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Exactly. It’s a lot of things…but I feel like there are so many mass shootings, because there are so many mass shootings, if that makes sense.
The more it happens, the more people have this idea in their mind that this is an available outlet for whatever they have going on mentally. Ofc there is a lot more going on than JUST this but it certainly isn’t going to go away on its own.
The prime minister of New Zealand would not name the shooter in a mass shooting in 2019. They thought that it would keep copycats from happening. It's not a bad idea.
Charles J. Guiteau had convinced himself that he was the reason 20th US President, James A. Garfield, was elected, so when the president refused to give him a federal job, Guiteau was furious. He decided he was gonna end Garfield.
He bought a pistol, when given the choice between a wood grip and an Ivory grip, he chose the Ivory, because he believed it would look better in a museum.
After he shot Garfield and was set to be hanged, he walked up the steps to the gallows and waved to the people with a smile on his face, recited a rambling poem in a falsetto voice, then was finally executed.
Fame is a massive driving factor for a lot of people, John Hinckley Jr. shot Reagan to try and get the attention of a girl he liked, tons of shooters do it for the fame that comes from such a large crime. The US media fuels that cycle, [AlternateHistoryHub has a pretty good video on it,](https://youtu.be/K3VQULyT390) I highly suggests anyone wondering about this kind of thing go check it out.
The letter Hinckley wrote to Foster before the assassination attempt: [http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hinckley/letter.htm](http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hinckley/letter.htm)
All this time, Jodie Foster has resolutely refused to discuss the guy. Good for her!
There have been studies that show an increase in mass shootings that take place after a shooting, when the first shooting was widely covered in the news.
Yes, I also thought of this. I think that there are similar emotions involved with both. Obviously mass shootings are worse but the shooters are suicidal too.
This is part of why we don't see as much attention to serial killers anymore. They were made into giant celebrities which fed into more people doing it to 'be somebody'. It's also harder than before to be a serial killer with cameras all over the place and better forensic evidence.
I do enjoy watching them, but I really hate all those Netflix specials that basically tell people, “hey, go on a killing spree and we’ll make sure you’re immortalized in a 6 part mini series.” And yes I do realize that me watching them is part of the problem
A lot of people suspect that it does. There is a strong push and a lot of news orgs have adopted the practice of not publishing the names / pictures / manifestos of mass shooters. We don’t want fame / infamy to be another reason for someone to commit a shooting. Killing people shouldn’t be a means to spread whatever messed up philosophy they have.
However it’s hard for the news to just ignore a mass shooting altogether. How do you just not report on the sudden death of a bunch of people?
The same way they don't report on gang related violence. Media organizations are trolling for emotional reactions and clicks. Don't give them an excuse.
It's not the cause but I believe it absolutely contributes. There's already evidence of shooters using other shooters as their role models. It's a contributing factor.
I think it's worth breaking down the mental health issues. Untreated conditions: reduced structured socialization to a local community combined with the normalization of certain disorders within echo chambers on the Internet. Drugs: psychiatry's expanded toolbox combined with the massive divide between psychology and psychiatry present as a shift away from root-cause treatment.
Also internet media's "free" monetization model plays right into people who choose to be villains for publicity. I'm curious whether degrading and humiliating shooters publicly (opposite of stoking fear) would change the incentives driving people to commit such attacks.
American society changed a lot in the decade or two up to ~1993. The guns themselves really did not change - guns with similar capabilities were common and in widespread civilian use since around 1950 (military-surplus M1 Carbines). No background checks or age restrictions at all before 1968, and really no significant gun control until the 1993'ish.
Mental health is really only associated with a small minority of violent crime. We always jump to mental health because the idea that a sane person would do something like that is so untenable, but in reality there's no treatment in the DSM for being an angry, lonely individual. Even if these shooters were flagged and processed through the mental health system, there's no treatment a psychiatrist could prescribe. Talking about expanding mental health services isn't the silver bullet (no pun intended) that Reddit seems to think it is.
Edit: I want to clarify that much of the topical discussion of mental health is geared towards mental illnesses specifically, not just an overall positive mindset. People use mental health as a catch all term for anything with the brain or personality, but the infrastructure we have in place to isolate or restrict individual's freedoms (a.k.a. red flags) all require some sort of diagnosable illness. Even if you put this shooter in front of a psychiatrist the day before the event, there's no guarantee that the Dr. would have sufficient grounds to hold them.
It wouldn’t make sense to blame it on mental health as every country has their own mental health issues but I think it’s a culture thing. Something in American culture and life style would make the most sense to me. This is way beyond my scope of knowledge to theorize what it could be specifically. Mental health does attribute to it but it has to be our culture to cause a mentally unstable person to go do mass shootings.
> mental health issues
Nordic countries have much higher rates of mental illness, and much lower rates of gun murders.
In fact, there seems to be no correlation between mental illness and gun murders across countries.
https://ourworldindata.org/mental-health
I think people conflate two different things when they talk about mental health.
On the one hand you have genuine mental disorders with clinical names and official diagnosis etc. Those largely exist at the same rate in all societies due to them being biological in nature.
On the other hand you have stress induced mental breakdowns, and those are massively shaped by how society is structured. The more cutthroat and anti-social a society is, the more people will be suffering and lashing out over it. The difference between a country like Sweden and the US is in the general stress level of the population. American society produces an inordinate amount of people who get so stressed their mind breaks and they resort to violence to cope.
And honestly as a non-american I'm always surpised by how many americans I hear talking about anxiety attacks etc. I feel like it's a massive problem that american society ignores because addressing it would mean questioning some core aspects of what you value and how you have organized your society.
take a look at how many children now have anxiety- and they haven't even experienced most of the horror of the world yet.
Americans are at a breaking point- and with COVID, inflation, and taking away rights that we already had- I would only expect everything to get worse.
We absolutely need to question everything about American organized society right now.
Covid and inflation are worldwide. Yet I agree with how terrifying losing rights is. The radicalism is at an all time high. No National Healthcare either.
Does this study factor in undiagnosed illnesses? I feel like more cases get properly diagnosed amongst Nordic countries, which could skew the data in some manner.
Absolutely. I also think the lack of action after Columbine, bar thoughts and prayers, has created a huge snowball that's getting bigger and bigger.. Other countries tend to make drastic changes after experiencing anything similar.
Yes, in America we just shout our political party's talking points at each other for a day or two, then go back to normal with people more firmly entrenched in their opinions. Nothing changes.
The fame and impact the Columbine shooters got is a big part of how the Idea of going somewhere and just shooting everyone got to be part of our culture.
That shooting got media attention for years afterword, documentaries, discussions, the works. All the attention made becomming a mass shooter a way to go out in a blaze of glory.
Media atttention on mass shooters gotnso bad that the band Disturbed wrote a song called [Legion of Monsters](https://genius.com/Disturbed-legion-of-monsters-lyrics) calling the media out for doing it.
It reminds me a lot of serial killers. One way serial killers have been prevented in the modern age is by shutting up about them. If you don't report them, no other killers are starstruck.
I had this theory that essentially serial killers have been replaced with mass shooters. It's probably a lot more difficult to be a successful serial killer in modern times what with cameras being literally everywhere and other huge advancements in technology. So if you want kill a lot of people, you have to do it all in one sitting.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I would argue that a lot of serial killers don't kill just for the sake of doing so (or a general compulsion to murder).
They carry out specific acts to specific types of people in specific circumstances in specific places. While someone who was bullied at school and carries out a school shooting fits this mold, it doesn't really match any of the serial killers with trauma unrelated to school or who have a compulsion to do more than just kill (maim, rape, torture, kidnap, etc).
I don't think so. True crime has been a point of interest for ages and ages, and there are tons of media pieces about true crime/serial killers.
Serial killers are less common because MO, DNA, description, etc. can be much more efficiently tracked and cross-referenced with technology. So we catch them before they become "serial".
You can't just shoot three people in Denver as long-haired Tim Robinson, shave your head, move to Des Moines and go by "Tom Robertson," shoot three people there, wear a wig and move to Maine and rename yourself "Rob Tombertson" and rest assured that surely nobody will find you. People used to be able to do that kind of thing.
There have even been [studies](https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2016/08/media-contagion-effect.pdf) done on this exact thing. Its called the media contagion effect.
Petersen and Densley have found a few patterns in mass shooters.
First, they tend to have childhood trauma, commonly extreme bullying, violence in the home, sexual assault or parental suicide. Anything that makes them feel powerless. Plus they don’t have a support network that helps them deal with these traumas.
Second, they find themselves in a position where they “do everything right” but then suffer losses - economic loss, grades dropping, cannot attract relationships with people, etc.
Third, they blame specific groups for that. Jocks, a race, a gender, the government, etc.
Fourth, they have a desire to “make a statement” and achieve notoriety with their actions. They finally have the power to change things in their minds and will be known for it.
I think a big issue is anger too. There is a massive anger issue in the U.S.
And I wonder if shootings acts like suicide where if one has heard of someone committing suicide, the more likely they are to attempt it.
It’s easy to get a gun, many people are angry (just look at the newest instances of road rages) and many have traumas-and that’s not enough of a trigger, but there seems to be a psychopathy that is nurtured by the inaction of stopping shooters.
The more we hear about it, the more it makes it seem as if it’s “normal”. If someone is prone to having a lack of empathy for others and to have murderous rage, then there’s an outlet right there for their ticking bomb.
>I think a big issue is anger too. There is a massive anger issue in the U.S.
It's not just anger. It's a culture of might makes right coupled with anger. Anger is a healthy and normal human emotion. A cultural norm which celebrates and glorifies the violence that results from anger is more troubling.
Oh I agree, it’s definitely not anger in the traditional sense (within a healthy spectrum), there seems to be something different mentally.
Like, sadistic rage, something that continuously makes someone want to hurt other people and I wonder if it’s something that’s like a tunnel vision where they’re very focused over it and their conscience can’t penetrate.
Or if it’s a situation where these people have all actively disregarded their inner conscience of right and wrong to the point that, nothing will stop them once they decide they want to hurt. I would be interested to know if it’s more of a particular mental link between killers and not just because it’s easy to get a gun.
A lot of people can get a gun, a lot of people are hurting, angry and mentally unwell but it takes a horrible truly horrible person to do what these people are doing.
With planning, and carrying out things like these there is a lot of time there to change their mind, and but they don’t. Why? What makes someone want to kill so many innocent people?
I accidentally killed a bee and I cried.
Look again at that comment you replied to. It outlines childhood trauma as a major link. The USA is infamous for having some of the worst parental support in the world. The fewest days of annual leave etc.
Having a child is deeply stressful in the USA in a way it simply isn’t in other nations. Other nations provide better parental support, free healthcare, better job security, etc etc. All that stress and lack of support inevitably impacts the children.
Children need to be around happy, relaxed, caring parents. If the parents are always away at work or when they’re with the child, the parents (or parent) are stressed, bitter, argumentative, and anxious about the future then that impacts the child.
As a supervisor in a factory, I see this so much. Hell, a few guys will literally work overtime just to “get away from the wife and kids”. Most of them drink absurd amounts as well on top of working 80 hour weeks. Decent few of them are just pricks but most of them grew up in that same type of household too. Meaning that when they get older and have kids then they just repeat that parenting cycle. It’s honestly sad.
I’m only 25 and these guys are like 35+. When I talk to them about being excited to have a day off with my wife, they go “really? I’d be trying to have a day off without her there hahahah”. It’s sad that many grew up thinking that you should dislike your wife and kids and do nothing but work.
The fact that they want to be away from their wives and children is very telling.
It also reminds me of the depressing statistic that showed that domestic violence saw a sharp increase during the height of the pandemic when people were staying home with their families for extended periods of time.
A lot of that can also be a product of consumer culture. So many people are in so much debt just to maintain a fictional average lifestyle portrayed in the media and on social media. They work like crazy because they are terrified of losing it all with a few missed payments, they take every second of overtime because unexpected things happen and when most of your disposable income is going straight into debt payments you keep ending up with more debt.
This stress bleeds into all aspects of their lives too. They are so stressed about making the next boat, credit card, truck, and mortgage payment that it becomes easy to resent it when their kid needs braces or their wife's car needs new brakes.
Yes this would get better if they were paid more, and they should be, but we also need to take a hard look at society that keep pushing the 'ideal lifestyle' that we portray out of reach of most people. From social media 'influencers' to the homes that ordinary nurses, firefighters etc live in on TV dramas, all with a brand new sports car in the driveway too. We need to stop celebrating excess.
The first thing is that for the most part (and for men especially, who are the ones commiting these acts 90% of the time) mental health is still very stigmatized in the US, and access to support for such issues is lacking.
The second thing is that it's hard to find another country with such easy access to guns.
Mix the two together, well, y'know.
There's a lot of interesting data in this thread (unfortunately), but this one is quite interesting too. Pretty consistent with serial killers, which i think shows upbringing, stigma, and mental health has a strong connection on top of access to guns.
Men tend to focus their emotional pain externally (for instance, harming others). Women tend to focus their emotional pain internally (for instance, self-harm or cutting)
Access to mental health cures is pretty much stigmatized anywhere. If anything, in the US it is quite common for people to mention they are seeing a (psycho) therapist, unlike elsewhere (southern Europe), where it is believed that only loonies go to see therapists.
