# Mass murders and writing



## Guest (Dec 15, 2012)

As an artist and soon-to-be author, my world has been shaken by the tragic events in Connecticut.

I see these shootings as someone taking the #fml mentality to the extreme, where it becomes #fyl as these people explode. Their private pain becoming a public wound on the face of humanity itself.

"Why?"
The question everyone seeks the answer for.
Somehow, I think, our modern, hyper-connected lives leaves some feeling disconnected with others.


The profile of the mass killer is usually that of a quiet, intelligent, middle-to-upper class, young white male.
Finding these disconnected individuals becomes difficult in a society like ours, where the loudest and most physically attractive people get all the attention.


Have you as an author dared to probe the psyche of the mass shooter?
What experiences do they have in common, and how does society identify people at risk for developing these intensely misanthropic world views?


If I'm not the only empathic person here reeling from the news on Friday, try and use this evil act to strengthen your resolve to make the world a better place.


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## Guest (Dec 15, 2012)

I don't if this is what you're looking and it's certainly an 'old school' view, for but to me these people are flat out evil. Yes things might have happened to 'push' them towards such acts, but for them to actually be able to go ahead and murder defenseless children establishes them as being dispositionally evil in my book. I would love to see someone stop one of these shooters dead in their tracks before/shortly after they start their killings (eg. they bring out their guns, but the moment they step through into another room, somebody hiding behind the door literally brains them with a fire extinguisher).

No sympathy at all for them along with terrorists and serial killers, and would be happy to see their ilk exterminated with any level of brutality necessary.


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## John Blackport (Jul 18, 2011)

I'm not sure sicklove is advocating that we owe mass murderers our sympathy.

I could be wrong, but that doesn't seem to be it.


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## Jerri Kay Lincoln (Jun 18, 2011)

sicklove said:


> What experiences do they have in common, and how does society identify people at risk for developing these intensely misanthropic world views?


Almost all school shooters across the board have one thing in common: anti-depressants.

A little known, but deadly fact.


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## Sapphire (Apr 24, 2012)

The world must also STOP "glamorizing" these monsters.  In the coming days his name, photos, life history, quotes from him, school records, every detail about his personal life will be broadcast and printed in every media format available.  We will never forget his name and face.  An unbalanced person can watch this and see his (or her) own opportunity to "immortalize" himself.  I'm ok with examining his psyche in an abstract way, but let's not make him famous, or a better adjective, infamous.


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## DarkScribe (Aug 30, 2012)

glutton said:


> I don't if this is what you're looking and it's certainly an 'old school' view, for but to me these people are flat out evil. Yes things might have happened to 'push' them towards such acts, but for them to actually be able to go ahead and murder defenseless children establishes them as being dispositionally evil in my book. I would love to see someone stop one of these shooters dead in their tracks before/shortly after they start their killings (eg. they bring out their guns, but the moment they step through into another room, somebody hiding behind the door literally brains them with a fire extinguisher).
> 
> No sympathy at all for them along with terrorists and serial killers, and would be happy to see their ilk exterminated with any level of brutality necessary.


Firstly all serial killers are not the same - it isn't a type, and they certainly aren't not all "evil". Many are damaged, and this leads to some horrific acts, but they are not born evil and predestined to reach a stage where they simply start killing because they are bad. Something triggers them, and we live in a world where violence is all around us, even in the form of the most popular games. It is probably amazing that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often as several years of playing games where death and mutilation is depicted in High Resolution detail desensitises. It isn't purely to do with games and videos, but they are a very definite factor.

In this instance the kid involved first killed his mother - a kindergarten teacher - then went to her school and began killing kids. If I had to guess, I would say that he resented the attention that she gave other kids and felt it was attention taken from him. He decided to commit suicide and during the process of killing himself to strike out, to retaliate against what he thought had driven him to such a low - the kids who his mother cared about.

The mention of anti depressants is a very valid thing. Not long ago a drug company Glaxo Smith Kline was given the largest fine in history - over three billion dollars - for suppressing information about the side effects of drugs including Paxil a popular anti depressant. The drug caused to patients to become violent and others to commit suicide. Paxil was used by several previous mass killers.


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## Sapphire (Apr 24, 2012)

Jerri Lincoln said:


> Almost all school shooters across the board have one thing in common: anti-depressants.
> 
> A little known, but deadly fact.


This is also true with many suicides, especially in teenagers and young adults.


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## valeriec80 (Feb 24, 2011)

sicklove said:


> Have you as an author dared to probe the psyche of the mass shooter?
> What experiences do they have in common, and how does society identify people at risk for developing these intensely misanthropic world views?


Death Girl--in my sig--is a nasty little YA book about mass murderers and school shootings. It's not well liked because, to quote a review, "I couldn't handle the darkness."

(Also, it has ending problems. It's only the third book I ever wrote, and I was really having trouble figuring out endings at the time.)

Mass murderers are usually sociopathic. There are lots of sociopaths. Not all sociopaths kill people. I don't know that it's possible to identify people at risk without seriously violating people's freedoms. I'm not sure that we can ever stop tragedies like this from happening entirely. Maybe these kinds of people are a sort of evolutionary throwback. They were undoubtedly very useful in the days of raiding and marauding and scuffling over land, when having a bloodthirsty killer in your army meant you didn't lose your land and your wife didn't get raped. We have less need of them nowadays, and maybe they'll die out over time.

I don't mean any of that to sound insensitive. I think the reason that this kind of stuff is called a senseless tragedy is because it absolutely makes no sense. People who do things like that are not normal people, and there's really no way to understand them at all. I think the most maddening thing about it is how senseless it is. It seems to be easier for us to take bad news as humans if it "makes sense." This doesn't. It never will. It's horrible.

And truthfully, even if it did "make sense," I'm sure the grieving families wouldn't really care. Death itself is the most senseless part of being alive.


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## Guest (Dec 15, 2012)

DarkScribe said:


> Something triggers them, and we live in a world where violence is all around us, even in the form of the most popular games. It is probably amazing that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often as several years of playing games where death and mutilation is depicted in High Resolution detail desensitises. It isn't purely top do with games and videos, but they are a very definite factor.


I don't want to get into a long debate over this, but IMO even if that is the case, it would take an inferior (call it evil or not, whatever you wish) form of human being to be influenced by games or movies to the point of carrying out violence against defenseless victims in real life. I would also disagree that game/movie violence is necessarily more prone to encouraging such behavior than say literary violence.


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## Guest (Dec 15, 2012)

John Blackport said:


> I'm not sure sicklove is advocating that we owe mass murderers our sympathy.
> 
> I could be wrong, but that doesn't seem to be it.


I didn't say he was, I was just giving my opinion on school shooters.

With regard to anti-depressants, I think people have grown far too reliant on prescription medications/drugs in general.


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## DarkScribe (Aug 30, 2012)

glutton said:


> I don't want to get into a long debate over this, but IMO even if that is the case, it would take an inferior (call it evil or not, whatever you wish) form of human being to be influenced by games or movies to the point of carrying out violence against defenseless victims in real life. I would also disagree that game/movie violence is necessarily more prone to encouraging such behavior than say literary violence.


Really? Literary the same as violent video games?

Gamers become obsessed, they play for hours every day, many are regarded as addicted. That doesn't happen with books, and books don't show blood, guts and gore the way a graphic game does. It is strange that teenage violence increased dramatically around the same time that extremely violent videos and graphic games became common. Many researchers believe that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the first game to cause violent responses in people who watched it.


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## R. Doug (Aug 14, 2010)

TV, movies, video games, and guns should never be the scapegoats for the over-prescription today of psycho-theraputic drugs to minors and exceptionally poor parenting skills.  Until you reign in bad parenting and the over-reliance upon drugs to correct behavioral problems, you're never going to get to the real root cause of these tragedies.

By the way, the guns used were reportedly purchased for him by the mother of the perpetrator.  That's a direct violation of federal law and, if true, shows precisely how bad the mother's parenting skills were — she couldn't even say "no" to his desire to have firearms despite his obvious behavioral problems.


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## Claudia King (Oct 27, 2012)

As a pretentious student this kind of topic might've been something I'd try to tackle. I did find it cathartic dipping into the minds of very disturbed characters (I remember writing one or two serial killer pieces), but it isn't something I'd write now. Unless there's some kind of point to be made or idea to be explored I'm not a big fan of writing dark or unsavoury subject matter purely for its own sake.
I have a feeling you'd have to fictionalise a piece like this a heck of a lot to make it worthwhile literature. Perhaps if you had a character who was failed by others, by society, or by the system, and ended up going on a murderous rampage it might work as a cautionary tale, but you'd still have to deal with the nasty aspect of them going way too far off the deep end.

Like other people have mentioned, this kind of crazy is something that doesn't have much rhyme or reason. Writing about extreme mental disorder is very difficult if you're not doing it as an outsider looking in, as its nature disconnects it from everything understandable and relatable in the reader's own experience.


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## 41413 (Apr 4, 2011)

ITT: Lots of egregious and unscientific claims without studies to back them up. Delightful.


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## DarkScribe (Aug 30, 2012)

smreine said:


> ITT: Lots of egregious and unscientific claims without studies to back them up. Delightful.


There is close to thirty years of "scientific" research into the effects of violent videos and games on people who are susceptible to them. I did did my psych degree in the eighties and at that stage it was being incorporated into psych courses. Look at some of the published work of David Myer in the early eighties. Nothing egregious there. Games in themselves don't cause violent crime, but in someone who has a bent in that direction, they desensitise, stifle empathy.


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

smreine said:


> ITT: Lots of egregious and unscientific claims without studies to back them up. Delightful.


Pretty much. The whole video games and movies cause violent behavior thing has been pretty studied and debunked over and over. Sigh.

Better access to mental health care and better early childhood education are things that have been proven to help reduce violent behavior.

However, some people will just do senseless things. It's tough to spot beforehand (who wants to believe that their son/friend/spouse is capable of this?) and tough to stop.


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## Guest (Dec 15, 2012)

DarkScribe said:


> Really? Literary the same as violent video games?
> 
> Gamers become obsessed, they play for hours every day, many are regarded as addicted. That doesn't happen with books, and books don't show blood, guts and gore the way a graphic game does. It is strange that teenage violence increased dramatically around the same time that extremely violent videos and graphic games became common. Many researchers believe that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was the first game to cause violent responses in people who watched it.


I _really_ shouldn't get into this, but games are obviously fake. For anyone who has been raised halfway properly, so are horror movies. For the sake of argument, OTOH, one could think that a book depicting a serial killer from a sympathetic viewpoint might give a susceptible person more mental ammo to 'justify' such actions to themselves and feel like they too should do such things.


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## DarkScribe (Aug 30, 2012)

Doomed Muse said:


> Pretty much. The whole video games and movies cause violent behavior thing has been pretty studied and debunked over and over. Sigh.
> 
> Better access to mental health care and better early childhood education are things that have been proven to help reduce violent behavior.
> 
> However, some people will just do senseless things. It's tough to spot beforehand (who wants to believe that their son/friend/spouse is capable of this?) and tough to stop.


Studied yes. Disputed yes. Debunked - no way.


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## Kathleen Valentine (Dec 10, 2009)

My friend, the author Greg Gibson, wrote an amazing book about the mind of a school shooter after Greg's son, Galen, was killed in a school shooting twenty years ago yesterday. He has an article about it in the New York Times today.


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## Guest (Dec 15, 2012)

Kathleen Valentine said:


> My friend, the author Greg Gibson, wrote an amazing book about the mind of a school shooter after Greg's son, Galen, was killed in a school shooting twenty years ago yesterday. He has an article about it in the New York Times today.


Thanks, what's it called?


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## Scott Daniel (Feb 1, 2011)

A few years ago, I started writing a novel dealing with school shootings. I was approaching it from the idea of the parent of the shooter ... I wanted to understand how a parent could be so oblivious as to what was going on with their child that they didn't see it coming - as in Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine.

I made the protagonist a cop and traced the development of his son, the shooter, through out the story. In the end, I wanted to answer one question - if you, as a parent, could see that your child was attempting to carry off something like Columbine, would you stop them if you could?

I never finished the novel. While I think the premise of the story is interesting, like others have said, I didn't want to glorify in any way these kinds of incidents.

From time to time, I wonder if I should go ahead, finish and publish it? Then things like yesterday happen and I know I've made the right choice by keeping it in the can.


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## Claudia King (Oct 27, 2012)

sicklove said:


> I am so glad you wrote "Confessions of a slut puppy" instead, you are a true gift to art.


Thank you, I feel like I've found my true calling.


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## Guest (Dec 15, 2012)

Scott Daniel said:


> if you, as a parent, could see that your child was attempting to carry off something like Columbine, would you stop them if you could?


Well if you turned them in to the authorities, wouldn't they have a better chance to survive than if you let them go ahead with the killings and subsequent suicide? It's not like you'd necessarily have to kill them to stop them... in fact I can't really see any benefit of not stopping them if you could, and very much blameworthy if you don't try to.


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## Kathleen Valentine (Dec 10, 2009)

sicklove said:


> Thanks, what's it called?


Gone Boy: A Father's Search for the Truth in His Son's Murder


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## Guest (Dec 15, 2012)

Kathleen Valentine said:


> Gone Boy: A Father's Search for the Truth in His Son's Murder


Just tried to order it, none of the 4-5 places I tried ship to Canada, so I emailed Amazon support to find me an option. I hate wasting my time trying to buy something.


