine Justice his deeds merited?
On topic. If Eric Holder isn’t proof a black man can be a mass murderer then what would be?
The NYT has issued the party line. Ignore the mental health issue and focus on the guns.
O.K. ban all white people, make them all go to these camps to be concentrated for the children’s and their own safety, tell them hard work will make them free, then send them all to the showers…..
From comments here http://tinyurl.com/a4y6hzb by Feral cat
This “inconvenient truth” being swept under the rug would be consistent with the Politically Correct behavior of the Sisterhood of Feminists
Smoking Frog@50 said:
“The fact that [Israel and Switzerland] don’t have rampage killings doesn’t tell us much. There are 38 Americans for every Israeli, and 38 Americans for every Swiss. Without additional information, we should expect the U.S. to have 38 “average murder incidents” for every such incident in Israel or Switzerland.”
I would counter-argue that population is not the driving parameter for rampage killings but rather population density. Refer to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependent_territories_by_population_density
From the previous link, I found the following national population densities:
Switzerland: 193 persons/km^2
Israel: 359 persons/km^2
United States: 34 persons/km^2
Based upon the assumption that population density drives rampage killings, Israel and Switzerland are much more likely to have rampage killings.
An obvious flaw with this reasoning is that population tends to be localized in urban areas with most of a country’s territory sparsely populated. For example, Australia has a tiny population density, i.e. 3 persons/km^2. However the overwhelming majority of Australia’s population is packed in three cities, i.e. Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. It’s actually not uncommon to find an Australian city dweller who has never seen a kangaroo in the wild.
Smoking Frog also said:
“This is similar to the fact that the ratio of white geniuses to black geniuses is much greater than the ratio of IQ-100 whites to IQ-100 blacks.”
Be careful with statistics based upon race. Your numbers maybe correct and your conclusions valid but you’ll still have the word “racist” tattooed on your forehead. You don’t ask a plump woman if she is pregnant.
Don Rodrigo@86 said:
“The notions that the MSM is “dying” or “weakened,” or that we are witnessing “the last gasp of the Left” are delusional.”
The whole conservative community is a giant echo chamber suffering from rampant confirmation bias (the recent Presidential election provided ample evidence of this). Having said that: We are witnessing the “the last gasp of the Left” because our whole civilization is just about to “crash and burn” largely due to the Left.
Too many people chasing after too few natural resource. Too many people voting for a living rather than pursuing honest careers. Lots of crooked politicians who will promise free government cheese to everyone.
@ 87 MP
parvenu :A person of obscure origin who has gained wealth, influence, or celebrity.
Same in french : un parvenu
puppy : A conceited or arrogant young man
a puppy ??? maybe a ”bobo” (: a member of a social class of well-to-do professionals who espouse bohemian values and lead bourgeois lives)
BoBo is very much in use in the french speaking world .
He’s or (insert LGBT here) on the left side !
SF
Cure is rarely the objective with pharmaceutical brain and mood treatments. The goal is “manageability.” Which boils down to, can the patient’s care-taker(s) minister to the ward, and can the ward “control” its behavior in public places.
And this probably even works to some reasonble degree in a large number – perhaps even the majority – of cases. The problem is when it doesn’t (and as best I can tell, in at least 10-20% of the cases the meds don’t help even if the patient is reliable in taking them, and sometimes make the condition worse) there’s no effective Plan B.
SF @ 95 – Thanks!
Parvenu bobo!
The news that his mother knew the victims is interesting, non?
That was one of the first bits of news to leak out, subsequently to be discounted. Another early bit of news was that he was carrying his brother’s ID.
Sibling rivalry? Was he just jealous that his brother had gotten out of the clutches of an overbearing mother, while he had been left behind to take her abuse alone?
All that talk about the anarchist mom reminds me that I agree with her son, that she is a stupid bitch for obsessing over the color of his pants.
Obsessive compulsive behavior (OCD?) & “Female logic”? Boy are the chicks going to have a connniption if that pans out!
76. Andrew X “I haven’t the foggiest clue what you are saying. What “items” were “hoaxes”….??? I cannot fathom what you are referring to.”
Almost every story you mentioned is a lie. In order to have work, the media-intelligence complex has been staging tragedies and pretending this protects people. Now you know not to castrate yourself and worship comets — you didn’t before. Chances are your taxes paid for that information either directly or through grants and NGO spending. (My God, if China reports the weather wrong then it’s a commie plot to kill people…)
Again, I reiterate from an earlier post. Mr. Fernandez, you are so clear and consise in your thinking. Why can’t everyone in America and around the world read your work. Why aren’t you on the radio and on television. If you just read your article word for word!!! Oh my goodness!!! Everyone would see a crystal clear picture of the situation in our country. We do however need to have a national conversation about mental health in America today. What resources do families have to deal with severly mentally ill family members today? Just think how dealing at home with the severly mentally ill affects other siblings and family members. The Mental health professionals think medicating patients is a panacea for everything and it isn’t. I agree no amount of legislation will protect us from the mentally insane. God be with us and in each and every heart during this dark time.
The Parvenu Bobo may have had a future in Hollywood doing remakes of Jack Nicholson movies!
The Raven
The Witches of Eastwick
The Shining
His mother could have played the Lorna Thayer (the waitress) role from Five Easy Pieces.