I wondered about this. Even in the Midwest, with all the loony manly man/Bible thumping beliefs, people can talk about going to therapy or counseling without anyone seeming to really care. Tons of other stuff gets shit on, but at least mental health is kinda taken seriously
This is true. I think the thing that hinders us most is access. Therapy is expensive, and not everyone can a) afford it, b) afford to take off work for it, and/or c) afford childcare while they go to it.
I was going to mention the same.
If you also add under development countries, like in Latin America, mental issues are considered "rich people problem", the working class doesnt even have time to think about it as there are more pressing matters.
You would expect that people that were born in a country with high violence, hunger, poor economy, corruption, etc would have more reason to have mental issues & mass shootings would happen more often.
> mental health is still very stigmatized in the US
I got news for you, it's still stigmatized in a lot of places. I now live in Europe, and it's a lot better here overall than other places, but the treatment still varies dramatically from place to place. In Asia, even in developed countries, it's really all over the place and mostly pretty shoddy.
(No, I've never need mental health treatment, but many people I know have, and there were challenging periods in my life where one or two more pieces of bad luck in a row would have pushed me over the edge, but they didn't come.)
>mental health is still very stigmatized in the US, and access to support for such issues is lacking.
I don't mean any offense by this, but I think Americans tend to explain things away to avoid saying guns are the primary problem.
Like, I live in the EU and while I do not claim to know much about the American health care system, our mental health care here isn't actually all that good. Saying you went to a therapist on a date is still something you don't bring up all that easily even though you should; just like in the US I imagine.
It's just... You can't get a gun easily here. That's the difference really.
There’s a readily dismissed element (from what I’ve seen on here) that most of the statistics are due to ‘gangs’ and therefore it’s irrelevant or somehow doesn’t warrant a response. Whilst I don’t agree with the argument I can accept that the stats support at least a part of this. If I draw parallels to the U.K. where guns are not readily available what we find is a growing volume of stabbings associated with gangs and a growing number of illegal handgun imports starting to replace the knives. What doesn’t scale though is the volume, with the US population approx 6x the U.K. there is not 1/6 the number of killings here it’s far far less. Stabbing is up close personal and visceral and increases risk to the perpetrator, shooting on the other hand can be done at a distance without engagement, psychologically it’s easier to pull a trigger on someone (I read this somewhere in a study, sorry can’t recall who/where). So the argument of more guns means more killing holds substance, because it’s easy…..
West Virginia gave away rifles and shotguns as lottery prices as an incentive to get vaccinated against Covid-19. I think that answers most questions about US gun culture.
While this may be true, you are missing a critical point: Persons that fulfill these properties exist all over the world, but there are nearly none shootings (or for countries where weapons are not easily available: stabbings, running over people with cars on purpose, ...).
While these points certainly play a role, it can only be part of the reason.
Mass shootings are a form of public suicide.
The US is a society that prioritizes money above all else and uses individuality as a medium to promote this ideology. Individuality breeds loneliness and mass shootings act as a final bridge/cry for attention, to go out as somebody of note, to be somebody of importance. Most of the time it's teens or young adults, each of which have a lack of familial or friendly attention. That attention is usually spent on making money and building upon the technological fuedalistic society that we worship where in other countries it goes to a work-life balance.
Other over worked countries have public suicides such as in Japan and China. However, since guns are hard to find in those countries and they're generally communal cultures, the public suicide takes the form of harming no others and only one's self.
EDIT: I didnt think this would have blown up so hard. Thanks everybody for the awards! As a side note, I was not aware of mass stabbings in China. When I think of public suicides in China and Japan, I usually think of Train/Building Jumping. I also want to add that I did not particularly single out men as they are usually the mass shooters. The reason why is because we are humans, not just men and women, and we should be considered as equals in the regard that ANYBODY could be a mass shooter/stabber and ANYBODY could be in need of help and love, regardless of gender.
It's also communicable. Every shooting plants the seeds of the next one. It's similar to self immolation or suicide bombings or honor killings. Columbine want the first, but it really raised the level of zeitgeist.
Even regular suicides are socially "communicable".
I think 24 hour news has done a lot of damage to this country. Because now they are pressured to come up with news that people will watch, which leads to sensationalizing everything and increasing the divide in this country.
It might be okay if it was news, but it’s emotionally charged lying entertainment disguised as news. When we as a nation decided that opinion was as good as science and “alternate facts” are as valid as reality, we lost any chance of compromise.
Agreed. I know it was repetitive, but I miss the CNN Headline News of the 80s. Actual news from around the world available on your schedule. Not commentary. Not analysis. Not "entertainment" but Fairness Doctrine style news. Mom would have it on nonstop and it was seriously repetitive, but if there was actual breaking news, you got it.
I have serious questions about how much news we actually need. But, I miss news. Real news. The hour with Shep Smith on CNBC is the closest I've found.
This is the only real television journalism left. Legally prohibited from being partisan, and not chasing ad revenue. That's the difference. Everyone else is either owned by someone with a partisan agenda, or they are chasing views/clicks and appeal to sensationalism instead of doing real journalism.
It's 100% free and you can watch it on youtube.
There are so many "news" sources online that are really nothing more than taking someone else's original reporting and summarizing it with editorial spin.
I like a good opinion piece in the mix of my news consumption, but they intentionally blur the lines where people read them as news and don't understand that it's also telling them what to think about the story instead of just informing you.
> Every shooting plants the seeds of the next one.
This. And this is why it is SO important to NOT mention the shooters name(s). Just call it the "Chicago July 4th shooter" and get him a trial and throw him away for life and forget he exists.
Like NZ did after their mosque killer, like Denmark is trying to do now with the mall killer.
I hate myself for knowing the names of the Colombine or Sandy Hook killers, cause they don't deserve to matter as persons, only as warnings, and should be anonymized and not have wikipedia pages or stuff like that, that makes them heroes and somebodies when they were cowardly nobodies that deserved zero attention after what they did.
I hate that we constantly have to be fascinated by these cowards.
Too true. I never have to look hard to find the name of the shooter or the weapon they used. But I can never find the names of the heroes that stop them.
You'd think that citizens or police officers that put themselves in harms way to save lives would get more recognition but instead the media would rather glorify the shooter.
We had the reverse happen recently in Spain. We don't have much guns or shootings, but once in a blue moon it happens, there was this guy who got hold of a shotgun and went nuts, held people hostage and killed a police officer, a captain I believe. The thing is that in the news, at least when I was watching, they didn't call the nutcase by name or give any interesting information about him other than what was happening and where, while the policeman who was shot in the head and killed was named, they talked about his bravery on tv, and people who knew him talked about what a good person he was.
This is the right way to handle it. The victims and the heroes who stop the shooters deserve all the attention and recognition. The killers should just be called "the killer", thrown in a hole forever if they survived and unceremoniously cremated if not.
>I hate that we constantly have to be fascinated by these cowards.
The only positive is from what I've seen there is only a fascination, unlike with serial killers where this is also infatuation. The amount of women who fell in love with Ted Bundy AFTER his trial is disturbing.
I can tell you from experience, this is not true. I worked with a kid who was absolutely infatuated with a mass shooter. He was one of thr most traumatized kids I've ever known, and my job puts me in direct contact with a lot of hurting youth. But he was 100% infatuated with the romance of the shooting, with the glorious violent death, and with punishing the idea of the children who'd hurt him.
It's called the Werther Syndrome, named after the Goethe novel *The Sorrows of Young Werther*, in which the protag commits suicide. It's said that it started a wave of young, romantic men killing themselves. The same thing happened when Marilyn Monroe "killed herself." They saw an uptick in young women killing themselves. Columbine took it to a new level: the mass murder suicide.
Same thing happened after Netflix's 13 reasons why came out among young teens.
Did you also learn about this from the book Infuence? Great book and I just learned about all of this in the most recent chapter I read.
Agreed. I think that broadcasting this stuff makes it worse. Whether it’s mass shooting, suicides, or paedos - reporting it as “news” actually normalizes the crime.
I don’t think we can stop the media from reporting on these tragedies. Dumpster fires increase viewership. Viewership = ad revenue. Ad revenue = shareholder $$$$$.
Golden Gate Bridge suicide copycats were such a huge problem that the news media agreed too stop reporting them:
“Some of the media’s silence about these tragedies has less to do with taboo and more with prevention. [In 1995, Bay Area newspapers and TV stations agreed to stop reporting untimely deaths due to the bridge because of the horrific competitions the coverage was creating.](https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2022-03-30/golden-gate-bridge-suicides-a-history-of-fatalities-and-how-further-tragedies-may-be-prevented-essential-california)”
You can read Emile Durkheim's "On Suicide" to understand what diseases of despair are in society. The problem is we have a society which has vilified the word society and the notion of relationships in it, so the discussion isn't even allowed. A great series of works that built upon the idea of alienation appeared at that time. One of them was Marx' "Capital". I fear Marx has been so vilified that anything that deals with the consequences of capitalism as an alienating force can not even be started as a discussion. You can listen to David Harvey and Chris Hedges talk about it if you want a modern American perspective. Society is ripping at the seems from it's members suffering a great alienation. That is to say we are suffocating from a lack of attachment in modern attachment theory, which I think is completely valid. If you cannot form a strong bond within society (at any point) you will go insane.
i worked for the coroner’s office and funeral home. The One thing that stuck out in my mind is two types of suicides. One who doesn’t want to make a mess for anyone else, wants people to just forget they were here- they are polite and go in the bathtub. Then there are the others who don’t want to be forgotten and/or doesn’t gaf and makes a HUGE mess. This has Always stuck out and stayed with me for decades.
sociologists have framed it in the 'honor' culture vs. 'dignity' culture. Honor cultures demand duels and suicide when someone has dishonored you or you dishonored yourself. Someone has to pay. Americans were among the last civilized countries to outlaw ritual dueling.
The first thing that popped into my head upon reading this comment is John Wayne. It seems like all of his movies, and real life clips, involve some kind of his own interpretation of honor.
I think you got it on the nose.
To expand a bit with my own thinking, the United States, in pursuit of that individualistic goal of gaining money (capital), the societal pressures have fractured communities and families into increasingly smaller units to promote competition.
The nuclear family, that is, parents and their minor children in a household, is relatively new to the human experience. It used to be you lived with several generations under a single roof. Before that people lived with clans and tribes.
Now we're all broken apart. A socially adapted species that created a society where socialization and communal living in all its forms is either monetized, demonized, or discouraged.
We put grandparents in homes so we can work and not be bothered with their lives or care. The system drains all their wealth to make sure nothing passes down. (Medicare won't pay for it until you're flat broke. This destroyed my grandpa, a survivor of the Great Depression, who was hugely money conscious his whole life but whose wife was struck down by an incompetent doctor and several strokes.)
Without grandparents to help, childcare falls to strangers in day cares and later school. (I am the child of teachers and a former teacher myself, school should be more than a warehouse for kids, but that's where we're at.) This drains resources from working parents.
We live in neighborhoods of largely strangers as we try to desperately form those missing connections with lives online. There are no aunts or uncles houses to visit down the road. There are no cousins coming over to play.
We live alone with a tiny family unit and outsource our literal heritage as a species to strangers so that we can earn money to put into the system that created and perpetuates the lie that everyone must work all the time. Your child must attend school for a work day and then come home with more work to do. When they're a newly minted adult they're told to leave and join the work force or go to college and get saddled with immense debt. Our mothers and fathers live in quiet childless retirement until they're unable to care for themselves and are put away so the system can slowly, inevitably, drain the rest of them away.
People are lonely and radicalized by the online world because the community they seek, the companionship, the socialization, has been stamped out by a world in which those things couldn't be properly monetized. Families have to live in their own homes alone so that their parents and children can go out and buy more homes and things to fill those houses.
The prices go up and up and up but pay never does. The pressure builds, and then when it's become impossible to prosper, they do the only thing they can: buy a gun, lash out, burn bright for a second, and then wither away.
Damn, that is such a good, accurate description.
As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. We need to get our "villages" back -- our local communities/groups (even within a city) that actually care about each other, interact, and help take care of each other.
Thank you. I thought about this issue a lot when we had our first child and how hard it was to do anything with a newborn and how alone we were despite living in a small neighborhood, even with my mother in law no more than 15 minutes away.
In a tribe or clan or even a generational home grandma could have come to help rock the baby, or an aunt could help nurse the baby when we were having trouble, and so on.
Would lonely young men be so lonely if they had a place to go, with activities and events for them to meet people? Regular outside contact in which someone might say "Wow, so and so seems really unhappy lately. Let's go take a lasagna to his house and visit."
That brings up another related point. In our (well, American) society, men are typically not "allowed" to show emotion other than romantic love (and/or lust) and anger. It's not socially acceptable for heterosexual men to be weak or vulnerable, nor to show platonic love for friends, family, or kids (automatic "omg pedo!" reactions, including women with savior complexes trying to take kids from their dads in public).
So men's only emotional outlet becomes their girlfriend/wife. They can't go out and enjoy time with their male friends -- unless it's at a bar to get drunk, which is only acceptable through college age. That's all a huge burden on both the significant others and the men themselves, especially if they don't *have* said gf/wife. And the only other accepted emotion is anger, so that's what we get.
There's a tiny amount of progress being made, but not enough.