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## DarkScribe (Aug 30, 2012)

R. Doug said:


> TV, movies, video games, and guns should never be the scapegoats for the over-prescription today of psycho-theraputic drugs to minors and exceptionally poor parenting skills. Until you reign in bad parenting and the over-reliance upon drugs to correct behavioral problems, you're never going to get to the real root cause of these tragedies.
> 
> By the way, the guns used were reportedly purchased for him by the mother of the perpetrator. That's a direct violation of federal law and, if true, shows precisely how bad the mother's parenting skills were - she couldn't even say "no" to his desire to have firearms despite his obvious behavioral problems.


I have not seen any news releases to support that. The Police, right from the start, have said that he took her guns and shot her with one of them - they were registered to her, they were not his own. It helps to stick to what is actually released when commenting on something like this. As for video games not being involved, it is coming out now that he was into violent video games - it was about his only hobby.


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## Guest (Dec 15, 2012)

DarkScribe said:


> As for video games not being involved, it is coming out now that he was into violent video games - it was about his only hobby.


Did the chicken come first or the egg? You could just as easily say people prone to violence are drawn to violent media, rather than it causing them to be violent.


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## brendajcarlton (Sep 29, 2012)

For what my 2 cents is worth, I encourage everyone who is thinking about writing a novel about a school killer to resist that impulse.  (Except for the one from the point of view of the victim's family)  If you lead people to believe that now they understand the mind of such a monster and they really don't, it could have dangerous real world consequences.   Perhaps someone will believe that a friend or relative is not dangerous because he's not like the character in your book, but he really is dangerous.

And just as a personal aside, I'm really tired of this argument that no one is bad.  Everyone has some kind of disorder.  Villians have worked in literature for eons because we all want to see the bad guys get what's coming to them.  How can we then say there are no bad guys in real life?  Maybe you weren't born bad, (even that is debatable with true sociopaths) but you certainly are bad now if you want to shoot little children.  Maybe your disorder contributed to your badness, but you are still a bad guy.  Or maybe it would be better to say that a desire to hurt little kids and actually doing it are worlds apart.  Psychology has it's place, and serves many people well, but too much emphasis on everyone's "disorder" seems to help convince people that self control is an impossibility.  I say it most emphatically is not.


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## Guest (Dec 15, 2012)

brendajcarlton said:


> (Except for the one from the point of view of the victim's family)


Or what about from the viewpoint of a potential victim who stops the killer dead in their tracks? That would be pretty satisfying.


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## brendajcarlton (Sep 29, 2012)

> Or what about from the viewpoint of a potential victim who stops the killer dead in their tracks? That would be pretty satisfying.


I like that one. I'd read that.


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## valeriec80 (Feb 24, 2011)

brendajcarlton said:


> And just as a personal aside, I'm really tired of this argument that no one is bad. Everyone has some kind of disorder. Villians have worked in literature for eons because we all want to see the bad guys get what's coming to them. How can we then say there are no bad guys in real life? Maybe you weren't born bad, (even that is debatable with true sociopaths) but you certainly are bad now if you want to shoot little children. Maybe your disorder contributed to your badness, but you are still a bad guy. Or maybe it would be better to say that a desire to hurt little kids and actually doing it are worlds apart. Psychology has it's place, and serves many people well, but too much emphasis on everyone's "disorder" seems to help convince people that self control is an impossibility. I say it most emphatically is not.


I think I'd have to only reply that "bad" is an imprecise term with a lot of varying meanings. Sociopathic mass killer, on the other hand, is a lot more exact.

As for the other implied statement here, that people are responsible for their actions no matter what has happened in their life or how they were born, I agree. To an extent. I just don't think it's that simple. People have choices--they have free will. But they also have given circumstances that they can't change. Both things are factors in why they make decisions and to ignore either of them because it doesn't fit philosophically with whatever one believes about "good" and "bad," is, I think, not the best way to approach the situation.


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## A. Rosaria (Sep 12, 2010)

Part of the problem is society, it makes it so much easier for the already unstable to go completely haywire. A stable person who flips may kill the one that triggered his rage, an unstable one need less to get to that point and those he kills may have nothing to do with why he got mad. The killing to kill seems to be the thing they are after. They go to an easy spot like a school, because they know they will less likely face any opposition, so they have more time to do the shitty thing they feel they need to do, to kill.

I say society is to blame, because we live in a system where the majority glorifies murder when one party does it and abhors it when another does it. It create a duality in people that feeds crazy in those sane, and psychotic insanity in those already crazy. We as a people have governments, containing a few hundred people, who send young men to other countries to fight X war for X cause, and they are applauded when they bomb a country to the middle ages, displacing millions, indirectly killing in the hundred of thousand, and directly killing in the ten of thousands. Innocent people die, thousands of children, and the majority of people whose government did it doesn't shed a single tear for these people.

People in Pakistan bordering Afghanistan live in terror for drone strikes on "alleged" militants (all men between 18-60 is deemed a militant) they never know when their day comes, when their kid get blasted in thousand pieces. And if that happens they are not even sure if they go to the funeral that it will be bombed. Every day children are killed by governments, and few who belong to those governments think much about that.

It's this insanity that set an example to a lot of people and what does this teach them? That life beyond the border is less worthy? Is insignificant? It's a thin line to skip to thinking the life within the border is also less and a very thin line for those people that are already unstable. It's no coincidence there are many more shootings now since the governments are falling rapidly to a new low. It's not only in the USA, it's everywhere. A man in China stabbed 22 kids dead December 13th. A day before this shooting.

It's not a gun thing like many in the USA want to make it be. Get rid of the guns and the crazies will use whatever other weapon they can find. The more restricted they become, the more drastic measures they will take. These are not mentally stable people, laws are nothing to them, and restrictions will only make them more inventive and efficient.

Instead of focussing on the tools these people might use, instead for once look at the cause that causes these shootings. I think it's the way we live life. We should realy stop setting the bad example, or allowing others to do horrible things to other people while we look away. If anything needs to be curtailed it is the system we have right now of perpetual war. Take the violence out of society, stop glorifying it. Every innocent person that dies is horrible, no matter who did the killing, it is bad. How can we hold our heads high speaking horror of these acts while condining governments killing thousands? It sends out a mixed signal, one which will add another drop to the already half full bucket of the next loon flipping.

I cry from within about what happened yesterday and the day before and every tagedy happening each day. It's taxing for me to follow the news but I still do follow it, because turning my eyes away to not see the wrong will only add to the wrong.

It's a sad day, it has been a sad day for a long, long time. I guess I'll piss some people off writing this, maybe a lot of people, but this is what I think and I'm upset enough about these senseless killings that for once I don't care and just say it, if it damns me or not.


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## RHill (Jun 9, 2012)

Scott Daniel said:


> A few years ago, I started writing a novel dealing with school shootings. I was approaching it from the idea of the parent of the shooter ... I wanted to understand how a parent could be so oblivious as to what was going on with t
> ...
> 
> From time to time, I wonder if I should go ahead, finish and publish it? Then things like yesterday happen and I know I've made the right choice by keeping it in the can.


I don't agree that you shouldn't publish it, and I think (could be mistaken) that the OP intent was for a discussion more of this nature. To me, dialogue about this type of thing, or a book about how it can come into being, helps to open the eyes of the public; to allow parents to see potential problems and maybe head them off at the pass. Like sexual abuse, which wasn't openly discussed until the last decade or so, examining the causes can help us to ward off the events. Recognize the signs. It does not "glorify" the activity to examine it.


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

Um, no one died in the stabbing in China. 22 were injured.


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## Kathleen Valentine (Dec 10, 2009)

Years ago I was living in a large southern city and a very strange thing happened. It was mid afternoon - well past lunch time but too early for going home - and a friend and I were walking back from a very late lunch to our office. We were on a shadowy side street where we probably shouldn't have been, looking in a shop window, when a man came up behind us, stuck something in my back and said, "Give me our purse." Without even thinking I turned around and slugged him right in the windpipe knocking him backwards over a cement planter while my friend and I ran. It wasn't until we got back to the office that I realized what I had done but it SCARED THE LIVING S$%# out of me that I did that. I've often wondered if I should explore that and write about it but, frankly, I'm afraid to go there....

Maybe I don't want to know that part of me.....


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## R. Doug (Aug 14, 2010)

Doomed Muse said:


> Um, no one died in the stabbing in China. 22 were injured.


And no guns were used in the Oklahoma City bombing, either. The point was not the lethality of the attack. The point was that there are always alternatives to guns, and that the _choice_ of weapon is irrelevant to the attack or the underlying causes behind it.


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## brendajcarlton (Sep 29, 2012)

> Maybe I don't want to know that part of me.....


IMHO, "that part of you", is called courage. Which is a good thing.


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## Joe_Nobody (Oct 23, 2012)

It is a little known fact that during the civil war, Union officers kept thinking something was wrong with their unit's weapons. They just weren't generating the anticipated fire power. A study was conducted and found an amazing statistic - 70% of the troops were intentionally firing high, or not shooting at the enemy at all.
One weapon was found at Gettysburg that had 7 balls loaded the barrel - the owner kept reloading on command, but wouldn't fire.

The military changed its training after that, continuing to refine the process until after the Vietnam war. I won't go into all of the details, but repetitive, reactionary drills were developed. These exercises were intentionally designed to overcome a common human trait - the inability to kill another person. By the time the first Gulf War was waged, over 90% of the troops used their weapons.

I've both received and conducted that training. To me, it's not much different than what my kids play on first person shooter video games. I'm not saying the recent incidents were because of video games. I am saying the violence that flows from our media, entertainment and culture can't be ignored as a factor.  

It is an unnatural act to take another human life in combat, let alone shooting children.

If you want to research the subject, the best work out there is by Lt. Col. David Grossman. The book is tittled "On Killing," and at one time was mandatory reading for some military officers. If nothing else, it may change your perspective on how many military professionals view the subject.


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## DarkScribe (Aug 30, 2012)

glutton said:


> Did the chicken come first or the egg? You could just as easily say people prone to violence are drawn to violent media, rather than it causing them to be violent.


The chicken came first.

People who are violent are drawn to violent media - that is accepted quite clearly in most of the studies. People who are not violent, but who are frustrated, angry or depressed are also affected by violent games and videos. If you really haven't bothered as yet, read through some of the several hundred thousand links to various reports and their peer comments. Anyone who dismisses out of hand the effect of violence in games and videos is taking a head in the sand attitude. There is too much in the way of solid information gathered in those thousands of studies to be ignored.

Look at this one, dated back in the early days (2000) when games were far from graphic. http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2000/04/video-games.aspx

Around the time of the first Texas Chainsaw Massacre movie the US Surgeon General said this:

_ "It is clear to me that the causal relationship between televised violence and antisocial behavior is sufficient to warrant appropriate and immediate remedial action...There comes a time when the data are sufficient to justify action. That time has come."_

Things have not improved since those days - they have become decidedly worse. The two kids, Harris and Klebold (Columbine Massacre) were Doom addicts. That is when the issue really started to get research attention. There was a lot that linked violence in video and games to violent acts before then, but after 1999 there was almost a universal concurrence regarding the effect. Most of the scientific dispute was related to the level of the effect, not that there was none. Gamers of course screamed loud and often that such games had no effect. Another problem is although some people, possibly a very small percentage, were very negatively affected by violence in games and videos, many found such games beneficial in the way of stress relief. I played Doom and similar back in those days - and I seem to have manged to resist any urges to start slaughtering people. I realise that the fact that I could play without ill effect doesn't mean that everyone can. Many people don't realise this, they feel that if it doesn't affect them, it won't affect anyone. This is not so, we are not all the same emotionally or psychologically and we don't all experience the same stress at the same time or respond to that stress in the same manner.


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## A. Rosaria (Sep 12, 2010)

Doomed Muse said:


> Um, no one died in the stabbing in China. 22 were injured.


Thank god if that is so. World is a little less worse but not by much.


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## Guest (Dec 15, 2012)

jljarvis said:


> leave the task of apportioning blame to experts, rather than voice knee-jerk pronouncements of blame at medication, video games, parents, society, etc.


Some of us don't trust the 'experts' enough for that though. Especially given it's unlikely we'll ever have all the 'experts' agree on something.

Also, another thing that really makes me despise school shooters, along with suicide bombers and serial killers, is that they aren't merely IMO evil, but cowards. If you're going to snap and murder people, why would you target kids who don't even know why you'd want to kill them? I'd have slightly more respect (even though it's still wrong obviously) for someone who tries to kill people who represent something they stand against and they consider 'enemies'. Those who choose their victims at least in part based on being easy prey are the lowest scum.


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

Grossman also presents this thesis:

http://www.gleamingedge.com/mirrors/onsheepwolvesandsheepdogs.html

But the real answer is we have no answers to these questions. That is why we are so scared.

B.


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## Guest (Dec 15, 2012)

DarkScribe said:


> The chicken came first.
> 
> People who are violent are drawn to violent media - that is accepted quite clearly in most of the studies. People who are not violent, but who are frustrated, angry or depressed are also affected by violent games and videos. If you really haven't bothered as yet, read through some of the several hundred thousand links to various reports and their peer comments. Anyone who dismisses out of hand the effect of violence in games and videos is taking a head in the sand attitude. There is too much in the way of solid information gathered in those thousands of studies to be ignored.
> 
> ...