“I’ll have a plain omelet, tomatoes and a piece of toast.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wtfNE4z6a8
@83
Are you’re children less valuable than Barack Obama’s children? Of course.
Actually, since the Effective Death Penalty Act they passed back in 1996, all federal employees are more valuable than your children. There are a whole host of crimes punishable by death if committed against federal employees. If they were your kids? We’ll see what the prosecutor thinks.
wretchard@10: “when the next intellectual mass murderer strikes it will be with something we never thought of”
The Fermi paradox “is the apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilization and humanity’s lack of contact with, or evidence for, such civilizations.”
Great Filter theories propose to resolve this paradox by proposing a filter (barrier) that prevents the rise of a an inter-stellar civilization.
One possible such filter is that as the technology of a civilization advances, the destructive power available to any one individual grows. And once that destructive power becomes great enough, all it will take is one intelligent crazy/evil person out of several billion, and good-bye civilization. Thus, either a civilization gets destroyed by one of its deviants before it can advance sufficiently, or it enters a self-imposed dark age.
(Yes, I know, despair is a sin, but when I am faced with an overbearing avalanche of evil/imbecility that seeks to deprive me of my constitutional right to self-defense because of the acts of a lone crazed gunman, I find that self-medicating with a dollop of despair helps me cope with my resultant near-homicidal anger.
. Or not.)
Baoboa- 98, you still are not making an iota of sense. I’ve gone over my post (#66) five times trying to figure out what the H you are talking about.
What “stories that I mention” were a lie??? Did not the Marshall Applegate Heaven’s Gate suicides in San Diego…. actually happen on March 20, 1997?? Was that just made up??
Did Jonestown not, um… actually happen in November, 1978?? Or does that just remain a “probable” event? Did Waco not actually happen, so what I saw on television that day were just a bunch of CGI flames? Does North Korea not exist, except in a State Department fantasy? What?
So, as to my post, what else IS there, that I “mentioned”? Are you REALLY, but not forthrightly, saying that none of these things really happened? Really?? (Speaking of cult behavior….)
It’s no big deal to me, but I am rabidly curious as to where you are coming from on this, because it certainly is lost on me.
Given the clear race disparity in gun violence, I’m sure my friends on the left would agree that an obvious first step is to prohibit black and Hispanic gun ownership.
#9 Formerly Roughcoat:
I apologize if someone already addressed your question (I don’t have time today to read all the comments) but the terms “psychopath,” “psychopathic personality,” and “sociopath,” or “sociopathic personality,” are all essentially synonymous.
The key characteristic of this condition is a lack of empathy, and the tendency to see others as little more than means toward one’s (usually evil) ends.
By the way, the DSM-IV-TR (about to be superseded by DSM-5) calls this “Antisocial Personality Disorder.”
An excellent clinical study, very old (first published in 1941!) but still pertinent, is Hervey Cleckley’s “The Mask of Sanity.”
Jamie Irons
I know there a re lots of holes in this but constructive criticism will be gratefully received.
http://www.richardquigley.net/on-gun-control/
103 – Who is this “Baobao”?
It doesn’t matter… I can’t explain things, Andrew, sorry.
To put things in a typically Belmont Club perspective…
The ubiquitous M1 Carbines that Wretchard saw so much of that they ceased to be seen were an example of Design Margin at work – or rather, a lack of it. The PI did/does not have a lot of Design Margin available. There was neither a chicken in every pot nor a Panzer in every village. One way to compensate for that is to carry an M1 Carbine. When seconds count the PI Police are only hours away, assuming they show up at all. People did not dial 911; they dialed .30 cal.
The US Design Margin is down below traditional levels and on its way to a still lower level. Like the PI, we can expect a personal need to supplement that inadequate Design Margin with more personal actions, including guns. The money to hire armed guards for every gathering of people is not there. And the will to admit the massive error in dismantling the State Mental Hospitals is not there; neither is the money to rebuild them.
When it comes to handling the crazies the loons in the mental health community have loosed upon us, We Are The People We Have Been Looking For.
It is the contention of Bradshaw that one can’t get a correct ‘take’ on sane behavior without getting a ‘fix’ on the whole family’s dynamic.
http://www.amazon.com/Bradshaw-Family-Creating-Solid-Self-Esteem/dp/1558744274
I bring this up because — within my extended family I know of persons with ‘issues.’
A superficial read would lead anyone to exactly the wrong analysis of who is ill — and who is reacting to them — indeed, may even be becoming ‘infected’ by mental illness/ neurosis.
===========
Considering the high intelligence of the perp — and the stem-winding nature of his psychic compression — one might suspect that his mother was intellectually and emotionally incestuous with her anti-favorite son.
In chemistry there is a counter-intuitive concept: anti-bonding. It’s the best heuristic explanation for many atomic phenomena. It’s used to ‘explain’ chemical bonding that occurs even though the energy states don’t seem to match up with first glance assumptions.
============
Anti-bonding is a real phenomena in family dynamics. I’ve seen it time and again. It’s the kind of ‘black sheep’ phenomenon wherein the parents objectify one kid as the angel and the other as the bad seed.
It’s the stuff of book lore and legend. (Cain and Abel, East of Eden [a reprise], Ordinary People, etc…)
Not uncommonly, parents will project their own parent-child issues down and out, particularly if the children are striking echoes of their parents — in behavior or looks.