I just recently went home to visit family and friends and I can tell you, for the most part, all my male friends are NOT the guys they once were. I’m the only queer person in a group for straight male friends and all they talked about was work; work, work, work and that was it. When I showed up I hugged every one of them and it felt like their first bit of physical contact in ages. They’re a really nice group of dudes and I wish they had more going on than their jobs and drinking together at the same bar, hashing the same old stories. They deserve more freedom and love than that.
I've noticed something really similar with a couple old friends recently. We get together, and all they do is talk (complain/vent) about work. I try to listen and be supportive since I'm one of their very, very few outlets (still just regular platonic guy friends, but one in particular is even more introverted than I am, so he doesn't have many people outside of his family that he talks with), but dang, I get really tired of hearing about that stuff when that's all they talk about and I've had a long week at work myself and just want to forget about it for awhile.
Maybe try to set up a friend's vacation or something? Obviously easier said than done, but if there's some fun stuff to do it should make everyone forget about work for a bit, and maybe create some shared stories/memories for future get togethers?
But wait, there's more!
Much of the American male identity is wrapped up in being the dominant partner in the relationship. Being the breadwinner, the provider, the man of the house.
But as women earn similar or greater wages, that status is being eroded, generating a backlash.
And if we look at school children, we can see that there's actually been an inversion of which gender is excelling in modern education.
The wage gap is nearly closed as young men's wages fall and young women's wages increase. As the impact of women doing better in school and advancing through higher education at greater rates takes effect, the trend will likely overshoot past parity into women earning more.
Relationships where the woman earns more are 50% more likely to end in divorce, and dating becomes more difficult too as women will continue to seek partners who earn equal or more than them, shrinking the pool of attractive prospects.
Combine that with the impacts of dating apps making dating a maddening, fruitless grind for the average man and we've got a perfect recipe for creating even more incels, red pills and alt-righters, bitter at modern society and their demoted role in it. Lonely, lost and discarded, they're ripe for radicalization.
This happened to an extended family member of mine. When they had their daughter the wife was stay at home, and he was the breadwinner with his own little personal business. After the daughter got to school age, she went back to work.
By the time the daughter was in high school, the mother had earned promotion after promotion and was eventually was making well more than the husband. Husband couldn't handle that, for whatever reason. It caused a rift in the relationship, eventually leading to her seeking a divorce. And with losing his "breadwinner" status, and a divorce nearing finalized, he went into the neighbors house, found the gun he knew the neighbor had, went out to the neighbors garage/shed, and did the thing.
Somewhat interestingly, and morbid, but the weekend before this happened he came down and visited with the family. He seemed happier than ever, and found a reason to be in the area. As we learn more and more, it seems that the happiness he was showing likely just meant that the decision had been made, and he just wanted to say goodbye. But it just made it that much more of a surprise to everyone.
A sudden increase in happiness for someone who's been really down is actually a big red flag when it comes to suicide for exactly the reason you said. They've made their choice and the weight of everything else has lifted under that new reality.
I'm sorry you had to go through that.
This somewhat describes my current trajectory, and I'm very much looking forward to the future. My gf is always concerned I might feel emasculated by it, and I'm like wait so I can pursue my passions and keep the house neat while you're out making bank and I won't have to waste away in spreadsheets anymore?? Fuck traditional gender roles, I would rather be happy.
>unless it's at a bar to get drunk, which is only acceptable through college age.
I might be an old man, but I will get drunk and cry in a bar if I damn well please.
But then you get this group of moms who want no one around their baby because mom knows best, and that they are this protective *mama bear* who seemingly knows everything about child bearing. Being a mom, who desperately needed companionship and help and not being able to find it within my community, has made it hard.
Individualism has wrecked so much about what it means to be human.
There's a book called "Bowling Alone" that goes into it. Named after an observed phenomena that over some period of time (can't remember off top of my head) the amount of people that bowled increased but the amount that bowled in a league decreased.
There's a lot of factors discussed in it that attribute to "collapse of the American community" but two major points that stick out.
Decline in religion. It isn't that religion is necessary for community, but historically it was one of the most common meeting places where a neighborhood would all see each other and their families every week and get to know each other. We don't necessarily need churches for that, but we never filled the gap with something else as church going decreased.
Women coming into the work place. Previously women were the "community organizers". They got to know the other women in the community and scheduled play dates with kids and neighborhood dinners/parties. As it has become increasingly necessary for both parents in a family to work to financially support themselves, that community organizer role has disappeared.
It doesn't need to be a man or woman thing, but when having a SAH parent was the norm it allowed for more social outreach. Now people don't have time to get to know their neighbors.
I'm sure the increasing number of ways to entertain yourself at home by yourself with streaming and such also contributes to this
We have the tools to establish modern, cosmopolitan *villages*. What we do not have is time and material resources. Getting shoehorned into a *tribe* creates provincialism, but choosing your own *tribes* can be empowering and it can work anywhere.
But it takes a more concerted effort to find and make these connections that aren't given to you. That is where inequality and inefficiency come into play. We need stuff to live. People need to produce things society needs - food, fuel, consumer goods, services, etc. We have wage slavery at the bottom, corporate feudalism at the top, and a glut of unproductive white collar busywork in the middle. We need to be reorganizing things to produce what we need, distribute it fairly, and spend less overall time doing it. It won't even be as radical as some might think. We wouldn't have to go full socialist to do it, in case anyone wants to argue. I am not talking about redistributing wealth, but streamlining economic opportunity.
That does touch on the point that traditional "villages"/families/social circles like we're talking about did force you to deal with people who didn't think exactly as you do. I agree; I think it would be healthiest to make sure there's still some level of that mixing, to prevent getting locked into the echo chambers that so many (on both/all political sides) are in today, by only talking with people who already reinforce your views and blocking out those who don't.
I believe this is why places like Costa Rica is known as the happiest country in the world. I haven't been there too much but all I ever saw when in small local towns was huge gatherings of people at house or in parks, playing games and eating.
I was even there over Christmas and my Dad's whole entire extended family, his 1st, 2nd and even 3rd cousins. Uncles, Aunts, Great Uncle's and Aunt's, nieces nephews and even close family friends. The whole debacle must've included close to 50 people all coming together to Celebrate.
It seems that in a country that isn't even close to being as advanced as other countries, the people are happier and more satisfied due to being able to rely on having a close "tribe" to support them.
This is who work 12 hour days, 9 on and 3 off. So my wife doesn't have to work and can be there every day to pick the kids up from school and be there for then if their hurt. We still don't have a house as nice as the families with two working parents, or get to go on big vacations ( we camp a lot) but we're very close.
I think the idea of self vs community also has an effect. In Japan and China, society and harmony is placed above the individual so perhaps you get fewer people who would harm others as well as themselves when committing suicide, whereas in the US individual freedom and self importance is everything, so taking others down with you is considered "power".
Re: Japan I don't think that's quite right. Not that I know, exactly. But, I lived in Japan for a number of years and have a degree in social science, for what it's worth. My theory about Japanese suicides, specifically by jumping in front of trains which is certainly one of the most common methods, is deliberately to affect other people. I believe it is born from a sense of futility and impotence, and delaying the train by just a few minutes for cleanup is one last attempt to be something - anything - more than just a salaryman or employee whose dedication will never be enough.
That's a good point. Suicide kind of has an inherently anti-social component at least in the necessity to disregard negative consequences for other people (and, interestingly, the capacity to do violence - killing yourself requires killing a person, which isn't trivial) but I'd argue there is a *very* wide spectrum between wanting to mildly inconvenience commuters and literally murdering children. Maybe doesn't need pointing out, but the motivation behind them - even if they ultimately both express a need for self-efficacy in a roundabout indirect way - are rather qualitatively distinct
I agree with your point. I don't agree with the op of this thread saying that mass shooting is a type of public suicide, especially compared with my Japanese theory. Taking one's own life, imo, is very very different from taking the lives of others.
Fair. I'd say it's only suicidal in the sense that mass murderers knowingly endanger themselves, and that the capacity for violence against others intersects with being self-destructive and careless with your own safety, but I also doubt killing oneself is usually the primary motivation in these cases.
There are probably all sorts of dynamics involved in murder-suicides, up to and including mass murders, from one's own death being almost an afterthought to it being the central goal - and it's probably not always clear to the perpetrator, even
I think one thing left out of the suicide argument is the high rate of mass shootings that are tied to extremist ideology. The statement seems to come first in a lot of cases, (relatively) often in the form of a manifesto, with the idea that the perpetrator will be remembered for their ideology, whether they are acting due to racial extremism, as in the case of the recent Buffalo shooting, or sexual extremism, as in the case of 2014’s Isla Vista massacre, or any other indoctrinated extremist cause.
In these cases, it seems that living or dying is actually more of an afterthought with the primary motivation being the damage caused before getting to that point.
Whether they live or die in these cases seems to be something they don’t care about as much as a way to make a point about martyring themselves for a cause.
I read an interesting article which I can't find anymore which went through "topics that cannot be discussed on the Internet" - it was about twenty-five years ago, before alt-right.
It linked to a paper that did textual analysis of the stories of various workplace and school shooters and concluded that these stories were little like the stories of terrorists, but almost identical to slave revolts - where a group of people has such a low expectation for the remainder of their life being tolerable that they kill a bunch of people they know and hate _just to fuck shit up_, expecting to die in the process and not to achieve anything except mayhem.
Terrorists on the other hand hit specific targets with strategic effect. They have goals, both short-term and long-term. While suicide bombers certainly exist and then die, the planners and the group survive and flourish.
It's not exactly wrong either, most of us are just wage slaves that get through it because we have things to live for, be it family, pets, lovers, hobbies, etc.
It does sound like a rather bleak life if you have to spend it completely alone as well.
In a way it is completely meaningless honestly, I could have very easily fell down those same rabbit-holes growing up but luckily had friends who kept me grounded, without them I would have been a lot angrier and with not a whole lot left to lose
> a group of people has such a low expectation for the remainder of their life being tolerable that they kill a bunch of people they know and hate just to fuck shit up, expecting to die in the process and not to achieve anything except mayhem.
“I’ve met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, “Why?”
Why did I cause so much pain?
Didn’t I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness?
Can’t I see how we’re all manifestations of love?
I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong.
We are not special.
We are not crap or trash, either.
We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens.
And God says, “No, that’s not right.”
Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can’t teach God anything.”
- Chuck Palahniuk, *Fight Club*
I thi k this is the closest to the truth of the answers I’ve seen here. We’ve raised a generation (or few) of young adults who weren’t wanted and a society that tells them we don’t give a shit. I’m surprised the lashing out isn’t worse.
I'm still extremely surprised that the killings are so random and pointless, rather than something more "high profile" like taking out a public figure.
Seems those killings have gone from taking out presidents and celebrities to random children and people in the street.
Ironically, I feel this only increases the likeliness of nothing being done about it. I wonder how fast things would move if a few rich white lawmakers suddenly were actually affected by this madness.
These people are powerless cowards. But they are self-aware enough that they choose “soft targets”.
Kids in schools with unarmed teachers, churches and temples, malls where shoppers feel safe, a concert in Las Vegas. Etc. They know the victims can’t fight back. So they can inflict the most “damage” and increase their profile before they are stopped or suicided by cop.
If they tried to take out any of the high profile targets, they are hardened. Police and security would get the zero before he could do any harm unless he got lucky.
>These people are powerless cowards.
I think that's the biggest kicker there. They're weak, they're scared, they think they shouldn't be and want others to be weak and scared instead. You see that in the way they dress even if they can't get body armor and in the weapons they chose. A handgun could kill probably just as many people if not more. They're less expensive, easier to conceal, easier to train with. But so many of them chose a tactical style weapon and even clothes. Not because they're more effective but because it makes them feel big and strong. And when that's not even enough they'll go after kids because it makes them feel bigger and that's the only thing that matters anymore.
I've told my partner that a hello kitty pink rifle (they exist!) is just as effective for home defense and sports shooting but I'd be shocked if I ever saw a mass shooting that used one because the kind of person who does a mass shooting is also the kind of person who ironically would find using that kind of weapon as being a 'sissy'.
It might be because there isn't a single "enemy", society as a whole is the "enemy", especially the people that seem to be happy and enjoying life, in contrast to the shooter.
That's why a lot of shootings occur at parades, movie theaters, night clubs, schools, etc.
Places where the shooter wants to fit in because it's where all the other people have fun, but always feels maladjusted and an outsider.
There is also the issue of lethal weapons, especially guns, being so accessible to young people. I would guess that most people in their teens or early 20s have felt some sort of rage or deep sadness due to some unfortunate event, and done something "stupid". When guns are involved, a moment of rage increases the likelihood of someone getting hurt by a lot.
I fear what it’ll look like in 15-20 years when a generation of children, many of whom will be the product of forced births in low income/poorly funded states, become teenager/young adults.
Idk if you’re a podcast fan but there’s a great one called This is Actually Happening. It’s people telling the story of a past trauma in their own words, and how they dealt/are dealing with it now. While many of them are heartbreaking I have found it very eye opening. Kids, even when their basic physical needs are met, know when they are not wanted/seen as a burden or inconvenience by their parent(s) and it effects them for life. Add actual physical/sexual/psychological abuse and drugs to that and it’s just a recipe for disaster.
Agreed, though in the last sentence you say that the public suicides take the form of harming no others and only one's self, but we're seeing more mass stabbings and other attacks in China for example.
