On 'spree shootings'
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One wonders how much of this is cultural contagion. Remember in earlier decades we had far more political assassinations, far more than today. Same with hi-jackings and serial killers.
One wonders if the supply of crazy people who do such things is more stable than we think, but the outlets (and resultant casualties) change with the 'fashion' of the time.
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Of course the 'fashionable methods' would change in part due to changes in the ease of pulling off the methods. Important politicians are harder to kill than before, hijackings much harder, guns easier and easier.
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I think the fact that these acts are imaginable and imagined, is an important factor. I doubt a mass shooting was ever a go to revenge fantasy for troubled young men 100 years ago. But now it’s on everybody’s mind. There’s an analogy to Overton windows, but for internal dialogues.
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That's exactly the point. Once one of these things gets thinkable, it can have quite a run.
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I mean, in the Dawkinsian sense, these are memes.
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Bombings are another example. We had a wave in the 70s. Not too often these days.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting the methods are interchangeable, and its the same profile of perp doing all of them. I just think that, m by looking at a single method at a time, we might miss something important.
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Sounds reasonable.
I guess there has always been a subset of people who want to see the world burn.
How you "implement" that "see the world burn" depends on the temporal and cultural circumstances, but that supply of people is always going to be there, and they are going to optimize for maximum damage.
That said, I assume the relative size of that subset isn't constant and can be reduced by good political policy (or enlarged by bad ones).
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Sounds about right.
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A snarky solution?
We need to make "spree shootings" seem soooo out of style that the shooter's future inmates would just make fun of him in prison, and the media would be too hip to cover it.
Or another idea... Did you know unlicensed drivers in the US kill about 800 people per YEAR? If you include the driver too, it's about 7,000 fatalities per year. Using the 800 number, that is 21 times higher than those killed in shooting sprees! We should tell the media the death toll from unlicensed use of a vehicular weapon is way cooler of a story.
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@jon-nyc said in On 'spree shootings':
Of course the 'fashionable methods' would change in part due to changes in the ease of pulling off the methods. Important politicians are harder to kill than before, hijackings much harder, guns easier and easier.
Uh, no.
Many moons ago, you could buy a surplus M1 Carbine through the mail -with no proof of age or felon status, just an attestation statement - for something like $20, maybe a hair more. Your GoogleFu is much better than mine, but I can't find where a M1 has been used in a school shooting.
It has 30-round mags, just like the AR-15. The 5.56 is more powerful than the .30 M1 round, but at the distances we're talking about, there's not much difference in lethality. And if one was willing to pay the tax and undergo the FBI check, a fully -auto M2 or M3 was not hard to come by.
So, we've got the very definition of an assault weapon (stupid term) readily available, cheap as dirt, plentiful M1 ball for peanuts, and we don't have mass shootings at schools.
You may be right about school shootings being the fashion of the moment among the troubled and the insane, but gun availability is not a contributing factor.
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I’ll grant you that the change in gun availability may not be a factor, but gun availability itself obviously is.
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Maybe the real problem is access to money to buy these things. 50 years ago people had to count their pennies to live.
The question that needs to be asked is how an unemployed or barely employed teenager got the cash to buy these toys in the first place.
“Little by little I am learning the art of being quite content by doing very little slowly” ~ Lionel Hardcastle
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@jon-nyc said in On 'spree shootings':
I’ll grant you that the change in gun availability may not be a factor, but gun availability itself obviously is.
M1's used to be pretty common. Guys bought them for their kids to deer hunt with (their ok if you keep the distances down) or they used them to deer hunt with dogs and horses in the woods. They were short, easy to handle and most guys used the fifteen round GI mags.
As for availability, I've talked before about how I've walked across the school grounds with a rifle in my hand. We were kicking that around in Sunday School last week, and most of the guys admitted they carried rifles and shotguns in their gun racks for an after school hunt, no big deal.
To top that, one of the guys I graduated high school said he brought a new shotgun into the classroom between periods, at the request of the teacher who wanted to see his new 870 LW.
That's pretty damn available.
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I think you missed my point. I’m conceding that gun acquisition hasn’t gotten easier, and therefore a the rise in school shootings isn’t due to such a change.
But that doesn’t mean ‘gun availability isn’t a factor”. Obviously availability of resource X is going to positively correlate with uses and misuses of resource X.
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@jon-nyc said in On 'spree shootings':
One wonders how much of this is cultural contagion. Remember in earlier decades we had far more political assassinations, far more than today. Same with hi-jackings and serial killers.
One wonders if the supply of crazy people who do such things is more stable than we think, but the outlets (and resultant casualties) change with the 'fashion' of the time.
I think this has a huge part to play in it. But we spin our wheels with video games and church on Sunday because social contagion is understood by basically nobody.
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@Renauda said in On 'spree shootings':
Maybe the real problem is access to money to buy these things. 50 years ago people had to count their pennies to live.
The question that needs to be asked is how an unemployed or barely employed teenager got the cash to buy these toys in the first place.
I was going to say this too. I couldn't afford my first gun until I was about 30. I blame the minimum wage.
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@Aqua-Letifer said in On 'spree shootings':
@jon-nyc said in On 'spree shootings':
One wonders how much of this is cultural contagion. Remember in earlier decades we had far more political assassinations, far more than today. Same with hi-jackings and serial killers.
One wonders if the supply of crazy people who do such things is more stable than we think, but the outlets (and resultant casualties) change with the 'fashion' of the time.
I think this has a huge part to play in it. But we spin our wheels with video games and church on Sunday because social contagion is understood by basically nobody.
And some people hang their hats on their belief that exposure to violence at an early age or exposure to good values has no effect upon young people's actions.
Train up a reed...
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@Kincaid said in On 'spree shootings':
@Renauda said in On 'spree shootings':
Maybe the real problem is access to money to buy these things. 50 years ago people had to count their pennies to live.
The question that needs to be asked is how an unemployed or barely employed teenager got the cash to buy these toys in the first place.
I was going to say this too. I couldn't afford my first gun until I was about 30. I blame the minimum wage.
I don’t think the minimum wage is the problem. Something else is at play here. Not at all sure what it is. Might be what what Jolly and Aqua are debating.
All I know is that 18 years old I was spending my money on girls, vinyl records, beer (legal drinking age here was already 18) and cigarettes and saving for tuition and pocket money while at university. I also seem to recall thinking of one day buying a well used truck for cheap although I knew full well I could not afford insurance or maintenance on the thing. Bought my first vehicle, a well used 1/2 ton Ford truck, when was 29 and working full time.
Firearms then were easy to buy and relatively inexpensive in the early 70s. Never crossed my mind to buy one until I started hunting in my 30s. Even then, I always bought used.