Not that I necessarily trust this 'evidence'... but even if it exists, is there any hard evidence that violent media hasn't given others the cathartic release needed for them to _not_ snap? Pretty sure there isn't.


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## valeriec80 (Feb 24, 2011)

Scott Daniel said:


> A few years ago, I started writing a novel dealing with school shootings. I was approaching it from the idea of the parent of the shooter ... I wanted to understand how a parent could be so oblivious as to what was going on with their child that they didn't see it coming - as in Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at Columbine.


Have you ever read _We Need to Talk About Kevin_? Basically this same premise.

It's a movie too, but the movie doesn't do as good of a job at muddying the waters between whether it was the mother's neglect that made the kid go nuts or if the kid was so unlovable the mother couldn't help but neglect him. Movie just makes him seem like a bad apple.

Really good book, though.


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

glutton said:


> Not that I necessarily trust this 'evidence'... but even if it exists, is there any hard evidence that violent media hasn't given others the cathartic release needed for them to _not_ snap? Pretty sure there isn't.


Studies exist that bolster both hypotheses, but the experts cannot even agree on how to interpret their results.

_Nailing the coffin shut on doubts that violent video games stimulate aggression: comment on Anderson et al. (2010)_

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20192555

_Much ado about nothing: the misestimation and overinterpretation of violent video game effects in eastern and western nations: comment on Anderson et al. (2010)_

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20192554

IMHO, the entire debate is low yield. The tremendous stigma surrounding all matters mental health has done far more harm than _Doom_ et al.

B.


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## Nathalie Hamidi (Jul 9, 2011)

Not going to participate much in this debate, but for my viewpoint: I'm a gamer, I like violence and aggression in movies, I love a good horror book. I've also - gasp! - played roleplaying games, around a table _and_ live. I don't think the problem is there. Sure, crazy people might play video games. Has there never been crazy people playing soccer or eating apple pies? The point I want to make is that it's the people that are crazy in the first place, not their hobbies.

Also, in the US there are so many guns everywhere... maybe with less guns there would be less people shooting their peers?










Last but not least, I've read this post on Wil Wheaton's tumblr a few minutes ago, I think it's worth reading. It may or may not be true, but it's surely something to consider:

__
https://37997849787%2Flet-me-tell-you-a-story-the-day-after-columbine


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## Ian Fraser (Mar 8, 2011)

I've always found mass murderers interesting. One of my constantly-selling (and often staged) Kindle theater scripts is about one of them: _'Charles Manson.'_

As a matter of interest, given that I stay an hour's drive away from the recent shooting, I've decided to dig out and publish another play of mine that won an award in the UK back in 2007. It has a deliberately provocative title. It's called _'Putting the Fun Back into School Shootings.'_ (Although it deals with an armed teacher rather than pupils).

Most school shootings aren't really understood for what they are: essentially failed slave revolts. There's a good interview with a stunning writer on the subject ( http://www.alternet.org/story/24796/a_brief_history_of_rage%2C_murder_and_rebellion ) or look at his book on Amazon, called 'Going Postal.'


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## DarkScribe (Aug 30, 2012)

glutton said:


> Not that I necessarily trust this 'evidence'... but even if it exists, is there any hard evidence that violent media hasn't given others the cathartic release needed for them to _not_ snap? Pretty sure there isn't.


Maybe you should try reading what is said before responding.

_"Another problem is although some people, possibly a very small percentage, were very negatively affected by violence in games and videos, many found such games beneficial in the way of stress relief."_

That has been a part of the problem, that although a few have very negative responses, others find such games cathartic, they relieve stress. Look at alcohol - most people have a slowing of reaction time, a lowering of inhibition. Some have increased reaction time, and an increase in paranoia. Should they rescind all drink driving laws because not all people are worse drivers when inebriated? It is not an all or nothing area, there are definitely shades of grey.


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## Guest (Dec 15, 2012)

DarkScribe said:


> Maybe you should try reading what is said before responding.


I read that part hence why I proposed that said stress relief might prevent other potential acts of violence.

I find the quoted text rude so I will stop responding to you in this thread before I go on a verbal rampage.


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## Claudia King (Oct 27, 2012)

My issue with studies into violent media and the relationship it can have with violent behaviour is that it doesn't tend to lead to many practical solutions. There isn't a direct and universal cause and effect going on, which makes it very difficult to establish strategies to address the problem. I'll be the first to argue that no subject should be off limits for artistic exploration, and that doing so is often a powerful way to help people understand and contextualise uncomfortable subject matter. But how do you weigh up the merits of productive media with genuine artistic value against "tasteless" products that might possibly, potentially, have a negative impact on those who're drawn to them?

You start to stray into horribly muddy waters of media censorship and everything that entails. I don't think it's particularly productive to focus on the effects of violent media (at least, not to the extent it gets scapegoated) when much more likely candidates such as parental and pastoral care should be in our sights.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

Joe_Nobody said:


> It is a little known fact that during the civil war, Union officers kept thinking something was wrong with their unit's weapons. They just weren't generating the anticipated fire power. A study was conducted and found an amazing statistic - 70% of the troops were intentionally firing high, or not shooting at the enemy at all.
> One weapon was found at Gettysburg that had 7 balls loaded the barrel - the owner kept reloading on command, but wouldn't fire.
> 
> The military changed its training after that, continuing to refine the process until after the Vietnam war. I won't go into all of the details, but repetitive, reactionary drills were developed. These exercises were intentionally designed to overcome a common human trait - the inability to kill another person. By the time the first Gulf War was waged, over 90% of the troops used their weapons.
> ...


I was going to point out the same thing. I'll only add that people confuse the different claims regarding the role of FPS games in mass shooting. Grossman and others believe that desensitization is a _necessary condition _ for being able to kill people; hence, FPS games facilitate mass shootings because they fill the world with people desensitized to killing. The other thesis is that FPS games play a _causal _ role in mass shootings by conditioning people to, well, get off on killing. Grossman's thesis is the easier to prove, but it assigns a less important role to FPS games. The second thesis is much harder to prove and it assigns a crucial role to FPS games. Accepting one thesis doesn't entail that you have to accept both.

This should also suggest why grouping guns together with games is wrongheaded. Guns don't play a causal psychological role in making people engage in mass shootings.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

Nathalie Hamidi said:


> ....that it's the people that are crazy in the first place, not their hobbies....


That's a little naive. Classifying something as a hobby doesn't mean it has no causal efficacy in everyday life. Serials killers are well known to practice "amateur taxidermy." Do you suppose that hobby's unconnected to the rest of their psyche?


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## DarkScribe (Aug 30, 2012)

glutton said:


> I read that part hence why I proposed that said stress relief might prevent other potential acts of violence.
> 
> I find the quoted text rude so I will stop responding to you in this thread before I go on a verbal rampage.


No, what you said was this:

_"Not that I necessarily trust this 'evidence'... but even if it exists, is there any hard evidence that violent media hasn't given others the cathartic release needed for them to not snap? Pretty sure there isn't."_


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## Ian Fraser (Mar 8, 2011)

I'm reminded of the Lenny Bruce line from the Fifties, which still remains true to this day: "Show me a mass murderer, and I'll show you someone with a 'good religious background' - every time." unquote.


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## Guest (Dec 15, 2012)

I really, really shouldn't but this



> is there any hard evidence that violent media hasn't given others the cathartic release needed for them to not snap?


is pretty close in meaning to



> said stress relief might prevent other potential acts of violence


You are officially my board enemy.


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## brendajcarlton (Sep 29, 2012)

> Grossman and others believe that desensitization is a necessary condition for being able to kill people; hence, FPS games facilitate mass shootings because they fill the world with people desensitized to killing. The other thesis is that FPS games play a causal role in mass shootings by conditioning people to, well, get off on killing. Grossman's thesis is the easier to prove, but it assigns a less important role to FPS games. The second thesis is much harder to prove and it assigns a crucial role to FPS games. Accepting one thesis doesn't entail that you have to accept both.


I see your point about difference between the two theses, but I still don't buy either one of them. Killing people on a computer screen is nothing like looking at, hearing and smelling a real life terrified child and still putting a bullet into the poor little kid. The two experiences are not remotely similar.


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## DarkScribe (Aug 30, 2012)

Nathalie Hamidi said:


> Not going to participate much in this debate, but for my viewpoint: I'm a gamer, I like violence and aggression in movies, I love a good horror book. I've also - gasp! - played roleplaying games, around a table _and_ live. I don't think the problem is there. Sure, crazy people might play video games. Has there never been crazy people playing soccer or eating apple pies? The point I want to make is that it's the people that are crazy in the first place, not their hobbies.
> 
> Also, in the US there are so many guns everywhere... maybe with less guns there would be less people shooting their peers?
> 
> ...


What is fascinating is that Switzerland has a higher per capita gun ownership than the US, but a fraction of the gun crime. They also have a system whereby all males who aren't medically unfit serve time in the army, are fully trained and take their weapons home with them. Walking through any suburban area in Switzerland is not unlike walking through a Military barracks. Every home has a man with an assault rifle who is well trained in its use. The most heavily armed nation (aside from Israel) has one of the lowest violent crime rates.


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## arvel (Jun 23, 2012)

I think a story from all viewpoints would be a wonderful book. There are people who do horrible and evil things, because they are horrible and evil people. There are also people who do horrible things out of rage or due to abuse or chemical imbalance. In the case of the Columbine event it was extreme bullying that happened. Does that justify what happened? No! But it also shows there was a problem. 

I know several people who had extreme bullying in school where they constantly went to teachers for help and were ignored. This isn't just being picked on or name calling. This is daily beatings, being pushed down the stairs, being forced to drink toilet water, being pinned down and peed on, and a lot worse. This is serious abuse that is ignored by the people that are supposed to help you. The kid gets angrier and angrier until they get to a point where they snap and just want to dish out the same pain to the people who hurt them and the people who watched them be hurt. When I was doing research for a book I cam across lots of people who suffered bullying and almost all of them said they would have hurt those people if given the opportunity back then. Sometimes things just aren't as black and white as people like to think. 

Not all school shootings are the same. But they are all terrible. All I can think about is how horrible it was for this man to kill those little children. It is terrible and unforgivable. But instead of focusing on whether this makes a person evil or not or shifting blame, I hope people would start focusing on how to stop something like this from happening again.


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## DarkScribe (Aug 30, 2012)

glutton said:


> I really, really shouldn't but this
> 
> is pretty close in meaning to
> 
> You are officially my board enemy.


Wow. Do I get a badge of some sort? I mean to make it "official".


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## GiGi Summers (Jul 31, 2012)

Joe_Nobody said:


> It is a little known fact that during the civil war, Union officers kept thinking something was wrong with their unit's weapons. They just weren't generating the anticipated fire power. A study was conducted and found an amazing statistic - 70% of the troops were intentionally firing high, or not shooting at the enemy at all.
> One weapon was found at Gettysburg that had 7 balls loaded the barrel - the owner kept reloading on command, but wouldn't fire.
> 
> The military changed its training after that, continuing to refine the process until after the Vietnam war. I won't go into all of the details, but repetitive, reactionary drills were developed. These exercises were intentionally designed to overcome a common human trait - the inability to kill another person. By the time the first Gulf War was waged, over 90% of the troops used their weapons.
> ...


Thank you for posting that about the Civil War, I had heard that but have never been able to verify that information. I will take a look at that book!


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## valeriec80 (Feb 24, 2011)

Joe_Nobody said:


> It is a little known fact that during the civil war, Union officers kept thinking something was wrong with their unit's weapons. They just weren't generating the anticipated fire power. A study was conducted and found an amazing statistic - 70% of the troops were intentionally firing high, or not shooting at the enemy at all.
> One weapon was found at Gettysburg that had 7 balls loaded the barrel - the owner kept reloading on command, but wouldn't fire.
> 
> The military changed its training after that, continuing to refine the process until after the Vietnam war. I won't go into all of the details, but repetitive, reactionary drills were developed. These exercises were intentionally designed to overcome a common human trait - the inability to kill another person. By the time the first Gulf War was waged, over 90% of the troops used their weapons.
> ...


Back in the 1800s, it was a far more common occurrence for people to shoot each other than it is now. In fact, violent crime was on the decrease in America up until the Prohibition, which screwed everything up. 

I really think we are becoming _less_ violent as a society rather than more.

However, I think we can both appeal to various authorities to back up our views, so I shall stop here.  I don't want to deny that what you're saying here is possible. Certainly, fake violence may tend to desensitize people. Studies do seem to indicate this.

However, considering that lots and lots and lots of people use video games, and there have been under 50 mass shootings in the United States, I think we can safely assume that the majority of people who play video games do not go on to actually shoot people.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

brendajcarlton said:


> I see your point about difference between the two theses, but I still don't buy either one of them. Killing people on a computer screen is nothing like looking at, hearing and smelling a real life terrified child and still putting a bullet into the poor little kid. The two experiences are not remotely similar.


It becomes clearer if you see the problem that FPS games overcome. Look at it from the military's side. Grossman points out that people have a natural aversion to killing others. To train soldiers to kill, therefore, you have to make them capable of getting _around _ this aversion. You do this by drilling them to shoot targets on command (making the response automatic) and you desensitize them to killing people in particular by using (e.g.) human-shaped targets. Rational thought and natural aversion is taken out of the equation by this point-and-shoot conditioning. His and others' argument goes that FPS games play the same role in desensitizing people to killing others. Playing a FPS game for hundreds or thousands of hours makes you able to automatically perform the same psychological point-and-shoot action that a soldier does.