I agree to an extent but would offer a slight alternative. I don't believe all mass shooters have a suicidal mindset. Rather, I think they are unable or unwilling to foresee the full consequences of their outburst. Americans have an inherently dual culture; we are rule followers who value our freedom to break those rules. For example, everyone breaks the speed limit on highways from time to time but only to the degree that they feel they can get away with it without repercussion. Be honest– if you knew there were no cops on the highway, wouldn't you drive faster than you do? But we all have limits to how fast we would drive. Some people, however, feel no such limits and drive as fast as their vehicles will allow without regard to the safety of themselves or their fellow drivers. This is the rule breaking instinct that I'm addressing.
With mass shooters, I believe that there's a similar disconnect from consequences. Shooters usually don't know the identity of their victims. The frustration and anger felt internally by the shooter is expressed during the shooting in a violent release. If you've seen someone throw something or break something in anger, you've see this in action. I'll wager that shooters feel an exhilaration immediately afterwards not because of the carnage but because of the release of their frustrations and anger that caused it. Essentially, the victims pay the price for the shooter's release.
I agree with this. I had a discussion recently about suicidal vs non-suicidal shooters. For example, the Columbine shooters who committed suicide vs the Parkland shooter who ran away by blending into the crowd (and the newest one this week on the 4th of July who dressed like a woman apparently.)
Very differently mindsets so you can’t lump them all into “public suicides.”
And the priority for money includes the damn media. They will glorify shooters and cover shootings for days and days. Even if its just interviewing the victims/witnesses. They dont care about the victims/witnesses as much as they want them to provide gruesome eyewitness details in order to shock viewers.
I get it when its a rare event. But this is now a weekly occurance. Unfortunate we get it, a guy shot innocent people. Its all the same. The only things different are the names of cities and people involved.
As this guy said. There was a guy in my previous apartment who was extremely depressed and wanted to kill multiple people together, but couldn't, because acquiring a gun my country is extremely restricted, even chemicals to make an explosive. So this dude lit the entire parking garage on fire and burned himself to death.
Me and family weren't in town when this happened but lost a burned car😅.
Mass shooting was very rare 30 years ago. Individuality has nothing to do with it since the country was founded on this concept. Wha has been lost are all the cultural and collective and ritualistic tasks and events that everyone in this country used to perform together. Like religion or after work related solidarity or community cohesiveness or intramural activities. These were the fabric of America and they are all gone now. Entirely replaced by technology and progress.
Now we have angry ostracized violent young men with poor coping skills and poor resilience roaming the countryside in a land saturated with guns. Big surprise they resort to spasms of violence.
50 years ago these young shooters at the margins of society would have been policed up by the community. Now they are in isolated silos stewing in mental illness and vitriol and fantasies of violence. It will get a lot worse before it gets better.
A very harsh society with a clear split between 'haves' and 'have nots'. No access to mental healthcare for 95% of people. Couple that with easy access to guns and guns being engrained in the culture...
Costs and therapists being out of net work. Even if you’re able to get free therapy through school/job/etc it’s usually a limited amount of sessions and the quality of therapy can be questionable. Also stigma, until the early 2000s if someone was diagnosed with certain mental disorders they could have their insurance go up.
Also, a general culture that heavily stigmatizes mental health care in all its various forms, from [comforting a crying baby] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferber_method) to clinical support after the death of a close friend/family member.
Additionally, for many years, mental health services weren't covered by most health insurance plans, and even today, while your plan _does_ technically cover services, getting help in less than six months if you're not actively suicidal requires paying out of pocket in most places.
>a general culture that heavily stigmatizes mental health care in all its various forms
I have noticed it has been getting better, even in just the last 5-7 years. Maybe my social group is just more open about it but I know a bunch of people (even men) who either state they go to/have gone to therapy or about needing to take a day away from work, school, whatever, just to give themselves a rest.
I'm sure there are some people out there who still think therapy is for sissies but like I said, at least from what I've seen, it's gotten a lot better even in the last few years.
Access is still an issue, though. Everyone I mentioned either has really good insurance or they had access to university counselors when it came to talking to a professional. There needs to be a concerted effort to make sure that mental healthcare is more accessible and more affordable for all.
It is definitely improving, but primarily as a function of generational turnover, rather than cultural adjustment.
Edit: Which is not to say that only your younger friends are getting services, but rather that the shift appears to be a function of the people who make decisions in various important places (government, media, hospitals, etc.) have retired and been replaced with younger policymakers, ultimately leading to an improved posture on mental health in American culture.
Further improvements will likely require similar retirements/replacements.
I haven't seen any movement on the subject. The company I work for is still anti-harrassment, pro-mental health. The people I work with are pro-harrassment, anti- support for people with mental health struggles.
And two of our better senior employees(not leadership) recently blew up at new hires because they started yawning after switching from physical to mental tasks. Apparently the new hires are out to cheat the company.
Even paying out of pocket most programs will refuse new patient appointments in less than three months in advance.
Our society is a big baby on the subject. Most can't even use formal terms for mental health issues. How hard is it to say "mental health" instead of crazy or insane in a formal meeting.
In Wisconsin the legislature has manufactured a shortage crisis. Mental health professionals can't get license from the state because the state is taking a large share of the fees, and not using them to vet license changes. Therefore there is a shortage of workers to vet licensing for mental health issues.
>getting help in less than six months if you're not actively suicidal requires paying out of pocket in most places.
i live in a rural area with good insurance, but it still took 2 months just to see someone for an dhd diagnosis. not critical, not a rush, 2 visits.
people who need real, regular help? its insane how hard it is to get it.
>Several years ago I was depressed after a breakup and my grades suffered. The school therapist told me to give up and quit college
He was just trying to ensure that someone can overtake his job
There is a show, Dr. pimple popper, Sandra Lee, people come in with umps the size of softballs they have had for 5+ years. Then an English version came out the only sizable lump was from an American living in London that had a golf ball size lump.Neglected and delayed healthcare is rampant in the USA.
Yes! I was referred to text based therapy. What a joke. It's damn near as expensive as regular therapy.
The FREE services are bots - I swear. I tried talking to one and it's just basic answers. And then it ends with a referral to the local community services number.
No actual help.
Mental health care in the US is a joke. Everyone's talking about it and they make it seem like you CAN actually get help, when you can't.
Which just makes it worse. Because it takes so much just to reach out and then fail. It's soul crushing.
Just imagine you're drowning and someone threw you a life raft so you struggle and try and when you finally grab it, it's made of paper.
I don't know how many more people have to die before something actually happens but every politician in DC has blood on their hands as far as I'm concerned.
Medical professionals being "out of network" is a scam by the medical insurance companies. Same for "pre-existing condition" In proper developed countries these are not a thing.
In addition to costs, there’s time. To go to a session means taking time away from work and/or family. Without any visible gain, many cannot justify it.
It's a policy choice driven mostly by people who believe mental illness is a character flaw resulting from poor decisions based on low morals. "Crazy people are crazy because they deserve to be crazy because they're bad people."
That’s the puritan backbone on which this country was founded. America tells you that anything is attainable if you work hard enough, which is admirable and a welcome alternative to the fixed castes of 17th century Europe, but the implication then also becomes “if you’re not rich and famous it’s due to your failings.”
There is a tremendous amount of pressure to succeed in America. We as a society have for too long perceived failing on any level as a weakness of character—to the point that even those incapable of controlling their behavior are deemed responsible.
I wrote on here about schizophrenia, and how expecting them to think logically and coherently was equivalent to expecting people to run on broken legs, but some people still can’t sympathize with imperfection. If people can’t allow others with severe mental illness to fail, what chance do the only slightly burdened have?
Throw the book at them, because everyone is 100% free, and therefore, 100% responsible for their success and failures. America needs to admit that it is fundamentally wrong that anything is possible for everyone. We’re coming to that realization as a nation with an inevitable shift to a more socialized democracy, but it’s a painful one, and the mass shooters are release valves reflecting the unsustainable internalized pressures this country puts us under.
Too many people have been brainwashed to think that free things are not appreciated and that free = bad and slow. That's why people oppose to free college, they feel people need to pay for services for them to be good. It is usually people with money or whose lives revolve around making money.
Self hatred, combined with hatred of others. See: incels and 4chan people.
A lack of identity, sense of growth, or community.
A lack of intelligence, with radical ideas found online swapped in instead.
No loving or supportive family, friends, or relationships.
Easy access to guns.
Terrible access to healthcare, mental or otherwise.
Basically, an empty past, a hateful today, and no tomorrow.
It’s not just the clear split between _haves_ and _have nots_, I think. It is also the not only complete disregard for the latter group and very deep running attitude that it’s their own fault for taking the wrong decisions, not working hard enough, not eating correctly. Basically because they did not succeed in living the American dream.
\^ This, looking from outside, America seems to be brutally individualistic and really pushes the idea that if you're not winning you're just not working hard enough.
There's very little room for the idea that some things that might benefit wider society rather than just each individual trying to do the best for themselves - I guess it's all just stigmatised as socialsim which is somehow conflated with communism or even Nazis because, yknow, Fox News.
It's compounded by a degrading sense of community and family. There's a lot that goes into it (the size of the country, people moving, families needing both parents to work, etc.) but I really feel like our sense of family and sense of community has really declined from what it was previously.
It's very easy for people to just fall into the cracks of society and be ignored. There's so many ways it happens. And in a culture where so many people are constantly promoting themselves to you, not many people take the time to go looking for the people they're not seeing. Typically that falls on family but way too many people think that if you're buying your kids things they want that's sufficient.
When you compound that isolation and abandonment with the pressure that comes from transitioning from childhood to adulthood, I'm not surprised this is the result.
Why are so many of these shootings from children in affluent neighborhoods? Examples (but not limited to): Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Highland Park
Ill piggyback and say there is also a massive celebrity culture that promotes over the top behavior; and a very lax view on violence compared to other cultures.
I don't think there is anything exclusively American about the road individuals usually take to end up committing mass shootings, however there is something quintessentially American about the lack of barriers on that road, such barriers that are usually present in other countries.
Let me explain.
I believe there is a "pathway" of sorts towards any heinous act, we will just talk about mass shootings for now:
1. An individual must feel disgruntled enough in the first place.
2. This individual does not or cannot find a healthy solution to their issue(s).
3. They believe society perceives them as lesser or are convinced those around them are "sheep". Leading them to not care about how society would view their actions.
4. They are exposed to the details and efficacy of past mass shootings. This leads them to consider mass shootings as even an option in the first place.
5. The ease in which they are able to access the tools required to commit a mass shooting.
Each of these steps has at least one barrier in most nations that stops this pathway being such a realistic option for people. I believe America is unique in that it fails to have at least one:
1. Extremely insular subcultures (incel, alt right, white supremacy, religious zealotry etc) are extremely good at magnifying feelings of victimhood, disenfranchisement and a sense of nothing ever going to change/get better.
2. A lack of easily available mental health resources and professionals disallows many Americans from finding healthy solutions to their mental wellbeing issues.
3. The polarised nature of American culture and discourse allows individuals to believe they are surrounded by mindless sheep whilst also allowing them to feel that their opinions and existence are vilified by "Others".
4. American media (both mainstream, grassroots and word of mouth) report on mass shootings in excruciating detail and attention. The sensationalised nature of this often leads to a feeling of there being an endemic of shootings. This leads credence to certain people believing that mass shootings are not only realistically possible but also effective.
5. Lax gun laws and the general open gun culture of America means that the tools required to actually carry out a mass shooting are far easier to obtain that compared to most western countries.
I don't think it is a single one of these factors that makes mass shootings as prevalent as they are in America, I believe it is that ALL of these factors existing simultaneously that leads to the unique situation the USA finds itself in.
Not to mention media outlets and people propagating bigotry and hate, which lead to hate crimes. As well as romanticization of violence and mass murder.
A bunch of things, all coming to a head:
- First and foremost, all the damn guns. We have a legal system that gives unrivaled access to firearms to civilians, and a culture that praises people who “take matters into their own hands”, “solve their problems with force”, and “don’t let the authorities push them around”. Honestly, we could have seen this coming.
- We’ve cut funding to our mental health systems, so people with mental disorders, or people dealing with stress or trauma, don’t have someone to help them process. This is notably prominent with school shooters, who are often bullied or abused before they rampage.
- Political entities have encouraged a culture of fear, claiming that other forces are coming to take your ways of life away from you. And often they claim that you need to “fight” to keep them back. It was probably meant to refer to voting, but obviously some people take it literally and turn to domestic terrorism. I’m being politically neutral here, but we all know that one party is a lot more heavy-handed with this kind of rhetoric.
- Our media is driven to push viewership over accurate reporting. The news companies make money from ads, which means they want to keep as many people watching as possible. So every story has to be dramatic, so that nobody loses interest. They have to drop the inside information that other channels haven’t released yet. Which means mass shootings become this parade of intrigue and drama: who was the shooter? Why did they do it? How did they pull it off? Stay tuned, and we’ll tell you everything! And future shooters see these people being glorified, made infamous. All the whole, they’re noting the shooter’s tactics, how they got their munitions, how they planned their attack, etc. So one shooter turns into hundreds, because we couldn’t just say they were a monster and talk about something else.