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In the case at hand, the father is a wealthy, successful man — who was ejected from the home by a hyper-maternalist mother.
She was not getting enough strokes, particularly after her sons reached adulthood, so she began extra ‘Pygmalion projects’ at the nearby school.
An over controlling mother — who unconsciously projects her rage against her ex-husband — is prone to fixate upon a son who is the living embodiment of her ex’s traits/ ticks.
It’s plain from the photo that the perp was a redhead. Did that rare color come from the father’s bloodlines?
His father holds a classic nerd job as a tax expert. The perp was nerdy to the limit.
As long as the mother was able to shape the world’s opinion of her son — he met the world as socially damaged goods.
It’s a sure bet that she killed any ( slim ) prospects he might have had dating — COLD.
Everything about that family dynamic reeks of a perpetual divorce proceedings — between mother and son.
In such a household, it would be easy for the other son to get by. All of her rage is focused upon only the one, the one that is a walking, talking version of Beta — if not Omega — that she threw out of home years before.
As to her rage, what kind of mother centers quite that much time at the shooting range?
From what little I gather, she was invested in a perpetual war upon men.
She didn’t re-marry, which is a ‘tell’ right there.
Every thing points to her having made a career out of making his life a living Hell.
Of course, her outward persona would project that she’s an ideal home-maker and maternal goddess. For someone with devils inside, such a mask would come early in life.
It would explain how she hooked Mr. Big — and then kicked him clear once he could be demoted to an ATM.
Nothing stimulates rage more than compelled dependency.
As to her end-game: Once the perp turned twenty-one didn’t that utterly cut off her stipend? Did it reduce it drastically?
Was her intention to have him committed really a gambit to keep her perpetually in the loop?
Did she fear that he’d move into his father’s house — or into a free-standing abode — from thence forth cutting her off from all son-control?
Everything points to her being a controlling personality. When extreme, such proclivities can induce in others apparent insanity/ sputtering rage so profound the individual can’t speak.
[My niece would, from time to time, tell ghastly lies WRT events -- putting the onus on her bother. He would often be left speechless, literally incoherent with rage. At which point their father would judge in her favor. It took her Uncle to catch her in the act. Her father was shocked that she was 'playing' him, just bald-faced lying, -- but with sincerity.]
================
Years and years ago, I read a rarely circulated PhD thesis for a scholar of criminal statistics. He’d gone ‘under the covers’ to troll out all of the bloody details for murders in the general Kansas City area. His results shocked him. They were miles and miles away from what he expected — and what every TV viewer ‘knows.’
He discovered that:
1) The typical murder victim deserved it — big time
2) The typical murder victim was a career criminal with a much worse rap sheet than the perp
3) The typical murder victim was warned/ threatened with death — usually time and again
4) The typical murder victim was a crime competitor — thugs will be thugs
5) The typical murder victim was WELL known to the FBI and local police
6) The typical murder victim was a military age male
7) The typical murder victim was of a non-Asian minority ethnicity
8) The single most common trait of known murderer was an empty rap sheet — or nearly so.
That last statistic is somewhat warped because for drug distributors, fresh ‘talent’ — i.e. a young gun, is sought and used for semi-professional hits.
The other category being infuriated locals putting down a player who’d moved in to the neighborhood.
The other, forbidden, truth was the remarkably HIGH percentage of gunshot murders that could not be solved; up towards 40%.
I knew that couldn’t be right. Because on TV Columbo always gets his perp — and they’re wealthy, white schemers.
Kansas City stats forty-years ago would have us believe that it’s drug retailers blowing each other away in the ‘hood — with some street corners generating a corpse every month or so. (!!!)
Chinese State Media Demands US Citizens Be Disarmed
by Brandon Darby 18 Dec 2012 707 post a comment
The official Chinese government news agency, Xinhua, has demanded the US immediately adopt stricter gun control measures to reduce the number of firearms the US populace is permitted to possess.
The Chinese state-controlled media’s statement, titled “Innocent Blood Demands No Delay for US Gun Control,” is primarily focused on the Newtown tragedy in which 26 Americans were killed by a mad gunman. Twenty of the victims were young children.
The Chinese government stated, “Their blood and tears demand no delay for the U.S. gun control.”
In an apparent effort to restrict information to their populace, the Chinese government wrote of a number of US mass shootings but failed to mention they were either stopped by a citizen legally carrying a firearm or otherwise only occurred in the controversial gun-free zones that critics say make prime targets for madmen.
The Chinese government states:
The past six months have seen enough shooting rampages in the United States. Just three days ago, three people were shot dead at a shopping mall in Oregon. Two weeks ago, a football player shot his girlfriend dead and then committed suicide. Five months ago, 12 people were killed and 58 wounded in a shooting spree at a midnight screening of a Batman film in Colorado.
The government went on to express a strong dislike of the National Rifle Association while also attacking the Republican Party as somehow complicit in the violence. Conversely, the article heaps praise on the Democratic Party:
The Clinton government launched a series of gun control policies at the end of last century. And the Democrats lost the Congressional election in 1994 and the presidential election in 2000, with the shadow of the NRA present in both defeats.