Now, I'm not saying the theory is true. But that's why one is similar to the other.


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## Sapphire (Apr 24, 2012)

Whether it's abuse, bullying, exposure to excessive violence, genetic error, poor parenting, failure, or whatever, really isn't the question.  The question is always, "Why didn't someone intercede?"  One answer COULD be that the evidence is a series of small events and behaviors.  No one incidence suggests the person might become a serial killer.  It is the aggregate of their life.  So, when mental health professionals or law authorities either see or are told about the individual, that single piece of information lacks much validity.  They cannot legally act.  They need to know about the aggregate.  They need to stop the sweeping away of single incidents.  They need to have a legal framework to address these individuals.  And, yes, families must be brave enough to act when they are aware of evil potential.


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## Scott Daniel (Feb 1, 2011)

valeriec80 said:


> Have you ever read _We Need to Talk About Kevin_? Basically this same premise.
> 
> It's a movie too, but the movie doesn't do as good of a job at muddying the waters between whether it was the mother's neglect that made the kid go nuts or if the kid was so unlovable the mother couldn't help but neglect him. Movie just makes him seem like a bad apple.
> 
> Really good book, though.


I haven't heard about that, Valerie but it does sound interesting.

The research I read, which wasn't tons, seemed to lean on the side of a person being genetically predisposed. Environment would certainly play a part, but the wiring, I believe, needs to be in place to start off with.


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## NoCat (Aug 5, 2010)

Tangential, but possibly interesting: http://bitmob.com/articles/my-four-year-old-son-plays-grand-theft-auto

I think we're insulated from violence and death a lot these days. 100 years ago, most of us would have seen a dead body by now. I remember asking a college class who had seen a dead person, and only about 3 of us out of 40 raised our hands. We hear about violence a lot, because of the instant information age, but it doesn't mean that somehow humans have become more violent in modern society. Humans have been doing terrible things to each other for pretty much ever.


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## BrianKittrell (Jan 8, 2011)

Blame the one who makes the decision to perform such acts, not inanimate objects. All willful decisions are made by people, not their weapons, not their games, not their movies, and not their books. As to the rest, my heart is with those suffering in Newtown. I have two kids who aren't quite school age, and a number of thoughts went through my head when I first heard the news.

My mother in law said, the night after the shootings, that humanity has crossed the line. I told her that humanity crossed the line a long time ago. We're so far past the line that we can't remember which ancestor was the last one to see it. It's a legend, a distant memory recounted by those who pray for peace and see nothing but suffering.

But, there are still good people left in the world. We can only hope that the good always outnumber the evil.


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## Starry Eve (Mar 10, 2011)

A friend of mine told me that she would never read a book about serial killers because it's making money off psychopaths. I guess there's a fine line between profiting off evil acts and using that information to understand and educate so we can find ways to minimize or better protect ourselves against these sorts of violent behaviors...?


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## EC Sheedy (Feb 24, 2011)

While there is often talk about video games desensitizing today's youth, which may--or may not--be a truth, I'm beginning to worry that it is society at large that risks becoming desensitized. I recently read that there have been over 60 mass murders since 1982. That is flat out terrifying.

Will I ever write about mass murderers? _*No.*_ I'm not capable of delving into the blackness of mind that breeds this horrific kind of evil--nor do I wish to go there.

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Some+deadliest+mass+shootings+around+world/7701203/story.html


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## P.A. Woodburn (May 22, 2010)

Nathalie Hamidi said:


> Not going to participate much in this debate, but for my viewpoint: I'm a gamer, I like violence and aggression in movies, I love a good horror book. I've also - gasp! - played roleplaying games, around a table _and_ live. I don't think the problem is there. Sure, crazy people might play video games. Has there never been crazy people playing soccer or eating apple pies? The point I want to make is that it's the people that are crazy in the first place, not their hobbies.
> 
> Also, in the US there are so many guns everywhere... maybe with less guns there would be less people shooting their peers?
> 
> ...


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## P.A. Woodburn (May 22, 2010)

If you read or skim this article http://www.animallaw.info/articles/ddusicacl.htm you will see that some of the animal cruelty laws for parts of the EU including Switzerland are a lot stricter than they are here.


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## David Adams (Jan 2, 2012)

My thoughts on the matter, and the inevitable gun control debate that's going to flare up, are a little strange.

Coming from the perspective of an Australian, it seems like guns themselves aren't the problem (Canada has a higher gun density than the US, but they have similar amounts of gun deaths as Japan, where they are totally illegal). The problem is, is that Americans shoot each other with them. Why? Well, I think the answer is that other western countries have well developed and free education, health care, and a welfare system. That means that the people that would otherwise turn to crime/drugs/be raving madmen who shoot kids in kindergarten can, at least, get help. Doesn't make those countries immune to random shootings, but it cuts down on them enormously.

The thing is, it seems that many Americans have a kind of rabid individualism and anti-tax stances that stop these kind of programs from being effectively implemented. The problem is, things like the space program, free education and free health care pay for themselves. The space program through technological innovation, education by creating skilled workers with tertiary educations who create technology and IP for export, and health care by keeping people healthy who would otherwise be unable to work (and allowing them to change jobs easily without losing their health care).

Having a decent welfare system also pays for itself by having lower crime rates. No, you can't eliminate crime and yes the systems are abused sometimes, but they overall help. Every other western country has realised this... it's strange that the US hasn't.


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## Lily_T (Sep 25, 2011)

T.L. Haddix said:


> Look at the recent shootings in Oregon and Colorado - both those places (the mall and the movie theater) were places were concealed carry was not allowed. I would just about guarantee you that if those places allowed CC, the shooters would have picked some place else.


Occam's razor: The shooters picked where they picked because it was close to where they lived.

Lots of people have ideas about why mass murderers do what they do, but this NYTimes article is one of the most exhaustive on the subject.

http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/09/us/they-threaten-seethe-and-unhinge-then-kill-in-quantity.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

It only goes up to 2000 but it documents every mass shooting in the past fifty years (even ones before they had, you know, video games) and the picture that emerges is different from the one most people's biases conjure up.

TLR

They are not just white, they are not just male, and they are not just young. If you were to build a profile based on the most comment attributes, it would be:

Mentally or emotionally disturbed.
Unemployed.
Made threats of mass violence before.


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## PaulLev (Nov 2, 2012)

WHDean said:


> I was going to point out the same thing. I'll only add that people confuse the different claims regarding the role of FPS games in mass shooting. Grossman and others believe that desensitization is a _necessary condition _ for being able to kill people; hence, FPS games facilitate mass shootings because they fill the world with people desensitized to killing. The other thesis is that FPS games play a _causal _ role in mass shootings by conditioning people to, well, get off on killing. Grossman's thesis is the easier to prove, but it assigns a less important role to FPS games. The second thesis is much harder to prove and it assigns a crucial role to FPS games. Accepting one thesis doesn't entail that you have to accept both.


Or, put otherwise, this gets at the difference between correlation (two behaviors happen at the same time) vs. causation (one behavior causes the other). Whatever our intuitions, the statistical facts are there is no evidence that violent video games cause violent behavior. That they are correlated could just as easily be the result of people who will later commit violence enjoying violent video games, along with the vastly greater of percentage of video gamers who never are deadly-violent. I made this point in a discussion with ant-videogame crusader Jack Thompson on CNBC a few years ago. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XtWV-tIeVg&list=PL8F3D91A8DA6B52F8&index=1


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## Cherise (May 13, 2012)

Sorry this image is so huge. I got it off my Facebook feed. I think this brave woman needs to be remembered, and I bet that her family would be honored if anyone chose to fictionalize her heroic story.


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## P.A. Woodburn (May 22, 2010)

David Adams said:


> My thoughts on the matter, and the inevitable gun control debate that's going to flare up, are a little strange.
> 
> Coming from the perspective of an Australian, it seems like guns themselves aren't the problem (Canada has a higher gun density than the US, but they have similar amounts of gun deaths as Japan, where they are totally illegal). The problem is, is that Americans shoot each other with them. Why? Well, I think the answer is that other western countries have well developed and free education, health care, and a welfare system. That means that the people that would otherwise turn to crime/drugs/be raving madmen who shoot kids in kindergarten can, at least, get help. Doesn't make those countries immune to random shootings, but it cuts down on them enormously.
> 
> ...


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## P.A. Woodburn (May 22, 2010)

Dumb question but how do you stop the quote and continue writing?


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

P.A. Woodburn said:


> Dumb question but how do you stop the quote and continue writing?


When you quote a prior post, it should end with a [/quote]

For example your post, quoted, looks like this:

[quote author=P.A. Woodburn link=topic=136065.msg1998103#msg1998103 date=1355623370]
Dumb question but how do you stop the quote and continue writing?
[/quote]

Just make sure you start typing your response after the final [/quote].

Sometimes there are some blank rows between the end of the quote and the [/quote].

Betsy


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

PaulLev said:


> Or, put otherwise, this gets at the difference between correlation (two behaviors happen at the same time) vs. causation (one behavior causes the other). Whatever our intuitions, the statistical facts are there is no evidence that violent video games cause violent behavior. That they are correlated could just as easily be the result of people who will later commit violence enjoying violent video games, along with the vastly greater of percentage of video gamers who never are deadly-violent. I made this point in a discussion with ant-videogame crusader Jack Thompson on CNBC a few years ago. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XtWV-tIeVg&list=PL8F3D91A8DA6B52F8&index=1


Well, this puts me in an odd position. I'm not especially persuaded by these studies, but I feel obligated to defend them against the charge you're making: if you think these studies can be explained away as a confusion between causation and correlation you either (1) didn't read any of them or (2) don't know what the expression means. All the studies usually cited measured _aggression that resulted from playing the games_. You can reject their measures of aggression or you can argue that the observed increases were temporary. But to claim they mistook correlation for causation in such cases is simply wrong because they didn't measure the gaming habits of killers vs. non-killers (or some such correlation).


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Folks,

apparently this thread got off to a rocky start this morning while I was off communing with nature as part of the Christmas Bird Count...  (wonderful way to start the day).  I applaud the civil discussion that has taken place since then.  However, as most of you know, political discussions are discouraged here on KB as they almost always end with personal attacks. Any discussion of US gun laws is a political discussion.  We want this thread to stay open. Work with us here, thanks!

Betsy


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## Guest (Dec 16, 2012)

Betsy the Quilter said:


> Folks,
> 
> apparently this thread got off to a rocky start this morning while I was off communing with nature as part of the Christmas Bird Count... (wonderful way to start the day).


Ahh, now I know when to post to catch you off guard.


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## P.A. Woodburn (May 22, 2010)

Betsy the Quilter said:


> When you quote a prior post, it should end with a [/quote]
> 
> For example your post, quoted, looks like this:
> 
> ...


I'm just testing please ignore.


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## P.A. Woodburn (May 22, 2010)

Hi, thanks.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

sicklove said:


> Ahh, now I know when to post to catch you off guard.


Three things:

(1) I'm not the only moderator here (and in fact my co-mod Ann handled issues in the thread earlier today) and 
(2) I can use the KB Time Machine to retroactively moderate things and 
(3) Posting vacations/banning can happen even if we don't catch something when it happens. 

Just sayin'.

Betsy


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> "Somehow, I think, our modern, hyper-connected lives leaves some feeling disconnected with others."


I only read the OP. My life has nothing to do with a nut who shoots a bunch of kids.


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## Guest (Dec 16, 2012)

I've been trolling on other forums to release my pent up rage since the morning.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> " The problem is, is that Americans shoot each other with them. Why? Well, I think the answer is that other western countries have well developed and free education, health care, and a welfare system. That means that the people that would otherwise turn to crime/drugs/be raving madmen who shoot kids in kindergarten can, at least, get help. Doesn't make those countries immune to random shootings, but it cuts down on them enormously."


Can you give us a description of the education, health, and welfare systems you are criticizing? Tell us about it. How does it work?

Also, can you tell us what set of criminals you are using as a sample set? Can you tell us about their education, health care, and welfare experience? How does their experience support your thesis? What specific services did these people not receive? How did the lack of such specific services lead to their crimes?

Were the Port Arthur killings due to a poorly developed system of free education, health care, and welfare?


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## AshMP (Dec 30, 2009)

What happened yesterday is the height of tragedy. There are no words for what happened in that school and what happened to those _babies_.

My belief is that what this man did has nothing to do with being "too connected and yet too disengaged" -- that's too easy an excuse ... I think it has to do with him being a truly sick individual who wanted to hurt people, children ... and that has nothing to do with anyone but him. And there will be people who look to justify what happened in those 20 minutes ... but to me, it's not about him, it's about the kids and teachers that lost their lives. Period.


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## Richardcrasta (Jul 29, 2010)

Jerri Lincoln said:


> Almost all school shooters across the board have one thing in common: anti-depressants.
> 
> A little known, but deadly fact.


Very interesting, Jerri. You've studied this? Send me the link via PM if you wish.