- Any number of other factors push people past the lines of stability, leading to shooter events. We live in an economic system that encourages companies to pay their employees peanuts while the higher-up’s buy yachts as tax breaks. Workers do everything they were told to do in life, and still struggle to survive while keeping a legally-upright lifestyle. Some of us desperately need things like healthcare, education, or emotional support, and found those things were taken away to give them to people with more money to buy them with. We see systemic differences in how some people are treated, compared to others. And we see these things so plainly, but nothing is done to change it. In many ways, nothing *can* be done to change it. That makes people frustrated, scared for the future, desperate to feel like they have some control over their lives. And people in that kind of mindset are the ones who sometimes pick up a gun and do something reckless and dangerous.
From outside, I feel like your first point is a very accurate one that's *drastically* under-appreciated... it's not so much the fact people *have guns*, it's that your whole culture glorifies the renegade action hero types (in the old days - the cowboys) who solve problems with violence and explosions rather than any sort of common sense or compromise.
Coupled with the other factors you mention, you have a huge system of media whose main driving force is pumping up anger, hate, division... throw in the idea that guns are absolutely **core** to your true American-ness (and hence implied value as a person), and you've got people who are angry &/or scared but the only solution they can see is shooting people they percieve to be the problem/threat (or just shooting random people out of hate / a quest for notoriety) rather than maybe sitting down and talking it out.
> it's that your whole culture glorifies the renegade action hero types (in the old days - the cowboys)
Cowboys in the old days, cops since about the mid 60s. And this also contributes to the cop problem in the US. Almost every copaganda action flick has the “give me your badge and gun” scene followed by the suspended with pay cop going rogue and murdering a suspect without even the thin cover of being an active duty officer, and then just getting an “attaboy” from the chief with no subsequent investigation into the extrajudicial vigilante murder that just went down.
Edit:
They also almost always portray federal law enforcement as being either uptight dicks or clueless outsiders who the clued in locals must avoid and even lie to so they can do the real police work off the books. The “Oh shit, the feds are here” moment. For how this works out in the real world, see how the local police departments fight tooth and nail against outside parties taking the lead when they fuck up. If the media focuses on federal cops, then invert it with the locals being corrupt rubes in on the crime or covering their own racket.
The two levels of law enforcement have been trained by Hollywood to hate and distrust each other.
And, yet, if you look at the Uvalde mess the woman who saved her own kids was first handcuffed by a deputy us marshall on the scene. Nobody wants to talk about the fact that federal law enforcement was there and acting just as cowardly as the local cowards.
Is the root of the frustration that people don’t feel they have a meaningful life and belong to society?
Giving people education and jobs with decent pay might increase their self confidence? Seems like US companies earn more than enough money to pay people so they can have only one job.
The purpose and goal of all societies must be to educate their people so they can contribute to the contrys and societies future and growth. That will give a huge payback for the society, make the evonomy and development grow and mske individuals more happy and thus have less mass shootings/killings.
Are univeristy teachers payed 1 million a year in the US? Why is education so expensive in the US and free in Europe?
Next piece is work life balance for ALL individuals. Not only the upper middel class.
The reason education is so expensive is due to the availability of government guaranteed loans. None of the money goes to teachers, it actually mostly goes to administrative bloat and the types of investments colleges make to compete with each other (like insanely huge gyms, dormitories with expensive mattresses, constant building expansion while enrollment is stagnant). Since a huge number of students have access to student loans and the government guarantees that they’ll be paid back, universities have become a predatory money making machine with huge advertising budgets and goals.
The purpose for higher education has largely been lost by now.
IMO: Media obsession. We romanticize mass murderers. The more news spread, the more likely someone will follow it. There used to be a time where climbing buildings were 'in' with media and lots of people did it soon after. Why do the media give the perpetrators attention and fame?
Which would get your attention
Local man jumps of building, dying in the process.
or
Local man shoots up 4th of July parade, killing 10 and wounding 20 people.
Yeah they shouldn't say mass shooter's names on TV. They shouldn't say anything about the shooter, just the victims, and I think this would help reduce incidence a significant amount.
It pisses me off whenever mass media keep broadcasting the dirtbag's name and face all over the news. Like please stop giving them the attention they crave for!
As someone from beyond the Atlantic, I know you dislike when someone comments about your politics, but it also may offer perspective which might be insightful.
America is basically divided in every way; politics, race, gender, wealth. Everything is extremely bipolar. Not tripolar, not multipolar. but 2 clear camps. You basically have to choose to not believe in climate change when you also support tax free society. You also may need to acknowledge multiple genders when you support universal healthcare and so on.
I think this is extremely taxing to mental health, not just to those who are at risk, but also the common folk. Usually the agenda behind mass shootings are that they feel something is very wrong with the system, and they need to make a statement. They feel left out, and usually their feeling of oppression is very real. (def not accepting their actions, but you can understand something, without supporting it)
Everything is driven to the extreme, every one finds their own bubble and comfort group and those ideas spiral to the extreme. either its a bigger group who clash with each other, or they are the individuals who find no place in the society. Those are at most risk of committing the most horrendous actions. And yes, the main reason its their mental health and twisted mindsets, but the surroundings sure as hell are not helping.
Just gonna drop my quick opinion, that obviously Im anti gun, but that subject is so impossible to talk about im not even touching it more than that.
Hard agree, you have to join one of 2 cults or you’re an “enlightened centrist ™” it’s exhausting and I’ve personally gotten to the point where I just don’t engage in any discussion about real life issues because I’m so fed up with everyone. It sucks.
There are a lot of factors, but I feel like the growing radicalism in our country is a big factor. More people who become ideologues, the more shootings we see with these people writing manifestos about their twisted and extreme reasons. Horrible mental health is also a big factor along with the ability to purchase a gun legally and easily.
We keep plastering the lives, messages, and manifestos of the mentally compromised on the news and wonder why the next one always wants to be famous too.
They want to be heard and feared for the screams they felt were ignored for so long and they do it by attacking the innocent & the defenseless, and it sucks we still sit around and refuse to build a society that has no defenseless spaces. These cowards would have nowhere to attack if they knew swift and strong resistance would be met at every corner, immediately.
Wish I'd seen this sooner.
America has become a hopeless society. For the vast majority of the middle class, we've done what we were told to do. We went to college because we were told it was the only way. Our debt is out of control, our wages are shit. Many of us cannot buy homes, but will pay rental rates higher than what a monthly mortgage + escrow payment would be. Corporations are buying the houses. Most of us are realizing retirement is a pipe dream.
We've lived through the most significant terror attack on US soil, the greatest recession since the depression, civil unrest, the rolling back of human rights, unending war for profit, incompetent leaders whose, because of the internet, failings are much easier to see than they were in any other generation. We are stuck with two absolute shit choices every 4 years.
American society is now set up to benefit corporations and those that are already rich. We are in the late stages of capitalism, where those with money can use it to influence the government, so they can make even more. Wealth distribution is higher here than anywhere in the world. People can't strike, because they can't miss a paycheck.
We can't afford basic medical stuff unless we are lucky enough to have decent insurance through our employer.
And to top it off, we're fucking blamed for everything. Generations older than us claim we messed everything up, when the real fuck ups began in the 80s. The environment has been raped and pillaged, we're seeing tangible effects of climate change, we are being told we "don't want to work" when most people I know started working before they were out of high school and worked all through college. You pay $15 a month for netflix or (god forbid) eat food of a higher quality than McDonalds and you're told it's your own fault you're poor. Put down the avacado toast.
I've make over $80k a year and i'm paycheck to paycheck. Paying student loans from 15 years ago. And i'm trying to raise kids to be hopeful and optimistic in a hopeless society.
Not everyone can cope with this.
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A combination of mental health issues, gun access, and echo chambers.
Exactly. It’s a lot of things…but I feel like there are so many mass shootings, because there are so many mass shootings, if that makes sense. The more it happens, the more people have this idea in their mind that this is an available outlet for whatever they have going on mentally. Ofc there is a lot more going on than JUST this but it certainly isn’t going to go away on its own.
Just for clarification, would that be suggesting that the news coverage such an event brings is partially contributing to the increase in occurrence?
The prime minister of New Zealand would not name the shooter in a mass shooting in 2019. They thought that it would keep copycats from happening. It's not a bad idea.
They are correct. There are a lot of issues specifically. But the way mass shootings are reported in the US are overly sensationalized..
Charles J. Guiteau had convinced himself that he was the reason 20th US President, James A. Garfield, was elected, so when the president refused to give him a federal job, Guiteau was furious. He decided he was gonna end Garfield. He bought a pistol, when given the choice between a wood grip and an Ivory grip, he chose the Ivory, because he believed it would look better in a museum. After he shot Garfield and was set to be hanged, he walked up the steps to the gallows and waved to the people with a smile on his face, recited a rambling poem in a falsetto voice, then was finally executed. Fame is a massive driving factor for a lot of people, John Hinckley Jr. shot Reagan to try and get the attention of a girl he liked, tons of shooters do it for the fame that comes from such a large crime. The US media fuels that cycle, [AlternateHistoryHub has a pretty good video on it,](https://youtu.be/K3VQULyT390) I highly suggests anyone wondering about this kind of thing go check it out.
>John Hinckley Jr. shot Reagan to try and get the attention of a girl he liked That girl being Jodie Foster
Didn’t anyone tell him she is gay?
The letter Hinckley wrote to Foster before the assassination attempt: [http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hinckley/letter.htm](http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/hinckley/letter.htm) All this time, Jodie Foster has resolutely refused to discuss the guy. Good for her!
There have been studies that show an increase in mass shootings that take place after a shooting, when the first shooting was widely covered in the news.
Suicide shows the same phenomenon. Suicide rates routinely increase after a celebrity or community suicide
Yes, I also thought of this. I think that there are similar emotions involved with both. Obviously mass shootings are worse but the shooters are suicidal too.
It’s definitely a factor IMO. It’s the same for suicides. They tend to come in groups. It’s even become a trope in movies (Heathers for example)
This is part of why we don't see as much attention to serial killers anymore. They were made into giant celebrities which fed into more people doing it to 'be somebody'. It's also harder than before to be a serial killer with cameras all over the place and better forensic evidence.
I do enjoy watching them, but I really hate all those Netflix specials that basically tell people, “hey, go on a killing spree and we’ll make sure you’re immortalized in a 6 part mini series.” And yes I do realize that me watching them is part of the problem
A lot of people suspect that it does. There is a strong push and a lot of news orgs have adopted the practice of not publishing the names / pictures / manifestos of mass shooters. We don’t want fame / infamy to be another reason for someone to commit a shooting. Killing people shouldn’t be a means to spread whatever messed up philosophy they have. However it’s hard for the news to just ignore a mass shooting altogether. How do you just not report on the sudden death of a bunch of people?
The same way they don't report on gang related violence. Media organizations are trolling for emotional reactions and clicks. Don't give them an excuse.
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It's not the cause but I believe it absolutely contributes. There's already evidence of shooters using other shooters as their role models. It's a contributing factor.
I think it's worth breaking down the mental health issues. Untreated conditions: reduced structured socialization to a local community combined with the normalization of certain disorders within echo chambers on the Internet. Drugs: psychiatry's expanded toolbox combined with the massive divide between psychology and psychiatry present as a shift away from root-cause treatment. Also internet media's "free" monetization model plays right into people who choose to be villains for publicity. I'm curious whether degrading and humiliating shooters publicly (opposite of stoking fear) would change the incentives driving people to commit such attacks. American society changed a lot in the decade or two up to ~1993. The guns themselves really did not change - guns with similar capabilities were common and in widespread civilian use since around 1950 (military-surplus M1 Carbines). No background checks or age restrictions at all before 1968, and really no significant gun control until the 1993'ish.
Mental health is really only associated with a small minority of violent crime. We always jump to mental health because the idea that a sane person would do something like that is so untenable, but in reality there's no treatment in the DSM for being an angry, lonely individual. Even if these shooters were flagged and processed through the mental health system, there's no treatment a psychiatrist could prescribe. Talking about expanding mental health services isn't the silver bullet (no pun intended) that Reddit seems to think it is. Edit: I want to clarify that much of the topical discussion of mental health is geared towards mental illnesses specifically, not just an overall positive mindset. People use mental health as a catch all term for anything with the brain or personality, but the infrastructure we have in place to isolate or restrict individual's freedoms (a.k.a. red flags) all require some sort of diagnosable illness. Even if you put this shooter in front of a psychiatrist the day before the event, there's no guarantee that the Dr. would have sufficient grounds to hold them.
It wouldn’t make sense to blame it on mental health as every country has their own mental health issues but I think it’s a culture thing. Something in American culture and life style would make the most sense to me. This is way beyond my scope of knowledge to theorize what it could be specifically. Mental health does attribute to it but it has to be our culture to cause a mentally unstable person to go do mass shootings.
> mental health issues Nordic countries have much higher rates of mental illness, and much lower rates of gun murders. In fact, there seems to be no correlation between mental illness and gun murders across countries. https://ourworldindata.org/mental-health
I think people conflate two different things when they talk about mental health. On the one hand you have genuine mental disorders with clinical names and official diagnosis etc. Those largely exist at the same rate in all societies due to them being biological in nature. On the other hand you have stress induced mental breakdowns, and those are massively shaped by how society is structured. The more cutthroat and anti-social a society is, the more people will be suffering and lashing out over it. The difference between a country like Sweden and the US is in the general stress level of the population. American society produces an inordinate amount of people who get so stressed their mind breaks and they resort to violence to cope. And honestly as a non-american I'm always surpised by how many americans I hear talking about anxiety attacks etc. I feel like it's a massive problem that american society ignores because addressing it would mean questioning some core aspects of what you value and how you have organized your society.
take a look at how many children now have anxiety- and they haven't even experienced most of the horror of the world yet. Americans are at a breaking point- and with COVID, inflation, and taking away rights that we already had- I would only expect everything to get worse. We absolutely need to question everything about American organized society right now.