The current Chinese government, the communist People’s Republic of China, was established in a revolution led by Mao Zedong, who killed an estimated 40-70 million people with starvation, executions, and re-education camps.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/12/18/China-Demands-US-Citizens-Be-Disarmed
Mike, in the Commissar tread, you said:
“Augustine was right too: Evil is nothing in itself. It is a parasite. It lives on the good, and is only an imitation of it. It eats and destroys the good. And when it has wrecked all the good, it has nothing left in itself to “be” anything at all. It disappears – as babies that were never born.”
Is that St. Augustine? Can you point me to the work from which this originates?
Much obliged.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oVzfzuts3o&feature=player_embedded
Here is the essence of what we have lost – as men. We no longer have the same sense of family and the grounding and determination to anchor ourselves to concepts and proven beliefs of the past. We as conservatives are also far afield from that past, but we are light-years closer to it than our detached, uncommitted, and craven brothers and sisters who have been infected by the abyss.
We humans of course are smarter, more sophisticated, supposedly more enlightened, and 40 or so years ago we had built up a design margin of protection. But today, today we are like the Vikings arrayed against the “Ghost Animal” men charging at us with obvious intent to destroy us…
…and somebody just before contact, wants to take our swords away.
Me thinks that that “someone” is unseen in today’s power structure, but is nevertheless present and is glaring at us from under some dark dead thing.
I wonder if any of our leaders carries the same sense of destructive need arising from a long ago pain that has not been put away, but currently festers for release? And truth be told, wants all of us to suffer as did Adam Lanza.
Adam got his release and what did he wrought?
What other monster of the Id awaits us all in the very near future?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYFr3UyVpRA
65. anon
I just want to add a personal anecdote to what is being discussed about drugs. I once had a boyfriend who was prescribed xanax because of anxiety about a cancer diagnosis. He told me the xanax caused him to have nightmares and extreme anger.
I knew a guy (now deceased) who had been going to psychiatrists for many years. I don’t know the diagnosis, but I’d say depression. Finally, he was on 4-5 prescription medications for his mental problems. He may have been getting some of them from different psychiatrists at the same time, so no one psychiatrist knew of all of them. To his friends, he seemed to have been getting worse for some time. They attributed this to the drugs. (I didn’t know him well enough to guess.)
He was also a gun enthusiast – since before he got depressed.
Finally, one day, he was found wandering around a shopping mall with his AK-47. He seemed to be dopey – non-threatening – didn’t know where he was – not making sense – so a guard engaged him in conversation rather than call the police right away. He probably wouldn’t have been able to “get it together” well enough to shoot anyone. He was committed, then after a while he was released, then, a couple years later, died of something else – I forget – heart attack, maybe.
64. spindok
That doesnt work here because there is no deterrence when you can’t see the guns.
This comment above “makes my day.” It seems to assume that anyone having a gun is someone that needs to be “deterred.” If you open carry in the United States, like they do in Israel, be you a security guard, a police officer, or a citizen (where open carry is legal) and you are in a place about to be robbed (bank, 711), you identify yourself as a first priority target. “Eliminate the guy with the gun” might be whispered by the crack-head leading the robbery team. In short, to make things simple for the robber, you identify yourself as a perfect place to put the first shot. Then, you, as an open carry advocate, are now dead. And useless.
If one conceals his pistol and someone tells you to “get on the floor”, do so unless you are a super trained superman, which few people are. No person that I know as a concealed carrier of a lethal firearm walks around “hoping” to be able to use it that day. It is a defensive weapon used with discretion and only as a last resort.
Are you aware that a concealed carry holder was the second person to tackle Jared Loughner, and prevent him from reloading his pistol and killing more innocents at Gabby Gifford’s political event? He never drew his gun because he did not know who was also inbound to the shooter (Police officer, security detail member) and because he was not certain that he could comply with rule number 4, below. He did not just think this stuff up on the fly, he thought it over in his mind on each and every training session he had at his range. He was ready to shoot, but he was just as ready to use a body block if the situation didn’t warrant the use of lethal force:
http://1withabullet.wordpress.com/2011/01/10/concealed-carry-permit-holder-helped-subdue-giffords-shooter/
The four rules of firearm safety are:
1. Every gun is loaded
2. Do not point your weapon at anything you do not wish to destroy
3. Keep your finger off the trigger until the sights are on the target
4. Always be sure of your target, what is in front and behind it.
If you are “carrying” in a dark theater and a crazy pulls out an AR-15, your responsibility is to employ the “Hippocratic oath” in your next action, to do no harm.
I really did not appreciate the point of the Israel comment, since to this reader it sounded very close to the claptrap routinely spouted by the liberal progressive media that “anyone carrying a gun” is probably on their way to “open up” on the next waiting and defenseless group of innocent bystanders. And if we can’t see that gun, we have no deterence. So it is the presence of the gun you are worried about and not the intent of the carrier.
If you actually knew how many people are carrying concealed today, by your comments, you’d probably soil your drawers. Concealed carry is exploding all over the US today, but only among those who are willing to take a modicum of responsibility for their own safety.
I am amazed at the number of people who have 2, 3, 4, or 5 guns in their house, but never go to the range…even to sight them in!
There are thousands of incidents where “good Guys and Gals” use guns to prevent crimes every day. For citizens to form an opinion on guns in general without educating themselves about the issue – both good and bad – one is erroneously “assuming” that the LSM is always telling you the truth. And today, that would be a grave mistake.
blert @ 109 – With today’s smaller families, I have seen a lot of helicopter parents who get “separation anxiety” as the child gets to the point of moving out (e.g. enrolling in a live-in college). Of course, with a “hyper-maternalist mother”, who wouldn’t want to flee? And all the media obsession with stories about threats to children tends to make mothers even more over-protective, a decidedly positive feedback loop to her obsession. The tighter she holds him, the more he struggles to get away.