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## Richardcrasta (Jul 29, 2010)

A. Rosaria said:


> Part of the problem is society, it makes it so much easier for the already unstable to go completely haywire. A stable person who flips may kill the one that triggered his rage, an unstable one need less to get to that point and those he kills may have nothing to do with why he got mad. The killing to kill seems to be the thing they are after. They go to an easy spot like a school, because they know they will less likely face any opposition, so they have more time to do the [crappy] thing they feel they need to do, to kill.
> 
> I say society is to blame, because we live in a system where the majority glorifies murder when one party does it and abhors it when another does it. It create a duality in people that feeds crazy in those sane, and psychotic insanity in those already crazy. We as a people have governments, containing a few hundred people, who send young men to other countries to fight X war for X cause, and they are applauded when they bomb a country to the middle ages, displacing millions, indirectly killing in the hundred of thousand, and directly killing in the ten of thousands. Innocent people die, thousands of children, and the majority of people whose government did it doesn't shed a single tear for these people.
> 
> ...


I empathize with most of this, especially how we are blind to the killings committed by our government/s in our name outside our borders, but the China stabbings information is wrong, I think: none of those stabbed DIED. http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/12/15/china-stabbing-school.html

Okay, I'm editing out the rest of this post out of respect for the moderator's caution, which I just noted.


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## Richardcrasta (Jul 29, 2010)

Ian Fraser said:


> I'm reminded of the Lenny Bruce line from the Fifties, which still remains true to this day: "Show me a mass murderer, and I'll show you someone with a 'good religious background' - every time." unquote.


Interesting. Do you have the link for this, if it's on You Tube?
Bill Maher has something similar to say, I think.


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## PaulLev (Nov 2, 2012)

WHDean said:


> Well, this puts me in an odd position. I'm not especially persuaded by these studies, but I feel obligated to defend them against the charge you're making: if you think these studies can be explained away as a confusion between causation and correlation you either (1) didn't read any of them or (2) don't know what the expression means. All the studies usually cited measured _aggression that resulted from playing the games_. You can reject their measures of aggression or you can argue that the observed increases were temporary. But to claim they mistook correlation for causation in such cases is simply wrong because they didn't measure the gaming habits of killers vs. non-killers (or some such correlation).


Not to get into a protracted discussion, and I'll keep this strictly academic and not political here, but there are basically two kinds of studies: (1) experiments, which show increases in violence in various laboratory settings, or on violence profile exams, but not in the real world over a period of time; and (2) surveys, in which violence in the real world and violence in video games shows correlation but not causation. The second kind of study is what I was referring to in my first post. You are apparently talking about the first kind of study - which, as you acknowledge, do not show any kind of violence that lasts in the real world (and, I'm adding, often show violence as a propensity as measured by various further laboratory procedures, which also have little or no connection to the real world).


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## balaspa (Dec 27, 2009)

I have.  The novel I work on between official novel projects is about a mass shooting.  However, although I have done research and tried to grasp the reasonings behind it, the fact is it is mostly about the people who survive.  It is my first novel that is more drama than horror or thriller.  I don't even know if I will ever finish the darn thing - and it will likely end up being a massive novel.


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## Jerri Kay Lincoln (Jun 18, 2011)

Richardcrasta said:


> Very interesting, Jerri. You've studied this? Send me the link via PM if you wish.


Yes, I have studied this. I used to work in an elementary school . . . call it self-preservation. I'll send you six links, but there are many more. Just because it's not well known does not mean it is not fact. I don't make stuff up . . . unless I'm writing . . . and then it's my job. Here's a quote from one of the links:

Fact: At least fourteen recent school shootings were committed by those taking or withdrawing from psychiatric drugs resulting in 109 wounded and 58 killed (in other school shootings, information about their drug use was never made public-neither confirming or refuting if they were under the influence of prescribed drugs.)


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## CaseyHollingshead (Dec 8, 2012)

It's very hard to take measure of violence as senseless as what happened in Connecticut. 

I don't think there is anything specific to blame. People have been killing one another since we first started across the African savannah so many years ago. Crimes of unbelievable cruelty happen every day and this sort of barbarism will never have any kind of end.


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## Richardcrasta (Jul 29, 2010)

Loading very slowly (could be my connection), but here's a link to a post I wrote, reacting emotionally as a father as well as a writer with a social conscience and a humorist. I heard of the killings 14 hours after they happened, and had been unaware all the time I was doing something else.

http://richardcrasta.com/newtown-school-shooting-and-whats-a-humor-writer-and-dad-to-do/

It's just my half penny (I would be flattering myself to call it two cents).


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## Becca Mills (Apr 27, 2012)

I read this article in Newsweek a while back on what are apparently thought to be the three major "types" of rampage killers. Interesting and perhaps helpful if you want to write about this sort of thing (lord knows I don't ... trouble enough sleeping last night with just the real thing to think about): 
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/07/29/aurora-shooting-what-does-a-killer-think.html

Sent from my LG-VS700 using Tapatalk 2


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## Starry Eve (Mar 10, 2011)

Does anyone have statistics on whether mass shootings have increased over the years? I hope it's still a relatively uncommon act...


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> " At least fourteen recent school shootings were committed by those taking or withdrawing from psychiatric drugs resulting in 109 wounded and 58 killed (in other school shootings, information about their drug use was never made public-neither confirming or refuting if they were under the influence of prescribed drugs."


What percentage of people taking these drugs subsequently became killers?


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## Bec (Aug 24, 2012)

I'm not going to delve into the whole gun debate - I'm an Aussie, if you know anything about recent (post-1996) Australian culture, my opinion should be obvious. 

But, I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned Jodi Picoult's novel "Nineteen Minutes" I read it a few years ago. It's about a high school shooter, his mother, his childhood friend and the friend's mother who is a judge, before, during and after the shooting. Pretty hard-core for Jodi Picoult.


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## JRTomlin (Jan 18, 2011)

R.M. Allinson said:


> I'm not going to delve into the whole gun debate - I'm an Aussie, if you know anything about recent (post-1996) Australian culture, my opinion should be obvious.
> 
> But, I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned Jodi Picoult's novel "Nineteen Minutes" I read it a few years ago. It's about a high school shooter, his mother, his childhood friend and the friend's mother who is a judge, before, during and after the shooting. Pretty hard-core for Jodi Picoult.


I'll say that I can only wish that the US would react to this as Australia did to the horrible events in Tasmania. That comment is going to get me in trouble.


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## AshMP (Dec 30, 2009)

R.M. Allinson said:


> I'm not going to delve into the whole gun debate - I'm an Aussie, if you know anything about recent (post-1996) Australian culture, my opinion should be obvious.
> 
> But, I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned Jodi Picoult's novel "Nineteen Minutes" I read it a few years ago. It's about a high school shooter, his mother, his childhood friend and the friend's mother who is a judge, before, during and after the shooting. Pretty hard-core for Jodi Picoult.


I've read the book ... it was interesting and yes, hard-core for Picoult who general deals more in the "moral" issues of things.


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## DarkScribe (Aug 30, 2012)

Cherise Kelley said:


> Sorry this image is so huge. I got it off my Facebook feed. I think this brave woman needs to be remembered, and I bet that her family would be honored if anyone chose to fictionalize her heroic story.


I knew nothing of her until this horrific event, and like you I am filled with respect and admiration for her and the other teachers and staff who died trying to protect the children. I do feel however that such devotion and courage needs no fictionalising, just recognition of her sacrifice and honouring of her memory.

Because the perpetrator died it leaves no focal point for the anger and anguish this horrendous event has aroused in so many millions of people. Not a nice thing to admit, but I would have rather he had survived to act as a target for all the rage and outrage he has triggered. In view of the fact that he would likely have been found incompetent and not paid the ultimate penalty possibly it is better this way.

I am the father of five children and now two grandchildren and this horrifies me, not just in and of itself, but at the almost certainty that there will be more such events. It won't ever happen, but rather than the murderer being front page all over the world, talked about for months, images of people spitting on his body then his grave might stop those who aspire to a "Famous" end when they are driven to suicide.
Such people need to be more aware of the disgust they engender than the notoriety.

Addendum: I was going to reduce the image size, but then I reconsidered. Her image should not be made smaller.


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## CraigInOregon (Aug 6, 2010)

Sicklove and others,

Mass murderers like the shooter at Clackamas Town Center last Tuesday (literally my backyard) and in Connecticut this past Friday, are one type of killer.

Serial killers are similar but, below the surface comparisons of "both are people who kill others," very different types of killers.

I've read my share of true crime over the course of my life.

It's an odd reading habit that not everyone understands; there are times where I think people would be less shocked if you admitted, "I read erotica" than "I read true crime."

Because people can relate to being interested in sex.

To be interested or intrigued by those who take human life? Well... you'll get a lot more weird looks off reading BTK: Bind, Torture, Kill by Wenzel, Potter, Laviana and Kelly, than you get from reading 50 Shades of Gray by E.L. James.

That's just a fact of life.

And yet, without some study of the Ted Bundys of the world, how can one write a thriller than involves a villain who is that sort of monster?

Some authors have endeavored to study more deeply than others the sort of minds that do these things.

Stephen King, under his Bachman pseudonym, explored classroom violence and mass murder in his 1977 book, Rage. These days, he says it's the one thing he comes closest to regretting having written.

And Thomas Harris' Silence of the Lambs was a rather penetrating study on the nature of evil, and the conflict between the rationalists/scientific view versus the spiritual evil view... in print, it was, anyway.

But then the characters became so popular that everything Harris wrote after that made Lecter into an anti-hero. Sometimes even a hero. Ugh.

It's odd territory, true... 

Yet there are certain types of stories one can't write without knowing some of this stuff.

It's a territory I'm treading toward with EyeCU... I won't say how, but I do have a character in my upcoming novel that would fit into the serial killer boundary more than the mass murderer boundary.

It's a tough character to write, even though I've done enough research to write the character.

Because this character's mind is a dark, dark place. And as a writer, I spend time there whenever I'm writing about this character.

The hope is that the entertainment produced makes the effort worthwhile.

Why?

Well, here's the real issue...

We will never EVER know... not really... what drove people like Jake Roberts or Adam Lanza to do what they did.

That's where fiction can't be stranger than truth. Fiction has to offer up more insight, more resolution, more of a "why" than real life will ever be obligated to reveal.

That's why, 130 years after he stalked the streets of Whitechapel, some people are still fascinated by the crimes of Jack the Ripper... because he was never caught, so we'll never know the truth.

And I think we yearn for some sort of insight, something that will make it easier to get back to our daily routine, and not worry constantly, "Am I safe going to a shopping mall? "Am I safe sending my kid to school?"

Just stray, late-night thoughts... nothing cohesive, I imagine, LOL.


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## Writerly Writer (Jul 19, 2012)

Well firstly the guy who committed this crime a) has autism which means he has trouble with empathy and notions of other people's world views. Which allows a person to be detached from the preservation of other peoples feelings. But he also had a personality disorder. Which probably had the most impact when he made the decision to go on that 'spree". It wasn't premeditated like Columbine so he had the gun at hand. If he hasn't had the gun what would he have used? The truth is that even if he used a cleaver or a knife there still would not have been as many deaths as there were in my opinion. I just don't think we can totally absolutely blame society for someone who is already biologically setup for this kind of breakdown.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

KJCOLT said:


> Well firstly the guy who committed this crime a) has autism .... But he also had a personality disorder.


Do we know this for a fact? Or is there only speculation....I've seen speculation but no confirmation....

Betsy


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## Nathalie Hamidi (Jul 9, 2011)

KJCOLT said:


> Well firstly the guy who committed this crime a) has autism which means he has trouble with empathy and notions of other people's world views. Which allows a person to be detached from the preservation of other peoples feelings. But he also had a personality disorder. Which probably had the most impact when he made the decision to go on that 'spree". It wasn't premeditated like Columbine so he had the gun at hand. If he hasn't had the gun what would he have used? The truth is that even if he used a cleaver or a knife there still would not have been as many deaths as there were in my opinion. I just don't think we can totally absolutely blame society for someone who is already biologically setup for this kind of breakdown.


I'm stopping you right there. Let's not make generalizations. There is a big difference between being autistic and a sociopath. Let's not offend 1 in 88 people.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

You're right, Nathalie....In my post, I was going to go on to say I know both people with autism and people with personality disorders and they haven't committed any crimes...I should have done so.

At this point, it seems to me that what we know keeps changing.... It's a difficult story, and we all have opinions. Let's all take care to not cause more harm by inflicting pain on our KindleBoards friends and family while discussing this.

Betsy


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## AshMP (Dec 30, 2009)

I agree with you Betsy.  As I said in on the other thread about this topic, our natural inclination as human-beings is to make sense of the senseless, to fit what happened into a box that is the right size so we feel like we can harness some control and that makes moving forward less scary. When we *think* we understand, when we feel like we have all the answers, we believe we can snuff this sort of tragedy out entirely.

We can't always do that.  It's rarely a simply fix.  Something in that family went terribly wrong -- and the scariest thing about that is that's something that just happens sometimes.  People lose control.  And that can happen to anyone and I don't believe, as horrible as this sounds, that we'll ever be able to skirt that entirely.  If someone is going to "snap" ... then nothing in the world is going to stop that from happening.  Some people are just too gone.


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## Jerri Kay Lincoln (Jun 18, 2011)

TURN OFF THE NEWS.......

Morgan Freeman's brilliant take on what happened yesterday :

"You want to know why. This may sound cynical, but here's why.

It's because of the way the media reports it. Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single *victim* of Columbine? Disturbed
people who would otherwise just off themselves in their basements see the news and want to top it by doing something worse, and going out in a memorable way. Why a grade school? Why children? Because he'll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.