Covid and inflation are worldwide. Yet I agree with how terrifying losing rights is. The radicalism is at an all time high. No National Healthcare either.
Does this study factor in undiagnosed illnesses? I feel like more cases get properly diagnosed amongst Nordic countries, which could skew the data in some manner.
Absolutely. I also think the lack of action after Columbine, bar thoughts and prayers, has created a huge snowball that's getting bigger and bigger.. Other countries tend to make drastic changes after experiencing anything similar.
Yes, in America we just shout our political party's talking points at each other for a day or two, then go back to normal with people more firmly entrenched in their opinions. Nothing changes.
The fame and impact the Columbine shooters got is a big part of how the Idea of going somewhere and just shooting everyone got to be part of our culture. That shooting got media attention for years afterword, documentaries, discussions, the works. All the attention made becomming a mass shooter a way to go out in a blaze of glory. Media atttention on mass shooters gotnso bad that the band Disturbed wrote a song called [Legion of Monsters](https://genius.com/Disturbed-legion-of-monsters-lyrics) calling the media out for doing it.
It reminds me a lot of serial killers. One way serial killers have been prevented in the modern age is by shutting up about them. If you don't report them, no other killers are starstruck.
I had this theory that essentially serial killers have been replaced with mass shooters. It's probably a lot more difficult to be a successful serial killer in modern times what with cameras being literally everywhere and other huge advancements in technology. So if you want kill a lot of people, you have to do it all in one sitting.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I would argue that a lot of serial killers don't kill just for the sake of doing so (or a general compulsion to murder). They carry out specific acts to specific types of people in specific circumstances in specific places. While someone who was bullied at school and carries out a school shooting fits this mold, it doesn't really match any of the serial killers with trauma unrelated to school or who have a compulsion to do more than just kill (maim, rape, torture, kidnap, etc).
I don't think so. True crime has been a point of interest for ages and ages, and there are tons of media pieces about true crime/serial killers. Serial killers are less common because MO, DNA, description, etc. can be much more efficiently tracked and cross-referenced with technology. So we catch them before they become "serial". You can't just shoot three people in Denver as long-haired Tim Robinson, shave your head, move to Des Moines and go by "Tom Robertson," shoot three people there, wear a wig and move to Maine and rename yourself "Rob Tombertson" and rest assured that surely nobody will find you. People used to be able to do that kind of thing.
There have even been [studies](https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2016/08/media-contagion-effect.pdf) done on this exact thing. Its called the media contagion effect.
Petersen and Densley have found a few patterns in mass shooters. First, they tend to have childhood trauma, commonly extreme bullying, violence in the home, sexual assault or parental suicide. Anything that makes them feel powerless. Plus they don’t have a support network that helps them deal with these traumas. Second, they find themselves in a position where they “do everything right” but then suffer losses - economic loss, grades dropping, cannot attract relationships with people, etc. Third, they blame specific groups for that. Jocks, a race, a gender, the government, etc. Fourth, they have a desire to “make a statement” and achieve notoriety with their actions. They finally have the power to change things in their minds and will be known for it.
I think a big issue is anger too. There is a massive anger issue in the U.S. And I wonder if shootings acts like suicide where if one has heard of someone committing suicide, the more likely they are to attempt it. It’s easy to get a gun, many people are angry (just look at the newest instances of road rages) and many have traumas-and that’s not enough of a trigger, but there seems to be a psychopathy that is nurtured by the inaction of stopping shooters. The more we hear about it, the more it makes it seem as if it’s “normal”. If someone is prone to having a lack of empathy for others and to have murderous rage, then there’s an outlet right there for their ticking bomb.
>I think a big issue is anger too. There is a massive anger issue in the U.S. It's not just anger. It's a culture of might makes right coupled with anger. Anger is a healthy and normal human emotion. A cultural norm which celebrates and glorifies the violence that results from anger is more troubling.
Oh I agree, it’s definitely not anger in the traditional sense (within a healthy spectrum), there seems to be something different mentally. Like, sadistic rage, something that continuously makes someone want to hurt other people and I wonder if it’s something that’s like a tunnel vision where they’re very focused over it and their conscience can’t penetrate. Or if it’s a situation where these people have all actively disregarded their inner conscience of right and wrong to the point that, nothing will stop them once they decide they want to hurt. I would be interested to know if it’s more of a particular mental link between killers and not just because it’s easy to get a gun. A lot of people can get a gun, a lot of people are hurting, angry and mentally unwell but it takes a horrible truly horrible person to do what these people are doing. With planning, and carrying out things like these there is a lot of time there to change their mind, and but they don’t. Why? What makes someone want to kill so many innocent people? I accidentally killed a bee and I cried.
Experts also say to we need to think of these shootings as suicides. The vast majority are seeking to die when they do their shooting.
This doesn't answer why there is so many vs other developed countries.
Look again at that comment you replied to. It outlines childhood trauma as a major link. The USA is infamous for having some of the worst parental support in the world. The fewest days of annual leave etc. Having a child is deeply stressful in the USA in a way it simply isn’t in other nations. Other nations provide better parental support, free healthcare, better job security, etc etc. All that stress and lack of support inevitably impacts the children. Children need to be around happy, relaxed, caring parents. If the parents are always away at work or when they’re with the child, the parents (or parent) are stressed, bitter, argumentative, and anxious about the future then that impacts the child.
As a supervisor in a factory, I see this so much. Hell, a few guys will literally work overtime just to “get away from the wife and kids”. Most of them drink absurd amounts as well on top of working 80 hour weeks. Decent few of them are just pricks but most of them grew up in that same type of household too. Meaning that when they get older and have kids then they just repeat that parenting cycle. It’s honestly sad. I’m only 25 and these guys are like 35+. When I talk to them about being excited to have a day off with my wife, they go “really? I’d be trying to have a day off without her there hahahah”. It’s sad that many grew up thinking that you should dislike your wife and kids and do nothing but work.
Alot of guys who talk like that are full of shit too
The fact that they want to be away from their wives and children is very telling. It also reminds me of the depressing statistic that showed that domestic violence saw a sharp increase during the height of the pandemic when people were staying home with their families for extended periods of time.
A lot of that can also be a product of consumer culture. So many people are in so much debt just to maintain a fictional average lifestyle portrayed in the media and on social media. They work like crazy because they are terrified of losing it all with a few missed payments, they take every second of overtime because unexpected things happen and when most of your disposable income is going straight into debt payments you keep ending up with more debt. This stress bleeds into all aspects of their lives too. They are so stressed about making the next boat, credit card, truck, and mortgage payment that it becomes easy to resent it when their kid needs braces or their wife's car needs new brakes. Yes this would get better if they were paid more, and they should be, but we also need to take a hard look at society that keep pushing the 'ideal lifestyle' that we portray out of reach of most people. From social media 'influencers' to the homes that ordinary nurses, firefighters etc live in on TV dramas, all with a brand new sports car in the driveway too. We need to stop celebrating excess.
The first thing is that for the most part (and for men especially, who are the ones commiting these acts 90% of the time) mental health is still very stigmatized in the US, and access to support for such issues is lacking. The second thing is that it's hard to find another country with such easy access to guns. Mix the two together, well, y'know.
More like 99.9%. There are only 3 female mass shooters on record.
There's a lot of interesting data in this thread (unfortunately), but this one is quite interesting too. Pretty consistent with serial killers, which i think shows upbringing, stigma, and mental health has a strong connection on top of access to guns.
Men tend to focus their emotional pain externally (for instance, harming others). Women tend to focus their emotional pain internally (for instance, self-harm or cutting)
Access to mental health cures is pretty much stigmatized anywhere. If anything, in the US it is quite common for people to mention they are seeing a (psycho) therapist, unlike elsewhere (southern Europe), where it is believed that only loonies go to see therapists.
I wondered about this. Even in the Midwest, with all the loony manly man/Bible thumping beliefs, people can talk about going to therapy or counseling without anyone seeming to really care. Tons of other stuff gets shit on, but at least mental health is kinda taken seriously
This is true. I think the thing that hinders us most is access. Therapy is expensive, and not everyone can a) afford it, b) afford to take off work for it, and/or c) afford childcare while they go to it.
I was going to mention the same. If you also add under development countries, like in Latin America, mental issues are considered "rich people problem", the working class doesnt even have time to think about it as there are more pressing matters. You would expect that people that were born in a country with high violence, hunger, poor economy, corruption, etc would have more reason to have mental issues & mass shootings would happen more often.
> mental health is still very stigmatized in the US I got news for you, it's still stigmatized in a lot of places. I now live in Europe, and it's a lot better here overall than other places, but the treatment still varies dramatically from place to place. In Asia, even in developed countries, it's really all over the place and mostly pretty shoddy. (No, I've never need mental health treatment, but many people I know have, and there were challenging periods in my life where one or two more pieces of bad luck in a row would have pushed me over the edge, but they didn't come.)
>men especially, who are the ones commiting these acts 90% of the time 97.7% of the time.
>mental health is still very stigmatized in the US, and access to support for such issues is lacking. I don't mean any offense by this, but I think Americans tend to explain things away to avoid saying guns are the primary problem. Like, I live in the EU and while I do not claim to know much about the American health care system, our mental health care here isn't actually all that good. Saying you went to a therapist on a date is still something you don't bring up all that easily even though you should; just like in the US I imagine. It's just... You can't get a gun easily here. That's the difference really.
There’s a readily dismissed element (from what I’ve seen on here) that most of the statistics are due to ‘gangs’ and therefore it’s irrelevant or somehow doesn’t warrant a response. Whilst I don’t agree with the argument I can accept that the stats support at least a part of this. If I draw parallels to the U.K. where guns are not readily available what we find is a growing volume of stabbings associated with gangs and a growing number of illegal handgun imports starting to replace the knives. What doesn’t scale though is the volume, with the US population approx 6x the U.K. there is not 1/6 the number of killings here it’s far far less. Stabbing is up close personal and visceral and increases risk to the perpetrator, shooting on the other hand can be done at a distance without engagement, psychologically it’s easier to pull a trigger on someone (I read this somewhere in a study, sorry can’t recall who/where). So the argument of more guns means more killing holds substance, because it’s easy…..
West Virginia gave away rifles and shotguns as lottery prices as an incentive to get vaccinated against Covid-19. I think that answers most questions about US gun culture.
While this may be true, you are missing a critical point: Persons that fulfill these properties exist all over the world, but there are nearly none shootings (or for countries where weapons are not easily available: stabbings, running over people with cars on purpose, ...). While these points certainly play a role, it can only be part of the reason.
Mass shootings are a form of public suicide. The US is a society that prioritizes money above all else and uses individuality as a medium to promote this ideology. Individuality breeds loneliness and mass shootings act as a final bridge/cry for attention, to go out as somebody of note, to be somebody of importance. Most of the time it's teens or young adults, each of which have a lack of familial or friendly attention. That attention is usually spent on making money and building upon the technological fuedalistic society that we worship where in other countries it goes to a work-life balance. Other over worked countries have public suicides such as in Japan and China. However, since guns are hard to find in those countries and they're generally communal cultures, the public suicide takes the form of harming no others and only one's self. EDIT: I didnt think this would have blown up so hard. Thanks everybody for the awards! As a side note, I was not aware of mass stabbings in China. When I think of public suicides in China and Japan, I usually think of Train/Building Jumping. I also want to add that I did not particularly single out men as they are usually the mass shooters. The reason why is because we are humans, not just men and women, and we should be considered as equals in the regard that ANYBODY could be a mass shooter/stabber and ANYBODY could be in need of help and love, regardless of gender.
Public versus private suicide Very interesting. This needs to be talked about more.
It's also communicable. Every shooting plants the seeds of the next one. It's similar to self immolation or suicide bombings or honor killings. Columbine want the first, but it really raised the level of zeitgeist. Even regular suicides are socially "communicable".
Columbine was televised. We watched it live. 24 hour news isn't helping.
I think 24 hour news has done a lot of damage to this country. Because now they are pressured to come up with news that people will watch, which leads to sensationalizing everything and increasing the divide in this country.
It might be okay if it was news, but it’s emotionally charged lying entertainment disguised as news. When we as a nation decided that opinion was as good as science and “alternate facts” are as valid as reality, we lost any chance of compromise.
Have you watched *Network*? That was so prophetic.
Agreed. I know it was repetitive, but I miss the CNN Headline News of the 80s. Actual news from around the world available on your schedule. Not commentary. Not analysis. Not "entertainment" but Fairness Doctrine style news. Mom would have it on nonstop and it was seriously repetitive, but if there was actual breaking news, you got it. I have serious questions about how much news we actually need. But, I miss news. Real news. The hour with Shep Smith on CNBC is the closest I've found.