I think the mother has one degree of separation from all the dead, so she is the proper focus of the investigation. Her son has two degrees of separation, through her, from the dead in the school. The police muddied the water when they said she was not an EMPLOYEE of the school. That seems to be strictly true, she was not paid, she was a volunteer.
So the question is, after shooting her, why did he feel the need to go to the school? And that is where the War on Young Men comes in. The totally female power structure of the school could lead to a feminist women sense of “Girls Rule, Boys Drool”. The women would never get any professional negative feedback, and a system without at least a slight negative feedback is a system out of control. So Adam wants to take out the sisterhood of the Anti-Male warrior princesses (and their spawn), so as to eliminate them and thereby win the War on Young Men in the favor of the young men.
He will become a hero to other young men by eliminating the threat to their sanity.
Back in the fifties, we had mostly female grade school teachers, but the principal was a man. His job was to provide that touch of professional negative feedback.
Mike, found it. Were not aware you were paraphrasing, so there is a somewhat different emphasis between your interpretation and the actual quote:
“if there were no good in what is evil, then the evil simply could not be, since it can have no mode in which to exist, nor any source from which corruption springs, unless it be something corruptible. Unless this something is good, it cannot be corrupted, because corruption is nothing more than the deprivation of the good. Evils, therefore, have their source in the good, and unless they are parasitic on something good, they are not anything at all.”
Yet, the concept of a parasite is there, though not as pronounced. It is interesting that Augustine uses that concept, which is rather naturalistic in scope, but he was a smart man. Some 6-7 centuries earlier, Greek authors had a similar concept, but it had more a spiritual dimension. Later, their concept was translated (and somewhat simplified as demon — from daimonoi, {spiritual} messenger, or devil {it. diabolo, slav. dyabol}). The ancient Greeks had several categories for this phenomenon, actually a whole slew of them with some distinct characteristics. It is possible that ancient Greek went a little bit overboard and simply did not have tools to discern that they were actually referring to one or two entity types and also that they were somewhat removed in time from a direct observation and a degree of distortion was present. However, they had some basic framework that described the parasitic nature of the critter(s), mode of attack, and some preventative measures.
This has been later taken nearly entirely out of context and the entities/organisms were mythologized and transformed beyond recognition, culminating in a concept of possession of the “spiritual” kind. In the case of Augustine–he may have been aware of the more down-to-earth nature of the phenomenon, because the subject was not thoroughly muddled yet in his time.
I started collecting some data back in 2003, but did put it on the backburner because there were quite a few “missing pages”. But I think I have now a bit more that would allow me to formulate a working hypothesis, though it may take a few months time as I am quite busy momentarily.
But I can make an initial summary and provide some sauce later.
In a nutshell, there may be one/two types of parasites that have a psychotropic effect on human brain. They thrive in the environment replete with negative emotional states and try to influence brain to stay in that state. It is a purely chemical relationship, there is no awareness of the critter that would interact with the higher cognitive functions of the host. But given what we know about psychotropic effects of some drugs (antidepressants like zoloft can induce extremely aggressive and homicidal behavior), the idea is not that preposterous.
The critter (one or more) follows the standard predator-prey relationship cycle–that is when human population grows, the attacks become more frequent until the infestations reaches the maximum, which leads to killing indirectly the hosts in large numbers due to psychotropic effects. When the human population declines (the remnant is not suitable to infections due to some measure of immunity) the predator starves and dies in large numbers as well, but some remnants “hibernate” in a secondary environment/host.
So far, the data indicate there are two cycles (which would indicate 2 different critters) one roughly 3-4 centuries and with a lesser impact because the critter may be less malignant and another roughly 13 centuries that usually results in a major fan blades and brown organic matter meet. If the data are somewhat on the mark, then we are about to enter the culmination of infestation on a grand pandemic scale.
TwobyFour @ 116 – The problem is a Nanny State run amok. This problem is as old as Eve and the apple.
Apply Occam’s Razor and KISS!
Machias,
I lived behind the Iron Curtain. It was no nanny state at all, except for the nomenclatura. E.g. the current “nanny state” is just a transient Potemkin village, using a segment of population as useful tools by buying them with some trinkets. And from that follows that it is not a cause, but a symptom and a temporary one at that. Once new nomenclatura is secured as the new hereditary elite, the nanny state in its current form would disappear like in a magical poof of smoke. Yea, the State would still pretend it’s a nanny, but it would be a rather a nasty nanny, something like nurse Ratched from One Flew Over Cuckoo’s Nest.
2X4 @ 118 – That’s the difference between a Nanny and a Mother
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6QuN2-6IN4
Psychology and psychiatry may have provided us valuable knowledge, but it is my humble opinion that they are no better at giving us a glimpse into the human heart than a witch doctor is at predicting rain.
So-and-so was bullied in school. He had an alcoholic father. He was socially awkward, a loner, and smart, and weird. Well, me too, and I haven’t killed anyone. He was off his meds — well, when I’m not drinking martinis, so am I.