CNN's article says that if the body count "holds up", this will rank as the second deadliest shooting behind Virginia Tech, as if statistics somehow make one shooting worse than another. Then they post a video interview of third-graders for all the details of what they saw and heard while the shootings were happening. Fox News has plastered the killer's face on all their reports for hours. Any articles or news stories yet that focus on the victims and ignore the killer's identity? None that I've seen yet. Because they don't sell. So congratulations, sensationalist media, you've just lit the fire for someone to top this and knock off a day care center or a maternity ward next.

You can help by forgetting you ever read this man's name, and remembering the name of at least one victim. You can help by donating to mental health research instead of pointing to gun control as the problem. You can help by turning off the news."


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## Guest (Dec 16, 2012)

Not Morgan Freeman's quote.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

sicklove said:


> Not Morgan Freeman's quote.


You're right, there's no evidence that Morgan Freeman said that. Or didn't say it, for that matter, as far as I know--has he or a spokesperson said anything?

Snopes is trying to keep up with all the rumors and false information being posted about this tragedy:
http://www.snopes.com/politics/guns/newtown.asp

Betsy


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## Richardcrasta (Jul 29, 2010)

Jerri Lincoln said:


> TURN OFF THE NEWS.......
> 
> Morgan Freeman's brilliant take on what happened yesterday :
> 
> ...


Thanks, Jerri, for being passionate about this and standing for something.
I was taking Paxil and similar drugs for years. I killed or physically hurt no one (well, if I did kill someone, would I tell you? what a silly thing to say), but I remember being moody, dazed, not in control. And every withdrawal, despite the promises that these drugs were "non-addictive", had painful consequences. Above all, I made bad decisions for which I am still paying. I have written part of the story in my autobiographical book, TKOAA.

Did psychiatrists recklessly prescribe new SSRI antidepressants as miracle drugs? Yes. Were they bribed by the drug companies to do it? Yes, I know, because I was close to someone in the system.

So, it's more complicated than good and evil. It's an entire corrupt and unjust system that needs to be reformed by a brave leader, a brave and visionary leader who can inspire and who is afraid of nothing at all, and eats his opponents for breakfast. A Lincoln, a Martin Luther King, an FDR, a Winston Churchill, perhaps.


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## Guest (Dec 16, 2012)

Richardcrasta said:


> So, it's more complicated than good and evil. It's an entire corrupt and unjust system that needs to be reformed by a brave leader, a brave and visionary leader who can inspire and who is afraid of nothing at all, and eats his opponents for breakfast. A Lincoln, a Martin Luther King, an FDR, a Winston Churchill, perhaps.


If it is the system, I think it would be as likely a mass revolt by the people that fixes it as a single 'leader'. I mean if the drugs are a big part of it, what if awareness became widespread enough that most of the customers stopped buying? That would be a bigger blow to the companies than one leader fighting against them could likely deliver.

Regardless of how much drugs are responsible for these killings, I do think modern society has become far too dependent on pharmaceuticals. I mean, I've never had a prescription in my life besides cold medication and I'm sure people could do with a lot less medication than the average today.


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## Sapphire (Apr 24, 2012)

I, too, get very upset with the news media sensationalizing these SICK EVIL people as heroes.  However, so far I think they have been doing less of it this time than usual (still too much though).  They're also running short profiles on some of this victims, brave school officials, beautiful and innocent children, grieving parents.  I do wish they'd quit trying to interview other students.  This is entirely inappropriate!


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## MegSilver (Feb 26, 2012)

Jerri Lincoln said:


> TURN OFF THE NEWS.......
> 
> Morgan Freeman's brilliant take on what happened yesterday :


Historical reference to Damnatio memoriae


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## JETaylor (Jan 25, 2011)

I am having a really tough time getting a handle on my emotions relating to this event. There is no reasonable explaination that can make us understand why these children died.  None.  And that's why every so often I find myself in tears. 

We haven't had the television on except to watch christmas specials or movies since Friday because it's too hard to listen to the speculation - and right now that's the bigger part of what is being broadcast.

The heroics of the teachers like Victoria Soto should be broadcast far and wide and it is to a point - but the killer is still getting air time.  

The facination with the why is what keeps the killer in the limelight and that's why the television isn't on.  A part of me wants to watch to see if there is an answer - but there isn't. 

I did take a look at the victim list so I'd remember their names and faces and say a prayer for their families to find strength and peace.


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## BrianKittrell (Jan 8, 2011)

I agree with the quote--whoever originally said it--and I think it's a major factor. Look at the presidential assassins. Most had their political reasons, but several admitted to doing it for fame. Most had diagnosed mental illness or symptoms of it. Whether the news is to blame as the sole contributor remains to be seen. It's two edges of the same sword: either they report the news or someone else will. Newsmen bring home the proverbial bacon by reporting stories accurately, adequately, and quickly. Drop any one of those three things, and they'll be looking for another job.

I think people need to look at history before jumping to conclusions and blaming all of these things for people's actions. There are people who refuse to take responsibility for their own actions or absolutely refuse to assign the blame to the person who did these things. We want to blame everything and everyone except the one who actually pulled the trigger. Video games, movies, books, and even the weapons themselves.

Here's proof that it doesn't take video games and movies to create a psychopath: http://thepirata.com/top-mass-murderers-in-history/ (#15 is one of those that are debatable. I don't know what I would've done in Truman's shoes, but I know that I'm glad I didn't have to make that call.)
Take the events in Connecticut and think about the numbers discussed in the article. The shooter in Connecticut killed 26 people, then himself. No one on the list at that link killed less than a hundred thousand people, either by their own hand or by signed order. Men, women, and children, slaughtered by the millions. And no one on that list ever played Grand Theft Auto or Dungeons and Dragons*. I suppose that we could say that Grand Theft Auto and Dungeons and Dragons has produced far less mass murderers than, say, living in Asia?

* As far as I know. I can't imagine Slobodan Milosevic rolling d20s between meetings on how to best murder all of the Muslims in Serbia, but you never know.

The line between correlation and causation is very important to consider. All mass murderers have had a glass of water at least once in their lives. Innocuous, perhaps, but look at gun ownership. Lots of people own guns in the United States. Do we all, upon acquiring the gun, go on a shooting rampage? Of course not.

I could support tighter controls on guns that actually did something to stop things like this. An assault weapons ban won't do that. New laws have very little chance of keeping anything like this from happening because laws are passive devices. They rely upon three things: 1) the citizen obeying, 2) the citizens who don't obey being caught, and 3) the agents of the law enforcing it. If any one of these fails, the law is just another patchwork fix that has more possibility of hurting the ones it was meant to protect. (Look at DRM and how it punishes legal purchasers considerably more than pirates, for instance.)

I haven't heard if there was one present, but we--in my city and county--employ specialized police officers who are placed at the schools. School resource officers. Their only job is to patrol the school, deal with incidents on school property, and investigate rumors of violence, etc. If there was one at Newtown, CT, it has not been made apparent at this time. However, I'm leaning toward the probability that there was not one because they probably would've reported that by now. Had there been one, I doubt this would've played out in the same fashion. Optimally, the school officer would've neutralized the shooter immediately. Worst case, the shooter would've neutralized the officer and then gone on his rampage. But I can promise you that the only thing on the mind of those school resource officers in situations like these is keeping those babies safe.

I know it's an extra expense for already-strained police and education budgets, but it's worth the officer's salary to have a deterrent like that at the school in the first place. It's a small price to pay to increase the safety of the schools. That's why we have them here and will continue to keep them.


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## Beatriz (Feb 22, 2011)

sicklove said:


> As an artist and soon-to-be author, my world has been shaken by the tragic events in Connecticut.
> 
> I see these shootings as someone taking the #fml mentality to the extreme, where it becomes #fyl as these people explode. Their private pain becoming a public wound on the face of humanity itself.
> 
> ...


We were all shaken by the tragic events and no, even as a writer I couldn't find any justification for this evil monster who at least had the decency to kill himself at the end. He was a maniac and his mother was paranoid, arming herself to the teeth to "protect herself with the economy turning" This is madness and she paid the ultimate price, that said, this maniac didn't just wake up one morning and said I'm going to kill my mother and kill everybody at the school. This was coming for a long time. This sick dude must have always been a gigantic problem and should have been committed a long time ago, unfortunately that wasn't done and twenty innocent angels paid for it, to say nothing of the heroic adults who tried to save them.


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## B. Justin Shier (Apr 1, 2011)

Roger Ebert said something similar years ago:



> Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.
> 
> The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."
> 
> In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.


http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?aid=/20031107/reviews/311070301/1023

B.


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## Caddy (Sep 13, 2011)

I have nothing much to say except since this event my stomach has ached badly and I find myself crying at different times. All of the questions we ask, and all of the answer we try to come up with, do nothing to change the horrible tragedy of it. That makes it hard to process. It just keeps spinning around in there. Humanity can be so beautiful, yet it can be so horrific. Every person, every act affects each individual somehow. Inside we all wither a little more every time something like this happens.


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## Guest (Dec 16, 2012)

BrianKittrell said:


> I haven't heard if there was one present, but we--in my city and county--employ specialized police officers who are placed at the schools. School resource officers. Their only job is to patrol the school, deal with incidents on school property, and investigate rumors of violence, etc. If there was one at Newtown, CT, it has not been made apparent at this time. However, I'm leaning toward the probability that there was not one because they probably would've reported that by now. Had there been one, I doubt this would've played out in the same fashion. Optimally, the school officer would've neutralized the shooter immediately. Worst case, the shooter would've neutralized the officer and then gone on his rampage. But I can promise you that the only thing on the mind of those school resource officers in situations like these is keeping those babies safe.
> 
> I know it's an extra expense for already-strained police and education budgets, but it's worth the officer's salary to have a deterrent like that at the school in the first place. It's a small price to pay to increase the safety of the schools. That's why we have them here and will continue to keep them.


I also had a thought, though probably impractical, that teachers could be given gun training and carry weapons... at the very least though, those licensed to should be _allowed_ to carry weapons. Whatever it takes, I'd just like to see more of these scumbag school shooters shot dead themselves before being able to kill anyone (or not that many people) instead of goddamn _succeeding_ like they usually do.


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## Michael Murray (Oct 31, 2011)

What happened sounds like a schizophrenic undergoing a psychotic break to me.

When I think of blaming the media I think of Ken Kesey- One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, for promoting the idea that people with serious mental illness are just misunderstood. Sometimes people actually have chemical imbalances that make them think and do things that no sane person would do. We still have a real problem recognizing mental illness and getting the afflicted treatment for it - once they are 18 the law considers them adults and if they say they want to stop taking their meds, that is their right. So you have to try to convince someone whose disease tells them society is out to get them and that their parents and best friends are lying to them that they should take their meds. That isn't easy.

I guess it could be the de-sensitization from games or military training makes it easier for a mentally ill person to cross the line from thinking violent thoughts to actually committing them. Definitely easy access to guns makes someone undergoing a psychotic break more dangerous.

I'm not at all sure though that there is more of this now than there was 100 years ago - people who were more or less considered normal by 'society' certainly committed mass murder and extreme violence 100 years ago - though it tended to be against Native Americans and African Americans. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_Wiyot_Massacre


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## Michael Murray (Oct 31, 2011)

T.L. Haddix said:


> I hope this doesn't come too close to political...
> 
> The reason the US welfare system is such a mess is because it isn't designed to help people through support at difficult times, so they can get back on their feet. It's designed to suppress and keep them dependent. It's nearly impossible to break free from the system once you're in it. And that suppression results in the birth of desperation, which leads to hopelessness, which leads to all kinds of issues. Until the welfare system is reformed, that won't change.


With mentally ill, its actually the opposite. The current US system is quite aggressive at trying to mainstream them, even in cases where every attempt to mainstream the afflicted person leads to a new psychotic break.


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## Jerri Kay Lincoln (Jun 18, 2011)

sicklove said:


> Not Morgan Freeman's quote.


You're right. Snopes says he did not say that.

However, I still think the statement is valid no matter who said it. Sensationalizing violence is not a way to stop it.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

PaulLev said:


> Not to get into a protracted discussion, and I'll keep this strictly academic and not political here, but there are basically two kinds of studies: (1) experiments, which show increases in violence in various laboratory settings, or on violence profile exams, but not in the real world over a period of time; and (2) surveys, in which violence in the real world and violence in video games shows correlation but not causation. The second kind of study is what I was referring to in my first post. You are apparently talking about the first kind of study - which, as you acknowledge, do not show any kind of violence that lasts in the real world (and, I'm adding, often show violence as a propensity as measured by various further laboratory procedures, which also have little or no connection to the real world).


I've never seen a scientific study that linked videogame violence to mass murder, and I find it a little hard to believe that anyone would've done one, given the small sample size. So I have to say that I smell a strawman here-though I could be wrong.

At any rate, this line of inquiry can't be dismissed with a wave of the hand. Morality is learned behaviour. People are socialized to be non-violent and they can be socialized (or un-socialized) to be violent. It's no less plausible to suggest that people learn from videogames than it is to suggest that they learn from books, music, TV, their peers, and their parents. Actually, it's a fact that they learn from all these things, so the only real question is how much influence videogames have.



B. Justin Shier said:


> Roger Ebert said something similar years ago:
> 
> http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?aid=/20031107/reviews/311070301/1023
> 
> B.


So Roger Ebert doesn't know the _Basketball Diaries _ has a cult following among the sort of disenfranchised teenagers who engage in anti-social behaviour? Methinks he doth protest too much.