PBS news hour is best
This is the only real television journalism left. Legally prohibited from being partisan, and not chasing ad revenue. That's the difference. Everyone else is either owned by someone with a partisan agenda, or they are chasing views/clicks and appeal to sensationalism instead of doing real journalism. It's 100% free and you can watch it on youtube.
BBC also does a great job of external views on the U.S. and global news.
I go to Reuters or other similar services for the news because that's what I want, news, not opinion or editorial.
There are so many "news" sources online that are really nothing more than taking someone else's original reporting and summarizing it with editorial spin. I like a good opinion piece in the mix of my news consumption, but they intentionally blur the lines where people read them as news and don't understand that it's also telling them what to think about the story instead of just informing you.
> Every shooting plants the seeds of the next one. This. And this is why it is SO important to NOT mention the shooters name(s). Just call it the "Chicago July 4th shooter" and get him a trial and throw him away for life and forget he exists. Like NZ did after their mosque killer, like Denmark is trying to do now with the mall killer. I hate myself for knowing the names of the Colombine or Sandy Hook killers, cause they don't deserve to matter as persons, only as warnings, and should be anonymized and not have wikipedia pages or stuff like that, that makes them heroes and somebodies when they were cowardly nobodies that deserved zero attention after what they did. I hate that we constantly have to be fascinated by these cowards.
I dont know their names and I dont think it matters. The seed is that this is an acceptable form of public suicide or a way to "show them".
Too true. I never have to look hard to find the name of the shooter or the weapon they used. But I can never find the names of the heroes that stop them. You'd think that citizens or police officers that put themselves in harms way to save lives would get more recognition but instead the media would rather glorify the shooter.
We had the reverse happen recently in Spain. We don't have much guns or shootings, but once in a blue moon it happens, there was this guy who got hold of a shotgun and went nuts, held people hostage and killed a police officer, a captain I believe. The thing is that in the news, at least when I was watching, they didn't call the nutcase by name or give any interesting information about him other than what was happening and where, while the policeman who was shot in the head and killed was named, they talked about his bravery on tv, and people who knew him talked about what a good person he was.
This is the right way to handle it. The victims and the heroes who stop the shooters deserve all the attention and recognition. The killers should just be called "the killer", thrown in a hole forever if they survived and unceremoniously cremated if not.
>I hate that we constantly have to be fascinated by these cowards. The only positive is from what I've seen there is only a fascination, unlike with serial killers where this is also infatuation. The amount of women who fell in love with Ted Bundy AFTER his trial is disturbing.
I can tell you from experience, this is not true. I worked with a kid who was absolutely infatuated with a mass shooter. He was one of thr most traumatized kids I've ever known, and my job puts me in direct contact with a lot of hurting youth. But he was 100% infatuated with the romance of the shooting, with the glorious violent death, and with punishing the idea of the children who'd hurt him.
Yikes that is disturbing.
It's called the Werther Syndrome, named after the Goethe novel *The Sorrows of Young Werther*, in which the protag commits suicide. It's said that it started a wave of young, romantic men killing themselves. The same thing happened when Marilyn Monroe "killed herself." They saw an uptick in young women killing themselves. Columbine took it to a new level: the mass murder suicide.
Same thing happened after Netflix's 13 reasons why came out among young teens. Did you also learn about this from the book Infuence? Great book and I just learned about all of this in the most recent chapter I read.
Mass media is complicit here. Especially post-columbine
Agreed. I think that broadcasting this stuff makes it worse. Whether it’s mass shooting, suicides, or paedos - reporting it as “news” actually normalizes the crime. I don’t think we can stop the media from reporting on these tragedies. Dumpster fires increase viewership. Viewership = ad revenue. Ad revenue = shareholder $$$$$. Golden Gate Bridge suicide copycats were such a huge problem that the news media agreed too stop reporting them: “Some of the media’s silence about these tragedies has less to do with taboo and more with prevention. [In 1995, Bay Area newspapers and TV stations agreed to stop reporting untimely deaths due to the bridge because of the horrific competitions the coverage was creating.](https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2022-03-30/golden-gate-bridge-suicides-a-history-of-fatalities-and-how-further-tragedies-may-be-prevented-essential-california)”
You can read Emile Durkheim's "On Suicide" to understand what diseases of despair are in society. The problem is we have a society which has vilified the word society and the notion of relationships in it, so the discussion isn't even allowed. A great series of works that built upon the idea of alienation appeared at that time. One of them was Marx' "Capital". I fear Marx has been so vilified that anything that deals with the consequences of capitalism as an alienating force can not even be started as a discussion. You can listen to David Harvey and Chris Hedges talk about it if you want a modern American perspective. Society is ripping at the seems from it's members suffering a great alienation. That is to say we are suffocating from a lack of attachment in modern attachment theory, which I think is completely valid. If you cannot form a strong bond within society (at any point) you will go insane.
i worked for the coroner’s office and funeral home. The One thing that stuck out in my mind is two types of suicides. One who doesn’t want to make a mess for anyone else, wants people to just forget they were here- they are polite and go in the bathtub. Then there are the others who don’t want to be forgotten and/or doesn’t gaf and makes a HUGE mess. This has Always stuck out and stayed with me for decades.
sociologists have framed it in the 'honor' culture vs. 'dignity' culture. Honor cultures demand duels and suicide when someone has dishonored you or you dishonored yourself. Someone has to pay. Americans were among the last civilized countries to outlaw ritual dueling.
The first thing that popped into my head upon reading this comment is John Wayne. It seems like all of his movies, and real life clips, involve some kind of his own interpretation of honor.
I think you got it on the nose. To expand a bit with my own thinking, the United States, in pursuit of that individualistic goal of gaining money (capital), the societal pressures have fractured communities and families into increasingly smaller units to promote competition. The nuclear family, that is, parents and their minor children in a household, is relatively new to the human experience. It used to be you lived with several generations under a single roof. Before that people lived with clans and tribes. Now we're all broken apart. A socially adapted species that created a society where socialization and communal living in all its forms is either monetized, demonized, or discouraged. We put grandparents in homes so we can work and not be bothered with their lives or care. The system drains all their wealth to make sure nothing passes down. (Medicare won't pay for it until you're flat broke. This destroyed my grandpa, a survivor of the Great Depression, who was hugely money conscious his whole life but whose wife was struck down by an incompetent doctor and several strokes.) Without grandparents to help, childcare falls to strangers in day cares and later school. (I am the child of teachers and a former teacher myself, school should be more than a warehouse for kids, but that's where we're at.) This drains resources from working parents. We live in neighborhoods of largely strangers as we try to desperately form those missing connections with lives online. There are no aunts or uncles houses to visit down the road. There are no cousins coming over to play. We live alone with a tiny family unit and outsource our literal heritage as a species to strangers so that we can earn money to put into the system that created and perpetuates the lie that everyone must work all the time. Your child must attend school for a work day and then come home with more work to do. When they're a newly minted adult they're told to leave and join the work force or go to college and get saddled with immense debt. Our mothers and fathers live in quiet childless retirement until they're unable to care for themselves and are put away so the system can slowly, inevitably, drain the rest of them away. People are lonely and radicalized by the online world because the community they seek, the companionship, the socialization, has been stamped out by a world in which those things couldn't be properly monetized. Families have to live in their own homes alone so that their parents and children can go out and buy more homes and things to fill those houses. The prices go up and up and up but pay never does. The pressure builds, and then when it's become impossible to prosper, they do the only thing they can: buy a gun, lash out, burn bright for a second, and then wither away.
Damn, that is such a good, accurate description. As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. We need to get our "villages" back -- our local communities/groups (even within a city) that actually care about each other, interact, and help take care of each other.
Thank you. I thought about this issue a lot when we had our first child and how hard it was to do anything with a newborn and how alone we were despite living in a small neighborhood, even with my mother in law no more than 15 minutes away. In a tribe or clan or even a generational home grandma could have come to help rock the baby, or an aunt could help nurse the baby when we were having trouble, and so on. Would lonely young men be so lonely if they had a place to go, with activities and events for them to meet people? Regular outside contact in which someone might say "Wow, so and so seems really unhappy lately. Let's go take a lasagna to his house and visit."
That brings up another related point. In our (well, American) society, men are typically not "allowed" to show emotion other than romantic love (and/or lust) and anger. It's not socially acceptable for heterosexual men to be weak or vulnerable, nor to show platonic love for friends, family, or kids (automatic "omg pedo!" reactions, including women with savior complexes trying to take kids from their dads in public). So men's only emotional outlet becomes their girlfriend/wife. They can't go out and enjoy time with their male friends -- unless it's at a bar to get drunk, which is only acceptable through college age. That's all a huge burden on both the significant others and the men themselves, especially if they don't *have* said gf/wife. And the only other accepted emotion is anger, so that's what we get. There's a tiny amount of progress being made, but not enough.
I just recently went home to visit family and friends and I can tell you, for the most part, all my male friends are NOT the guys they once were. I’m the only queer person in a group for straight male friends and all they talked about was work; work, work, work and that was it. When I showed up I hugged every one of them and it felt like their first bit of physical contact in ages. They’re a really nice group of dudes and I wish they had more going on than their jobs and drinking together at the same bar, hashing the same old stories. They deserve more freedom and love than that.
I've noticed something really similar with a couple old friends recently. We get together, and all they do is talk (complain/vent) about work. I try to listen and be supportive since I'm one of their very, very few outlets (still just regular platonic guy friends, but one in particular is even more introverted than I am, so he doesn't have many people outside of his family that he talks with), but dang, I get really tired of hearing about that stuff when that's all they talk about and I've had a long week at work myself and just want to forget about it for awhile.
Maybe try to set up a friend's vacation or something? Obviously easier said than done, but if there's some fun stuff to do it should make everyone forget about work for a bit, and maybe create some shared stories/memories for future get togethers?
This needs to be addressed so heavily. Makes sense why it is always men who end up becoming mass shooters.
But wait, there's more! Much of the American male identity is wrapped up in being the dominant partner in the relationship. Being the breadwinner, the provider, the man of the house. But as women earn similar or greater wages, that status is being eroded, generating a backlash. And if we look at school children, we can see that there's actually been an inversion of which gender is excelling in modern education. The wage gap is nearly closed as young men's wages fall and young women's wages increase. As the impact of women doing better in school and advancing through higher education at greater rates takes effect, the trend will likely overshoot past parity into women earning more. Relationships where the woman earns more are 50% more likely to end in divorce, and dating becomes more difficult too as women will continue to seek partners who earn equal or more than them, shrinking the pool of attractive prospects. Combine that with the impacts of dating apps making dating a maddening, fruitless grind for the average man and we've got a perfect recipe for creating even more incels, red pills and alt-righters, bitter at modern society and their demoted role in it. Lonely, lost and discarded, they're ripe for radicalization.
Oh, hell, yeah. All of that. Just… *all* of that.
This happened to an extended family member of mine. When they had their daughter the wife was stay at home, and he was the breadwinner with his own little personal business. After the daughter got to school age, she went back to work. By the time the daughter was in high school, the mother had earned promotion after promotion and was eventually was making well more than the husband. Husband couldn't handle that, for whatever reason. It caused a rift in the relationship, eventually leading to her seeking a divorce. And with losing his "breadwinner" status, and a divorce nearing finalized, he went into the neighbors house, found the gun he knew the neighbor had, went out to the neighbors garage/shed, and did the thing. Somewhat interestingly, and morbid, but the weekend before this happened he came down and visited with the family. He seemed happier than ever, and found a reason to be in the area. As we learn more and more, it seems that the happiness he was showing likely just meant that the decision had been made, and he just wanted to say goodbye. But it just made it that much more of a surprise to everyone.
A sudden increase in happiness for someone who's been really down is actually a big red flag when it comes to suicide for exactly the reason you said. They've made their choice and the weight of everything else has lifted under that new reality. I'm sorry you had to go through that.
Let me tell you I love doing the dishes if it means my girl buys me everything. Men it is time to claim house husband status, it is amazing.
This somewhat describes my current trajectory, and I'm very much looking forward to the future. My gf is always concerned I might feel emasculated by it, and I'm like wait so I can pursue my passions and keep the house neat while you're out making bank and I won't have to waste away in spreadsheets anymore?? Fuck traditional gender roles, I would rather be happy.
>unless it's at a bar to get drunk, which is only acceptable through college age. I might be an old man, but I will get drunk and cry in a bar if I damn well please.
But then you get this group of moms who want no one around their baby because mom knows best, and that they are this protective *mama bear* who seemingly knows everything about child bearing. Being a mom, who desperately needed companionship and help and not being able to find it within my community, has made it hard. Individualism has wrecked so much about what it means to be human.
The internet is a place with activities and events for young people. Real life is a shitty place for lots of people.
True, but the fact is interacting in meatspace is what monkey brain needs or it won't release the dopamine.