He was a psychopath. A sociopath. Schizophrenic. Manic-depressive. Bipolar. He had problems with rage. Labels are great. They can help you with the whats, but not the whys. Chemical imbalance, schmalance — when we figure out what chemical *balance* means, and we haven’t, then we can talk about chemical imbalance.
Just as primitive cultures have a hard time coming to a systematic understanding of the natural world — the great gift of Western civilization — we Westerners have a hard time understanding the eddies and flows of the spiritual world. Even the Christians among us have trouble with this, though we have no excuse for it. Paul spoke of the unseen war of the spirits all around us. Paul’s voice is authoritative on many subjects, but on others we have forgotten how to listen.
Western Christians forget their spiritual roots. Fact is, Christianity was an Eastern transplant into Western civilization — which had already been structurally complete for hundreds of years before Christianity was added to the alloy.
Christians profess to believe that a Christian is visited by the Holy Spirit and changed from within — “born again”. The Holy Spirit molds and shapes a man’s wants and desires until the day comes when our will adheres perfectly to His perfect will. There is nothing Western about that concept.
Why would not the Devil and demons operate in a similar, though perverse, manner? If a man invites them into his soul, would they not also mold and shape a man’s perceptions and desires in such a way as to do the most damage, wreck the most lives, upend the most steadfast faiths? Cackling fiendishly all the way.
In a perverse analogy to the way a Christian’s will is incorporated into the Lord’s, would not the demons’ possession lose his free will as well, reaching a point where he could no more deviate from what they have in store for him than a rock could refuse to fall?
Maybe primitive cultures have something to teach us after all. Where they see evil, we see crazy.
Ahm, your 119 is referring to … what?
As for your 115, I think you are projecting a bit. maybe you should use the occam razor yourself and not just suggest it to others.
A.L. did not just shoot princesses in making, he picked off the boys too. Equal opportunity snuff. Whole class, just like that. You weren’t there to tell him they were sissy boys.
There was, in all likelihood no trace of your assumption that any relation to feminism or expression of it thereof was involved. His social awareness was practically non-existent and any notion that you suggest likely went past him.
A.L. was simply a nut case, subsisting on antidepressants. There is some reason to believe that he decided to go off the meds for some days prior to the event. In any case, his wiring was not right. This can be documented based on several sources, though they may be individually anecdotal, in sum they clearly indicate that him being a nutcase is not a conjecture. He had “demons”.
Several days prior shooting, his mother was considering for hm a permanent accommodation in a nuthouse. He apparently let someone know he suspects that and that he’s scared out of his wits. Maybe that led to his skipping of meds and that exacerbated his paranoia. he may have seen his mother, at that stage as a devil incarnate and the class she was involved with as “contaminated” Girls and boys. And teachers.
There are a few unclear items, though. His conduct on the event day was rather structured. There was nothing erratic about it, all precisely executed, in a mechanical fashion. It can be explained by a dissociative state as a result of skipping meds or an incipient or progressive MPD.
But there is another item that is puzzling and which could provide a different context.
At the time of the shooting, the cops caught a guy in the woods wearing camo trousers and dark jacket. Upon police confronting him, he allegedly said: “I did not do it”. They led him out in cuffs and put him into the FRONT SEAT of the cop car. Witnesses saw this and its on tape. Who is this guy, why was he there, whats his name and why was he in the woods near the school. Since initial reports of this, the propaganda machine is silent.
Not to invoke conspiracy theories, but there is another explanation for the precise execution–A.L. had help. The camo dude may have been his “handler” and it may have been then him that provided the plan, A.L. just followed instructions. /end speculation
Roughly speaking and just for my own labeling use, I define psychopath as the type you find doing serial killing, hearing voices, usually dumped into the catch all definition bi-polar. I think women do more serial killing than supposed because they tend to use poison and are harder to detect and catch. You’ll read about black widows and nurse who move from hospital to hospital leaving higher than normal mortality rates in the wards that they served.
Sociopaths, to me, are the ones who lack feelings toward people, extremely subjective, the smarter ones learn to fake emotions so they won’t stand out. Some tend to be adrenalin junkies because it seems that extreme danger is the only thing that will give them “feeling”. You’ll find some in the military. There was a paper/post on one of the Milblogs about managing the sociopaths in you unit.
As I stated at the beginning these are my own definitions of definitions for quick and dirty labeling purposes.
I found it interesting that in the new “Sherlock” BBC TV series that when Holmes is called a psychopath he takes umbrage and declares that he is not, “I’m a high functioning sociopath!”
Reformed Trombonist, sure. I don’t exclude that possibility. But that does not negate my parasite conjecture. The predator-prey pattern is discernable. The intelligent demonic entities would behave in a different manner, not in spurs and cycles of centuries, and tailored to individual make up. According to tradition, this type of possession involves one’s soul. The interaction transpires on the conscious level, as opposite to the parasite interaction that is entirely subconscious. Their main tool is seduction (and I don’t mean just sexual motivation per incubi/succubi). One can be seduced through any “mortal sins” vehicle. Demons of this type don’t attack. They let themselves invited in. They talk sweetly, appealing to you conscious mind, almost like bleeding heart liberals. They promise all sort of wonders. Contrary to the tradition, they say nothing about soul, nor let you sign a contract in your blood. Nothing so tacky, all very sophisticated. They don’t appear as luscious comely succubus or incubus. More like grey eminences (emanations?) with concerned large eyes. “We are here to help you”. They sometimes claim that they are masters of the universe and are your parent and quite concerned about their child. But they are only masters of outer darkness, not even outer space.