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## Nathalie Hamidi (Jul 9, 2011)

Michael Murray said:


> What happened sounds like a schizophrenic undergoing a psychotic break to me.
> 
> When I think of blaming the media I think of Ken Kesey- One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, for promoting the idea that people with serious mental illness are just misunderstood. Sometimes people actually have chemical imbalances that make them think and do things that no sane person would do. We still have a real problem recognizing mental illness and getting the afflicted treatment for it - once they are 18 the law considers them adults and if they say they want to stop taking their meds, that is their right. So you have to try to convince someone whose disease tells them society is out to get them and that their parents and best friends are lying to them that they should take their meds. That isn't easy.
> 
> ...


Again, let's not pass judgement too easily. Do you know about schizophrenia?
People with schizophrenia are more likely to hurt themselves than others. Violence against others is reported to be most likely combined with drug abuse.
Please, do not throw stereotypes or misinformation around, please please please.


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## Ian Fraser (Mar 8, 2011)

Seeing as 'Basketball Diaries' was mentioned, another film that's definitely worth watching is Gus Van Sant's 'Elephant.'

The point should perhaps be made that while some are saying 'something terribly wrong happened with that family' - that's making an assumption that the society itself is healthy to begin with. I'd beg to differ. Judging from the levels of alienation and frustration evident amongst US youth (and older), facing futures that are only tolerable at best, its fairly clear that the public shooting phenomena will continue as individuals misguidedly try to rail against a system which is not fulfilling or nourishing. There is a price to be paid for living in a society predicated on consumerism, militarism, materialism, and the desire for fame: the slaves will revolt.

It is also no coincidence that the Pentagon often works hand in hand with the makers of many first person shooter games - both to churn out cannon fodder for the Army, desensitize youth against killing, and to improve accuracy of firing. (Taxpayer money paid for the FPS 'America's Army.') There are studies out there looking at the 'kill' ratio of public shooters - which tends to be higher than that of soldiers in uniform. This is something that can only have been achieved by playing video games relentlessly - exactly as those in the Pentagon have wanted. Like I said, rampant militarism...


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## Michael Murray (Oct 31, 2011)

Nathalie Hamidi said:


> Again, let's not pass judgement too easily. Do you know about schizophrenia?
> People with schizophrenia are more likely to hurt themselves than others. Violence against others is reported to be most likely combined with drug abuse.
> Please, do not throw stereotypes or misinformation around, please please please.


Yes, I do. Doesn't what happened sound like a psychotic break to you? Esp. the first one where no one knows what it is or how to handle it?

I 100% agree that very few people with schizophrenia hurt others.

I also think this shooter was mentally ill and if that had been recognized and treated, there is a very high likely hood that the shootings would not have happened. If people don't talk about the symptoms for fear of offending, they won't recognize them and they won't try to get the afflicted treatment.


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## Nathalie Hamidi (Jul 9, 2011)

Michael Murray said:


> Yes, I do. Doesn't what happened sound like a psychotic break to you? Esp. the first one where no one knows what it is or how to handle it?
> 
> I 100% agree that very few people with schizophrenia hurt others.
> 
> I also think this shooter was mentally ill and if that had been recognized and treated, there is a very high likely hood that the shootings would not have happened. If people don't talk about the symptoms for fear of offending, they won't recognize them and they won't try to get the afflicted treatment.


Since I'm not an MD, I avoid giving people a diagnosis, most of all people I have never met. 
It's not a case where I don't want people saying he was schizophrenic, if he was. Or autistic. It's me begging people not to make assumptions.


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## Nathalie Hamidi (Jul 9, 2011)

T.L. Haddix said:


> I understand what you're saying, and why you're saying it - being cautious here is important. But Michael has a good point about people needing to become more familiar with the dangerous symptoms of mental illness. Until the mainstream population understands that mental illness isn't a cloak sufferers can shrug off at whim, things won't change.
> 
> For example, how many people here know that schizophrenia is actually a different kind of mental illness than say depression? It is (or was, it's been a few years so forgive me if this is outdated) considered an organic mental illness. Just like Alzheimer's. There is no amount of cognitive behavior therapy or psychoanalysis that is going to make something like schizophrenia go away. The brain chemistry, and possibly/probably the brain structure itself, is just different and dysfunctional.


You're right, and I wish there would be more awareness about schizophrenia - or autism (which by the way are not the same thing at all, despite what French psycho-analysts may say).
I agree that people should (for the lack of a better word, sorry if I'm not being clear enough) know the signs and be able to help or at least raise a flag for someone else to act.

Yet you don't see a lot of schizophrenic|autistic people going around and murdering people. What I'm saying is, let's be cautious, let's not give diagnoses, let's try to stay on facts and not generalize. I would hate for people saying "oh, all autistics are mass murderers" - and I feel strongly about that because my sons are autistic. And I would hate for people thinking that all schizophrenic people are a danger to others, because it's not truer than saying that all soccer players|black|gay|orphaned|jewish|people are XYZ (I'll let you choose what).

What is true is that is one person that had probably some mental problems or chemical imbalance, at least temporarily. I wish it wouldn't be reduced to a diagnosis because it encompasses other people that are innocent.


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## Guest (Dec 16, 2012)

I feel responsible to use my imagination in a way to help other people. The thing that comes to mind that may provide a way for family members, survivors, and people touched by this around the world, is a book that would really encourage people to treat each other better. Care for each other, get to know your neighbors. Get people more active in including other people in their lives. In our new hyper-connected world, obviously people are becoming disconnected. In one of the interviews, one of the neighbors mentioned how they were the only family they didn't know.


Has anyone tried to approach these mass-shootings as not a gun control issue, or a mental health issue, but rooted within the society we've created ourselves?
If you live in a country full of easy-access guns and unkind hearts, mass murders become commonplace.


In my mind, I can imagine how some awkward kid could get bullied to the point where he loathes everyone and everything. Add in our "man up" culture, our tendencies to stigmatize people feeling down or quiet, constant put-downs and/or neglect from family, and I think it's a recipe for the modern day monster. One look at YouTube comments can almost drive anyone into wondering where we went wrong. Sites like 4Chan showcase the ragged edge of metamodernism. How much more evidence do you need of these shooters adopting a "villain" approach to life itself, than how the Aurora shooter dressed up and dyed his hair? The Virginia Tech shooter's self-portrait?


If people don't start to seriously examine the ways we frivolously act towards community, manners, mental health and social isolation, I think more of these events will continue to occur.


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## Michael Murray (Oct 31, 2011)

Good links these:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/i-am-adam-lanzas-mother-mental-illness-conversation_n_2311009.html

http://apt.rcpsych.org/content/12/4/239.full


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## R. Doug (Aug 14, 2010)

If the availability (or unavailability) of guns were the root cause, Switzerland would be one of the deadliest places on Earth and Mexico one of the safest.


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## CraigInOregon (Aug 6, 2010)

Okay, I need to share some more thoughts on this thread, because it's taking an ugly turn or two.

1) About autism.

My wife has spent the last several years working with autistic clients. (She's finishing off a master's degree in clinical counseling.) We were both grieved to hear the CT shooter might have autism because of how it would cause uninformed folks to generalize about those with autism.

Here's a couple paragraphs from Wikipedia about it:



> Autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior. The diagnostic criteria require that symptoms become apparent before a child is three years old.[2] Autism affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their synapses connect and organize; how this occurs is not well understood.[3] It is one of three recognized disorders in the autism spectrum (ASDs), the other two being Asperger syndrome, which lacks delays in cognitive development and language, and pervasive developmental disorder, not otherwise specified (commonly abbreviated as PDD-NOS), which is diagnosed when the full set of criteria for autism or Asperger syndrome are not met.[4]
> 
> Autism has a strong genetic basis, although the genetics of autism are complex and it is unclear whether ASD is explained more by rare mutations, or by rare combinations of common genetic variants.[5] In rare cases, autism is strongly associated with agents that cause birth defects.[6] Controversies surround other proposed environmental causes, such as heavy metals, pesticides or childhood vaccines;[7] the vaccine hypotheses are biologically implausible and lack convincing scientific evidence.[8] The prevalence of autism is about 1-2 per 1,000 people worldwide, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report 11 per 1,000 children in the United States are diagnosed with ASD as of 2008.[7][9][10] The number of people diagnosed with autism has increased dramatically since the 1980s, partly due to changes in diagnostic practice; the question of whether actual prevalence has increased is unresolved.[11]


The bottom line on autism is that there are varying degrees of the condition, but the worst bit that autism is attributed to contributing to are: aggressive behavior, temper tantrums and destruction of property. The harming of others or the taking of life is just as rare in autistic children, however, as it is in non-autistics.

The most common problems are simply communication difficulties and socialization awkwardness. Not violence.

So, please, don't lump all people with autism into some "gunman in waiting" stereotype. It's just not so.

2. About videogames.

Everyone's favorite whipping post gets brought up again as a "contributing factor." But so far, I've not read any reports that indicate that either Jake Roberts or Adam Lanza were even exposed to videogames at all. So this is a case of bringing out a favorite excuse/whipping post as a "cause" -- in this case, without even knowing whether Roberts or Lanza were gamers.

In the case of Roberts, from what I've heard, he was far more into the "party scene" locally than videogames. He admitted on his Facebook that he enjoyed getting drunk on a regular basis. So, anyone want to bring back Prohibition based on that?

Look, the most popular videogames sell MILLIONS of copies, and we get, what, three major US spree shootings in the past year? So, if videogames were the actual "cause," why did only three people in roughly the same age group go on sprees? Why don't we see millions of such cases?

What I will say is that among the TV shows and movies I've watched in the past month, I *know* I've seen at least a half-dozen "bad guys" go on shooting rampages and then eat a bullet themselves in front of cops trying to arrest them.

Two of the three major US spree shooters in the past year... Roberts and Lanza... ended their sprees with their own suicides. Only James Holmes in Aurora, CO, did not. Should we cite those TV shows and movies as the cause of that?

Now, surely, someone will speak up and say, "No one's saying everyone who plays videogames is a psychopathic killer, or turns people into one, but SURELY you can agree that videogames don't help."

Well, neither do a lot of things.

How about TV news that is flooded only with reports of violent crime? How about the ready availability of online porn, including the violent stuff?

I mean, Ted Bundy never had videogames or online porn or any number of factors people love to cite as "causes." (Back in the 1950s, the whipping boy was EC Horror Comics, and the worst thing THEY inspired was a young Stephen King into becoming the premiere horror novelist of his generation.)

But Bundy, in an interview with Focus on the Family just before his execution, tried to blame access to "a few Playboys" as a child as the reason he became a serial killer.

So anyone want to outlaw boobs? 

I'm not trying to be overly ridiculous here, but the point is, people want simple answers and there are none.

As for the "X doesn't help these borderline people" argument, my last bit of argumentation is this. A lot of things can set off "borderline people" and if you remove stimulus A, B, and C, then all that changes is that it becomes stimulus D, E, and F that set them off.

It's not easy to predict who's going to go on a killing spree. If it were easy, they could just round up the budding little psychos at the age of 10 or so, before they move from harming animals into harming people, lock them up, and throw away the key.

If anyone thinks predicting who will become the next spree killer or serial killer is simple... go ahead... try it. Let's see your batting average, bub!  And you better be right, long BEFORE they actually go on their spree.

Let's stop searching for simple answers and easy scapegoats, shall we?


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## PaulLev (Nov 2, 2012)

WHDean said:


> Morality is learned behaviour. People are socialized to be non-violent and they can be socialized (or un-socialized) to be violent. It's no less plausible to suggest that people learn from videogames than it is to suggest that they learn from books, music, TV, their peers, and their parents. Actually, it's a fact that they learn from all these things, so the only real question is how much influence videogames have.


The question about videogames has been answered in the lack of evidence that videogames cause violence in the real world. As to what does cause it? Most psychologists say that it's a complex matrix of real life events and propensities, not what we see in the movies or play in videogames.


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## Sapphire (Apr 24, 2012)

BK refers to a need for police officers as school resource officers. He states if one had been present, he could have stopped the killing. In our city, most school districts do have a resource officer assigned to each school. One could not stop such an incident though. Why? Because they are not allowed to be armed on school property.


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## Justawriter (Jul 24, 2012)

Guns are only part of the problem. Nancy Lanza probably didn't make a good decision when she chose to bring multiple guns into the house, including two semi-automatic weapons...and then repeatedly took her sons to the range and showed them how to shoot.

The rumors are swirling about what Adam Lanza suffered from, Bipolar disorder, autism, adhd. He had a high IQ and was considered a 'goth' who had violent tendencies and a record that went way back.

The scariest thing about Adam was that it sounds like he was seriously mentally ill...a ticking time bomb waiting to go off.

Do video games and violent movies both glorify and desensitize kids to violence, even to the point of making it exciting? Yeah, I think so. It certainly doesn't help. Remember the chilling movie, Natural Born Killers? About teens who went on a killing spree...just for the thrill of it? I never saw the movie, the idea of it sickened me...but I was saddened and not at all surprised to hear of multiple copy cat killings after the movie was released.

But, the saddest, and ultimately scariest thing is that there are many more Adams out there. This article is making its way around Facebook and the most chilling part of it is the comments section, where not one or two, but many other mothers are chiming in saying they have an 'Adam' like child at home, and they don't know what to do about it. A child that is sweet as pie one moment, whose IQ is off the charts, but who can suddenly switch into the bad zone, when the eyes go cold and rage takes over and they threaten to kill their parents or siblings.

This is what we need to fix first....From the Huffington post piece,

Three days before 20 year-old Adam Lanza killed his mother, then opened fire on a classroom full of Connecticut kindergartners, my 13-year old son Michael (name changed) missed his bus because he was wearing the wrong color pants.

"I can wear these pants," he said, his tone increasingly belligerent, the black-hole pupils of his eyes swallowing the blue irises.

"They are navy blue," I told him. "Your school's dress code says black or khaki pants only."

"They told me I could wear these," he insisted. "You're a stupid bitch. I can wear whatever pants I want to. This is America. I have rights!"

"You can't wear whatever pants you want to," I said, my tone affable, reasonable. "And you definitely cannot call me a stupid bitch. You're grounded from electronics for the rest of the day. Now get in the car, and I will take you to school."

I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me.

A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7 and 9 year old siblings knew the safety plan -- they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me. Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me.

That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room. The mental hospital didn't have any beds that day, and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a prescription for Zyprexa and a follow-up visit with a local pediatric psychiatrist.

We still don't know what's wrong with Michael. Autism spectrum, ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all been tossed around at various meetings with probation officers and social workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He's been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.

At the start of seventh grade, Michael was accepted to an accelerated program for highly gifted math and science students. His IQ is off the charts. When he's in a good mood, he will gladly bend your ear on subjects ranging from Greek mythology to the differences between Einsteinian and Newtonian physics to Doctor Who. He's in a good mood most of the time. But when he's not, watch out. And it's impossible to predict what will set him off.

Several weeks into his new junior high school, Michael began exhibiting increasingly odd and threatening behaviors at school. We decided to transfer him to the district's most restrictive behavioral program, a contained school environment where children who can't function in normal classrooms can access their right to free public babysitting from 7:30-1:50 Monday through Friday until they turn 18.

The morning of the pants incident, Michael continued to argue with me on the drive. He would occasionally apologize and seem remorseful. Right before we turned into his school parking lot, he said, "Look, Mom, I'm really sorry. Can I have video games back today?"

"No way," I told him. "You cannot act the way you acted this morning and think you can get your electronic privileges back that quickly."

His face turned cold, and his eyes were full of calculated rage. "Then I'm going to kill myself," he said. "I'm going to jump out of this car right now and kill myself."

That was it. After the knife incident, I told him that if he ever said those words again, I would take him straight to the mental hospital, no ifs, ands, or buts. I did not respond, except to pull the car into the opposite lane, turning left instead of right.
"Where are you taking me?" he said, suddenly worried. "Where are we going?"

"You know where we are going," I replied.

"No! You can't do that to me! You're sending me to hell! You're sending me straight to hell!"

I pulled up in front of the hospital, frantically waiving for one of the clinicians who happened to be standing outside. "Call the police," I said. "Hurry."

rest here, along with the comments, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/16/i-am-adam-lanzas-mother-mental-illness-conversation_n_2311009.html


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## Lily_T (Sep 25, 2011)

Here's the thing.

You'll never know.

*Ever*.

And that what makes mass murderers stand out in people's mind. That NYTimes analysis I posted earlier pegged the number of American mass murderers at 102 between 1949 and 2000.

102. Out of ~300,000,000 [Excluding serial killers, who do not have the same profile as mass killers] people.

And guess what? Internationally, that rate holds up as well. Cultural and legal variations are not really significant for this subset of killers.

Think about the number of non-mass killings that happen every single year all over the country. You'll see that the number of mass killings pale in comparison. And yet we fixate on them.

When other murders happen we are able to shrug them off _(don't mean to sound callous, but we do)_ because we feel that we know why it happened. Robbery gone bad. Drug deal gone bad. Rape gone bad. We think we know why it happened and so we file it under BAD STUFF TO AVOID and move on.

But if you've been personally touched by violence, then you know that no matter what reason is given you never truly understand _why_ it happened.

Mass killings in a way turn us all into victims' families. Because we'll never know why. And because we'll never be able to formulate pat responses (don't drive in the bad side of town, avoid strange men, install alarm systems) we are left reeling, left searching for answers that will never come. Just like the mothers, fathers, siblings of all those other victims who ordinarily slip to the back of our collective minds without another thought. The arbitrary nature of mass killings forces our empathy in a way that other acts of violence do not.

And yes, some of the things people keep coming back to are factors, but they are correlations not causation. Because even if we were to create some profile that exactly matched every mass murderer then guess what?

It would also match millions of people who would never harm a fly. Millions. And one of those people might well be YOU.


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## Justawriter (Jul 24, 2012)

T.L. Haddix said:


> Pamela - you say that she shouldn't have taken her sons to learn how to shoot. But in any situation where the son wasn't disturbed, that is good parenting. Teaching your children how to safely handle firearms if you choose to own them is exactly what gun experts advise. A child who is taught gun safety and respect is much less likely to injure themselves or someone else with said weapons. Obviously, Adam Lanza is not someone who should have had any access to guns.
> 
> And also to Pamela, there is a book, which absolutely scared me to death, that ranks right up there with probably the scariest thing I've read outside of books about the Holocaust. Lisa Gardner's "Love You More." It deals with exactly the situation you describe, but it's fiction.


I agree about learning respect for guns. Also agree that Adam never should have been around them, given his history. Both my brother and father have guns, rifles and pistols, but not semi-automatic weapons. Can anyone explain to me why anyone would ever possibly need such a weapon?

I actually read that Lisa Gardner book! I've read all her books, she's a local author who is very supportive of other authors and if you ever met her you'd be amazed that she writes such dark books, she's such a sweetheart. That book was very scary.


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## Guest (Dec 17, 2012)

PamelaKelley said:


> Can anyone explain to me why anyone would ever possibly need such a weapon?


To overthrow the government...


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## valeriec80 (Feb 24, 2011)

PamelaKelley said:


> Remember the chilling movie, Natural Born Killers? About teens who went on a killing spree...just for the thrill of it? I never saw the movie, the idea of it sickened me...but I was saddened and not at all surprised to hear of multiple copy cat killings after the movie was released.


Natural Born Killers is a satire, and it essentially points out why it's disgusting to glorify killers on the news.

It's unfortunate that people don't understand satire all the time, but then people thought Jonathan Swift was actually advocating eating babies, so... I guess that's never going to stop.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> Again, let's not pass judgement too easily. Do you know about schizophrenia?
> People with schizophrenia are more likely to hurt themselves than others. Violence against others is reported to be most likely combined with drug abuse. Please, do not throw stereotypes or misinformation around, please please please.


How about a poster in red, white, and blue showing schizophrenics' crimes by nation?



> TURN OFF THE NEWS.......


But keep this thread going?



> Can anyone explain to me why anyone would ever possibly need such a weapon?


To protect one's self and family during the ten minutes it takes the cops to respond. Note the police do not have a constitutional obligation to protect people from harm. We have no right to such protection.

"_The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the police did not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm, even a woman who had obtained a court-issued protective order against a violent husband making an arrest mandatory for a violation_."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/28scotus.html


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## BrianKittrell (Jan 8, 2011)

glutton said:


> I also had a thought, though probably impractical, that teachers could be given gun training and carry weapons... at the very least though, those licensed to should be _allowed_ to carry weapons. Whatever it takes, I'd just like to see more of these scumbag school shooters shot dead themselves before being able to kill anyone (or not that many people) instead of goshdarm _succeeding_ like they usually do.


Well, the propensity for accidental shootings would increase. It could also have the unintended result of supplying an attacker with more ammunition or more weapons since, let's face it, teachers might not be the best at self-defense or tactical scenarios. Some of them, however, are former military, former police, and the like. Those people should be allowed to carry if they're licensed and meet a minimum requirement of competency.

For those not trained or capable, I would say that even a step down--less than lethal force--would be something worth exploring. Tasers, pepper sprays, and other such measures would, at he minimum, reduce the amount of casualties. And even if an accident happened, the likelihood of a fatality is extremely low.

I am in the process of drafting a letter to my congressman outlining a potential plan for legislation that he may or may not be willing to adapt and submit to the House. It would call for federal grants to add or increase school resource officer presence in schools, along with training willing employees in hand-to-hand self-defense and usage of less-than-lethal arms.



glutton said:


> To overthrow the government...


Precisely. The 2nd Amendment was meant to make sure that tyrannical rule couldn't last, for the people would never be defenseless against their own government. Those folks had a little experience with tyranny, oppression, and governments disarming their own people.


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## Guest (Dec 17, 2012)

T.L. Haddix said:


> Overthrowing the government? Seriously, glutton? Okay. I think it's safe to agree to disagree there.


Supposedly, that's what the right to bear arms is intended for... if the government is corrupt.


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## WHDean (Nov 2, 2011)

PaulLev said:


> The question about videogames has been answered in the lack of evidence that videogames cause violence in the real world. As to what does cause it? Most psychologists say that it's a complex matrix of real life events and propensities, not what we see in the movies or play in videogames.


Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence.

You've spent too much time on TV, because this is classic pundit boilerplate: "complex matrix of real life events and propensities, not what we see in the movies or play in videogames." What human behaviour could not be characterized in this way? And which variable could not be selected out in the same way you selected out movies and videogames?

People cry when they watch movies, they join activist groups after watching documentaries, and now and then someone confesses to a crime after watching a movie about Jesus. Oh yeah, I forgot. Only good stuff comes from watching movies...


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## CraigInOregon (Aug 6, 2010)

glutton said:


> Supposedly, that's what the right to bear arms is intended for... if the government is corrupt.


I agree on the intent of the second amendment being one that includes self-defense against corrupt government.

But, man, realistically speaking... that was before governments had tanks and nukes and bunker busters and now drones.... even if every single person in the US had an AR-15 and unlimited ammo, there's not much chance of a rebellion against the U.S. government even being slowed down by individual firearm ownership.

They could just send in a drone with a chemical weapon attached and gas you to death in your own home.... so it's really not the "balancer of power" it once was.

I'm not saying I don't support the second amendment. I do. But its utility as a protection against a tyrannical government is considerably diminished in this day and age, because the government has way more stuff, and more powerful stuff, than any of us. All you can hope for, really, is that it protects you from Mr. Rapist, Mr. Burglar, and Mr. Serial Killer... if that.

And since those folks use blitzkrieg-style "lightning strike" sudden attacks, one rarely has a chance to use a gun for personal home protection.


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## Guest (Dec 17, 2012)

Terrence OBrien said:


> "_The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that the police did not have a constitutional duty to protect a person from harm, even a woman who had obtained a court-issued protective order against a violent husband making an arrest mandatory for a violation_."
> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/28scotus.html


If any American governmental institution is outdated and creaky at the joints, it might be the Supreme Court.


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## Guest (Dec 17, 2012)

CraigInTwinCities said:


> I agree on the intent of the second amendment being one that includes self-defense against corrupt government.
> 
> But, man, realistically speaking... that was before governments had tanks and nukes and bunker busters and now drones.... even if every single person in the US had an AR-15 and unlimited ammo, there's not much chance of a rebellion against the U.S. government even begin slowed down by individual firearm ownership.
> 
> ...


This assumes that not enough of the military will join the common people's rebellion in this scenario.


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## Terrence OBrien (Oct 21, 2010)

> If any American governmental institution is outdated and creaky at the joints, it might be the Supreme Court.


Can you elaborate?


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Terrence OBrien said:


> Can you elaborate?


No, not in this thread.... Folks, we've started to circle around to gun control and political discussion again...not the purpose of this thread specifically and not allowed on KindleBoards generally.

Thanks.

Betsy


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## Guest (Dec 17, 2012)

If you missed it, President Obama's speech at the Connecticut Memorial hinted at the basis of humanity; the love for our young.


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## NathanWrann (May 5, 2011)

sicklove said:


> If you missed it, President Obama's speech at the Connecticut Memorial hinted at the basis of humanity; the love for our young.


I thought it was one of the best speeches I've ever seen in my life.


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## Nathalie Hamidi (Jul 9, 2011)

T.L. Haddix said:


> And I'm not being clear, and I do apologize. I know that the majority of schizophrenics and autistic people, which are NOT the same thing, are not a threat to others. That's the last thing I meant to suggest.
> 
> I think there needs to be widespread education, though - not just about the problems and symptoms caused by these diseases, but about the dangerous symptoms, the warning signs. I don't know what they are. How do we even find that out? Is there a specific set of things that profilers would look for?


No need to apologize, you had been perfectly clear! 
I was just continuing the debate, actually. I was not accusing you of anything: I know for a fact that out of France (and Argentina) people are in fact more informed than here in France about all this.

Thank you all for this discussion, I find that it has been most civil and even though we might have different opinions we have wrote them with care and precaution. <3


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## CraigInOregon (Aug 6, 2010)

sicklove said:


> If you missed it, President Obama's speech at the Connecticut Memorial hinted at the basis of humanity; the love for our young.


A point more eloquently made in the 1980s by Sting in his song, Russians.


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## Betsy the Quilter (Oct 27, 2008)

Locking this thread.  I've asked several times that we stay away from politics and gun control.  

Nor do I see any benefit or indeed purpose of a post insulting large groups of Americans because one disagrees with them.  Sicklove, I've removed your post; it's far afield from your stated reason for starting this thread.

I think this thread has probably run its course.  Let's all move on and work out our grief and issues with the Newtown shooting in a different way.

Betsy
KB Moderator


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