Is it possible the shooting was staged? Cui bono?
1. The Obama administration. It gets the focus off of Banghazi and our lying Sec. of State, and puts it on more comfortable ground for the Obama regime: crisis management, feigned outrage and government expansion.
2. The feminized state school system. They’re victims now – the whole lot of them. Every blue-state school from LA to Chicago to Newport is basking in the moral certitude that accrues to their victim status. And that certitude says we must control guns now! As Maureen Dowd once said of Cindy Sheehan, “Gotta use that moral authority while ya got it!”
3. The Democrat’s extended national campus network. To take the media’s word for it, Democrats are outraged by the shootings, and every sinew of their national machine, from welfare lobbyists to Chuck Schumer’s pages is straining to take advantage of Lanza’s crimes.
4. The Democrat’s international campus networks. Every anti-American delegate at the UN, every editor for Der Stern and Bertelesmanns in the Norway/German Left, and every twitching multiculturalist in France’s governmental lycees is chomping at the bit to bring Americans under the reign of international gun restrictions.
A lot of folks stand to gain their agendas after the Newport shooting. They see an opportunity here that only last week did not exist. Why not suppose the shooting was engineered for just this purpose?
114. Sgian Dubh
“And if we can’t see that gun, we have no deterence. So it is the presence of the gun you are worried about and not the intent of the carrier.”
I think it is just the opposite. Wretchard wrote in an earlier post about his experience growing up in the Phillipines where open guns were common. After a while you see the person, not the gun. Walk down any street in a US city with a rifle slung behind you and the vast majority of people will remember nothing except the gun.
I noticed the same thing when visiting Israel. We Americans are so unused to the sight of anyone except a uniformed police officer openly carrying a gun that we stare which is very amusing for the locals. It is no big deal there and the attitude carries over into the whole security posture as anyone who has been through an Israeli airport can tell you. Security is focused on the individual, not the size of the toothpaste tube in your carry on.
Heinlein talked about an armed society as a polite society which is no doubt true but I cannot see how that works when they are hidden.
I have some idea about how many people carry guns or at least keep one in the glove box. When I took the NRA class required to get a CC permit where I live almost everyone was already carrying and just wanted to make it legal. My instructor was very proud of the fact that although he was routinely offered $200 or $300 to just issue the certificate, and knew others who did, he resisted temptation and kept to the rules. Most of the people in the class had little interest in practicing at the range beyond the minimum required for the course.
These were not people I worry about. They just wanted something for self defense and for good reasons but I would not conflate that with a plan to protect our schools or public areas. Your post admits that the gun is to protect you, not anyone else and you dont want it on your hip because it would make you a target. Fine, but we still haven’t made any headway into the issue at hand.
I think an open carrying society promotes a healthier and more pragmatic ‘gun culture’ if you will. What we have now are two seperate populations one of which is comfortable around guns and the others who have never seen a rifle up close and think of them as evil alien things that make people into killing machines.
This is just a day on the beach in Tel Aviv but it went viral in the US and Europe.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4425657/Israeli-soldier-on-the-beach-in-a-bikini-holding-a-gun.html
It’s not just illegal aliens and drugs. The list of things the government (or at least a state government) tried to ban:
Things made of dog fur.
Cuban cigars.
Alcohol. (involved in far more deaths than firearms!)
Porn.
Radar Detectors.
Ferrets.
Failure every time.
In fact, the only time bans ever seem to work out are when the demand for a product is already small, or when the product is widely available and the ban only targets one specific source. For example, you can’t bring in any merchandise from Iran, but then, they don’t make anything we really want and can’t get elsewhere, so it’s not a problem.
Ferrets????
“What can man do against such a reckless hate?”
Not trying to minimize the tragedy of some children having their lives cut short by getting shot at school — but let’s just suppose that Teh Won could talk to his magic unicorn and prevent any future school shootings: then where would we be?
In deep doo-doo, to quote the last real President America had.
There would still be millions of children whose lives are being ruined by the educational system’s expensive failure (females & minorities worst hit, as usual). There would still be billions of people whose lives are about to be ruined & truncated when the bill for unsustainable government borrowing comes due. These are critical times. Much as we all feel sorry for those little children and their parents, there are much bigger catastrophes rolling towards us. Let’s try to keep our eye on the ball.
“Heinlein talked about an armed society as a polite society which is no doubt true but I cannot see how that works when they are hidden.”
Humans are risk averse, so when the threat is unseen but known to be reasonably common you will assume it is there.
Like germs.
Swami @ 126,
And we’ve got zebra mussels and chinese carp invading the Great Lakes and Mississippi River…and the Eurasian salt cedar choking the waterways of the Southwest…Globe Eucalyptus and Japanese Honeysuckle obscuring native wild ginger and Pacific Coast iris patches in the ravines of central and northern California…Kudzu strangling hardwood forests in low areas of Georgia, Alabama and Florida…(and, truth be known, there is not a thing that anyone can do about any of it!).
But the government’s going to solve our gun-problem now! Because they’ve got such a good handle on the nation’s other environmental, social, and international problems, right!?
Like Adam Lanza’s play-list of rancid thoughts, the list of “To-Do Items” that government agencies ain’t getting done here and now goes on and on and on.
Our political class needs to acknowledge that the social machines they devise for the nation, like Social Security and “universal health care” (just to name two) contain flaws, may not work as planned, or are outright failures…and that these machines should be subject to regular review, reform and/or repeal. Of course, they cannot affort to concede either. It’d be detrimental to their theme of Government Uber Alles, and Sacramento, Detroit and Chicago may not get their bail-outs.
So, until there is a seachange in DC, it’s “Forward!”
129. Swami
If we could see the germs life as we know it would be very different. Would make a good idea for a sci fi book.
“And we’ve got zebra mussels and chinese carp invading the Great Lakes and Mississippi River…and the Eurasian salt cedar choking the waterways of the Southwest…Globe Eucalyptus and Japanese Honeysuckle obscuring native wild ginger and Pacific Coast iris patches in the ravines of central and northern California…Kudzu strangling hardwood forests in low areas of Georgia, Alabama and Florida…(and, truth be known, there is not a thing that anyone can do about any of it!).”
Every nook and cranny. Damned illegal aliens!
Got a strangest idea that Canada will meet an old foe, Germany, again on the battlefield of WWIV.
Yeah, just Canada and Germany. Switzerland will be again neutral.
128. Kinuachdrach
“there are much bigger catastrophes rolling towards us. Let’s try to keep our eye on the ball.”
The ball (or Baal?):
http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTga-e_dROibkyule9VRBDXefU0StYYxTQsj0L5vYZPE7eqdQ4F
The panic: http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2012/12/19/school-districts-cancel-class-due-to-doomsday-talk-potential-threats/
Yes, Twobyfour, Ferrets. In the D.P.R of California, armed border guards inspect vehicles and refuse entry to ferrets.*
But in typical American refusal to bow down to tyranny, there are secret lists of “Ferret friendly vets” (who will treat your pet and report it as a cat) and even websites that will help you evade the law.
For example:
http://www.ferretsanonymous.com/checkpoints/checkpoints.html
*No, I have no idea what would happen if the ferret was Mexican.
Swami,
You left off toliets and light bulbs.
Remember, the government is so full of cr@p that they figure they’re experts on what sort of toliet you should have in your own house.
and all of their bright ideas end up toxic when they’re done, so might as well make us all use toxic, dim bulbs.
134. Swami
What about pythons?
(“Go Coileen, show the trooper here what you can do!”)
The Hyksos ruled Lower Egypt for about 300 years at most (c. 1800-1500s); they never gained control of the Upper Egyptian nomes. They were not Arabs, but a mix of Canaanite and Indo-European adventurers (the latter, “Maryannu,” or “Young Heroes,” i.e., probably, Aryan chieftains and their retinues from the Mitanni realm). The Hyksos were enabled in their conquest of Egypt by superior technology, in particular bronze armor and, most importantly, the employment of the light, spoke-wheel horse drawn chariot. They were expelled from Egypt in the mid-1500s by a nationalistic rebellion led by Seqenenre Tao, rule of the Thebes Nome, and his sons, Kamose and Ahmose. Seqenenre was killed in battle with the Hyksos; his skull shows a hideous wound, likely inflicted by an ax. His son Ahmose succeeded him, ruled for about 3 years, and was also probably killed in battle. Kamose established himself as pharaoh of the newly reunited Egyptian kingdom, and founded the 18th Dynasty. Hatshepsut was the fifth pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty, ruling c. 1508-1458. Solomon lived over 500 years later, long after the Hatshepsut and the Hyksos had departed from the scene.
Re: Blert 109:
“As to her end-game: Once the perp turned twenty-one didn’t that utterly cut off her stipend? Did it reduce it drastically?
Was her intention to have him committed really a gambit to keep her perpetually in the loop?”
As I understand it, she was filing for conservatorship rather than guardianship. Conservatorship would have given her control over his assets but not his body. Guardianship would have given her the ability to commit him. Folks are jumping to the conclusion that she wanted him committed. If your description of the family dynamic is accurate, she wanted the keys to the bank account unfettered. And with him in the games zone, he was already committed in his own room. Had she committed him, she would also have had to pay some part of that care, further limiting her funds. Ugly, ugly stuff. Cheers -
125. spindok
Heinlein talked about an armed society as a polite society which is no doubt true but I cannot see how that works when they are hidden.
Let me give you a hand. It works in the exact opposite way when the government decides it is time to confiscate all weapons and then the criminals believe they have carte blance when burlarizng homesor attacking people – anywhere.
In fact, what it does to the aged folk among us is that they now realize that anyone, anyone, can come into their house and take anything they want…even while you’re watching. And if they catch you being stupid, like hollaring at them, or trying to dial 911, they explain it to you by beating the crap out of you.
When armed both inside and outside the house….geezers can defend their own rights and can even be good samaritans:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soZT__WQKsM&feature=endscreen&NR=1
…. thus procedures which emphasize herding kids or people into one place under the dubious protection of an unarmed teacher or designated person are disasters waiting to happen.
Sorry, Wretchard. The procedures is not for safety measures. It is for the ‘peace of minds’, as ‘authorities’ were seen as acting upon some events.
As you said it, such massacres were ‘rare events’, the herding and drills are means to quell public fear.