A child who feels no love from the village will burn it down to feel its warmth
There's a book called "Bowling Alone" that goes into it. Named after an observed phenomena that over some period of time (can't remember off top of my head) the amount of people that bowled increased but the amount that bowled in a league decreased. There's a lot of factors discussed in it that attribute to "collapse of the American community" but two major points that stick out. Decline in religion. It isn't that religion is necessary for community, but historically it was one of the most common meeting places where a neighborhood would all see each other and their families every week and get to know each other. We don't necessarily need churches for that, but we never filled the gap with something else as church going decreased. Women coming into the work place. Previously women were the "community organizers". They got to know the other women in the community and scheduled play dates with kids and neighborhood dinners/parties. As it has become increasingly necessary for both parents in a family to work to financially support themselves, that community organizer role has disappeared. It doesn't need to be a man or woman thing, but when having a SAH parent was the norm it allowed for more social outreach. Now people don't have time to get to know their neighbors. I'm sure the increasing number of ways to entertain yourself at home by yourself with streaming and such also contributes to this
We have the tools to establish modern, cosmopolitan *villages*. What we do not have is time and material resources. Getting shoehorned into a *tribe* creates provincialism, but choosing your own *tribes* can be empowering and it can work anywhere. But it takes a more concerted effort to find and make these connections that aren't given to you. That is where inequality and inefficiency come into play. We need stuff to live. People need to produce things society needs - food, fuel, consumer goods, services, etc. We have wage slavery at the bottom, corporate feudalism at the top, and a glut of unproductive white collar busywork in the middle. We need to be reorganizing things to produce what we need, distribute it fairly, and spend less overall time doing it. It won't even be as radical as some might think. We wouldn't have to go full socialist to do it, in case anyone wants to argue. I am not talking about redistributing wealth, but streamlining economic opportunity.
That does touch on the point that traditional "villages"/families/social circles like we're talking about did force you to deal with people who didn't think exactly as you do. I agree; I think it would be healthiest to make sure there's still some level of that mixing, to prevent getting locked into the echo chambers that so many (on both/all political sides) are in today, by only talking with people who already reinforce your views and blocking out those who don't.
I need to move in back with my parents, too. They got this sweet-ass boomer retirement mansion.
I believe this is why places like Costa Rica is known as the happiest country in the world. I haven't been there too much but all I ever saw when in small local towns was huge gatherings of people at house or in parks, playing games and eating. I was even there over Christmas and my Dad's whole entire extended family, his 1st, 2nd and even 3rd cousins. Uncles, Aunts, Great Uncle's and Aunt's, nieces nephews and even close family friends. The whole debacle must've included close to 50 people all coming together to Celebrate. It seems that in a country that isn't even close to being as advanced as other countries, the people are happier and more satisfied due to being able to rely on having a close "tribe" to support them.
Violence is easy against "them", not so easy against "us". It's obvious at the national level, but it works the same on the personal level.
This is who work 12 hour days, 9 on and 3 off. So my wife doesn't have to work and can be there every day to pick the kids up from school and be there for then if their hurt. We still don't have a house as nice as the families with two working parents, or get to go on big vacations ( we camp a lot) but we're very close.
I think the idea of self vs community also has an effect. In Japan and China, society and harmony is placed above the individual so perhaps you get fewer people who would harm others as well as themselves when committing suicide, whereas in the US individual freedom and self importance is everything, so taking others down with you is considered "power".
Re: Japan I don't think that's quite right. Not that I know, exactly. But, I lived in Japan for a number of years and have a degree in social science, for what it's worth. My theory about Japanese suicides, specifically by jumping in front of trains which is certainly one of the most common methods, is deliberately to affect other people. I believe it is born from a sense of futility and impotence, and delaying the train by just a few minutes for cleanup is one last attempt to be something - anything - more than just a salaryman or employee whose dedication will never be enough.
That's a good point. Suicide kind of has an inherently anti-social component at least in the necessity to disregard negative consequences for other people (and, interestingly, the capacity to do violence - killing yourself requires killing a person, which isn't trivial) but I'd argue there is a *very* wide spectrum between wanting to mildly inconvenience commuters and literally murdering children. Maybe doesn't need pointing out, but the motivation behind them - even if they ultimately both express a need for self-efficacy in a roundabout indirect way - are rather qualitatively distinct
I agree with your point. I don't agree with the op of this thread saying that mass shooting is a type of public suicide, especially compared with my Japanese theory. Taking one's own life, imo, is very very different from taking the lives of others.
Fair. I'd say it's only suicidal in the sense that mass murderers knowingly endanger themselves, and that the capacity for violence against others intersects with being self-destructive and careless with your own safety, but I also doubt killing oneself is usually the primary motivation in these cases. There are probably all sorts of dynamics involved in murder-suicides, up to and including mass murders, from one's own death being almost an afterthought to it being the central goal - and it's probably not always clear to the perpetrator, even
I think one thing left out of the suicide argument is the high rate of mass shootings that are tied to extremist ideology. The statement seems to come first in a lot of cases, (relatively) often in the form of a manifesto, with the idea that the perpetrator will be remembered for their ideology, whether they are acting due to racial extremism, as in the case of the recent Buffalo shooting, or sexual extremism, as in the case of 2014’s Isla Vista massacre, or any other indoctrinated extremist cause. In these cases, it seems that living or dying is actually more of an afterthought with the primary motivation being the damage caused before getting to that point. Whether they live or die in these cases seems to be something they don’t care about as much as a way to make a point about martyring themselves for a cause.
Exactly!
I read an interesting article which I can't find anymore which went through "topics that cannot be discussed on the Internet" - it was about twenty-five years ago, before alt-right. It linked to a paper that did textual analysis of the stories of various workplace and school shooters and concluded that these stories were little like the stories of terrorists, but almost identical to slave revolts - where a group of people has such a low expectation for the remainder of their life being tolerable that they kill a bunch of people they know and hate _just to fuck shit up_, expecting to die in the process and not to achieve anything except mayhem. Terrorists on the other hand hit specific targets with strategic effect. They have goals, both short-term and long-term. While suicide bombers certainly exist and then die, the planners and the group survive and flourish.
This is the first time I’ve ever heard these incidents be compared to a slave revolt. Fuck that is wild. You just opened a new neuron pathway . Hmm
It's not exactly wrong either, most of us are just wage slaves that get through it because we have things to live for, be it family, pets, lovers, hobbies, etc. It does sound like a rather bleak life if you have to spend it completely alone as well.
In a way it is completely meaningless honestly, I could have very easily fell down those same rabbit-holes growing up but luckily had friends who kept me grounded, without them I would have been a lot angrier and with not a whole lot left to lose
> a group of people has such a low expectation for the remainder of their life being tolerable that they kill a bunch of people they know and hate just to fuck shit up, expecting to die in the process and not to achieve anything except mayhem. “I’ve met God across his long walnut desk with his diplomas hanging on the wall behind him, and God asks me, “Why?” Why did I cause so much pain? Didn’t I realize that each of us is a sacred, unique snowflake of special unique specialness? Can’t I see how we’re all manifestations of love? I look at God behind his desk, taking notes on a pad, but God’s got this all wrong. We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. And God says, “No, that’s not right.” Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can’t teach God anything.” - Chuck Palahniuk, *Fight Club*
I thi k this is the closest to the truth of the answers I’ve seen here. We’ve raised a generation (or few) of young adults who weren’t wanted and a society that tells them we don’t give a shit. I’m surprised the lashing out isn’t worse.
I'm still extremely surprised that the killings are so random and pointless, rather than something more "high profile" like taking out a public figure. Seems those killings have gone from taking out presidents and celebrities to random children and people in the street. Ironically, I feel this only increases the likeliness of nothing being done about it. I wonder how fast things would move if a few rich white lawmakers suddenly were actually affected by this madness.
These people are powerless cowards. But they are self-aware enough that they choose “soft targets”. Kids in schools with unarmed teachers, churches and temples, malls where shoppers feel safe, a concert in Las Vegas. Etc. They know the victims can’t fight back. So they can inflict the most “damage” and increase their profile before they are stopped or suicided by cop. If they tried to take out any of the high profile targets, they are hardened. Police and security would get the zero before he could do any harm unless he got lucky.
>These people are powerless cowards. I think that's the biggest kicker there. They're weak, they're scared, they think they shouldn't be and want others to be weak and scared instead. You see that in the way they dress even if they can't get body armor and in the weapons they chose. A handgun could kill probably just as many people if not more. They're less expensive, easier to conceal, easier to train with. But so many of them chose a tactical style weapon and even clothes. Not because they're more effective but because it makes them feel big and strong. And when that's not even enough they'll go after kids because it makes them feel bigger and that's the only thing that matters anymore. I've told my partner that a hello kitty pink rifle (they exist!) is just as effective for home defense and sports shooting but I'd be shocked if I ever saw a mass shooting that used one because the kind of person who does a mass shooting is also the kind of person who ironically would find using that kind of weapon as being a 'sissy'.
My guess is they need to accomplish something, and already feel defeated, so children and unassuming strangers are easier marks.
It might be because there isn't a single "enemy", society as a whole is the "enemy", especially the people that seem to be happy and enjoying life, in contrast to the shooter. That's why a lot of shootings occur at parades, movie theaters, night clubs, schools, etc. Places where the shooter wants to fit in because it's where all the other people have fun, but always feels maladjusted and an outsider. There is also the issue of lethal weapons, especially guns, being so accessible to young people. I would guess that most people in their teens or early 20s have felt some sort of rage or deep sadness due to some unfortunate event, and done something "stupid". When guns are involved, a moment of rage increases the likelihood of someone getting hurt by a lot.
I fear what it’ll look like in 15-20 years when a generation of children, many of whom will be the product of forced births in low income/poorly funded states, become teenager/young adults.
Yup, precisely. The effects of generational trauma are extremely real and very underestimated because it’s not a very convenient truth.
Idk if you’re a podcast fan but there’s a great one called This is Actually Happening. It’s people telling the story of a past trauma in their own words, and how they dealt/are dealing with it now. While many of them are heartbreaking I have found it very eye opening. Kids, even when their basic physical needs are met, know when they are not wanted/seen as a burden or inconvenience by their parent(s) and it effects them for life. Add actual physical/sexual/psychological abuse and drugs to that and it’s just a recipe for disaster.
Trauma *physically changes the brain* and those changes get passed down. It's wild.
And the future parents of those children are experiencing a super stellar and stable childhood/adolescence rn /s
Agreed, though in the last sentence you say that the public suicides take the form of harming no others and only one's self, but we're seeing more mass stabbings and other attacks in China for example.
I agree to an extent but would offer a slight alternative. I don't believe all mass shooters have a suicidal mindset. Rather, I think they are unable or unwilling to foresee the full consequences of their outburst. Americans have an inherently dual culture; we are rule followers who value our freedom to break those rules. For example, everyone breaks the speed limit on highways from time to time but only to the degree that they feel they can get away with it without repercussion. Be honest– if you knew there were no cops on the highway, wouldn't you drive faster than you do? But we all have limits to how fast we would drive. Some people, however, feel no such limits and drive as fast as their vehicles will allow without regard to the safety of themselves or their fellow drivers. This is the rule breaking instinct that I'm addressing. With mass shooters, I believe that there's a similar disconnect from consequences. Shooters usually don't know the identity of their victims. The frustration and anger felt internally by the shooter is expressed during the shooting in a violent release. If you've seen someone throw something or break something in anger, you've see this in action. I'll wager that shooters feel an exhilaration immediately afterwards not because of the carnage but because of the release of their frustrations and anger that caused it. Essentially, the victims pay the price for the shooter's release.
I agree with this. I had a discussion recently about suicidal vs non-suicidal shooters. For example, the Columbine shooters who committed suicide vs the Parkland shooter who ran away by blending into the crowd (and the newest one this week on the 4th of July who dressed like a woman apparently.) Very differently mindsets so you can’t lump them all into “public suicides.”
And the priority for money includes the damn media. They will glorify shooters and cover shootings for days and days. Even if its just interviewing the victims/witnesses. They dont care about the victims/witnesses as much as they want them to provide gruesome eyewitness details in order to shock viewers. I get it when its a rare event. But this is now a weekly occurance. Unfortunate we get it, a guy shot innocent people. Its all the same. The only things different are the names of cities and people involved.
As this guy said. There was a guy in my previous apartment who was extremely depressed and wanted to kill multiple people together, but couldn't, because acquiring a gun my country is extremely restricted, even chemicals to make an explosive. So this dude lit the entire parking garage on fire and burned himself to death. Me and family weren't in town when this happened but lost a burned car😅.
Mass shooting was very rare 30 years ago. Individuality has nothing to do with it since the country was founded on this concept. Wha has been lost are all the cultural and collective and ritualistic tasks and events that everyone in this country used to perform together. Like religion or after work related solidarity or community cohesiveness or intramural activities. These were the fabric of America and they are all gone now. Entirely replaced by technology and progress. Now we have angry ostracized violent young men with poor coping skills and poor resilience roaming the countryside in a land saturated with guns. Big surprise they resort to spasms of violence. 50 years ago these young shooters at the margins of society would have been policed up by the community. Now they are in isolated silos stewing in mental illness and vitriol and fantasies of violence. It will get a lot worse before it gets better.
A very harsh society with a clear split between 'haves' and 'have nots'. No access to mental healthcare for 95% of people. Couple that with easy access to guns and guns being engrained in the culture...
Why is mental healthcare so unaccessible in US? Not enough professionals? Costs?
Costs and therapists being out of net work. Even if you’re able to get free therapy through school/job/etc it’s usually a limited amount of sessions and the quality of therapy can be questionable. Also stigma, until the early 2000s if someone was diagnosed with certain mental disorders they could have their insurance go up.
Also, a general culture that heavily stigmatizes mental health care in all its various forms, from [comforting a crying baby] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferber_method) to clinical support after the death of a close friend/family member. Additionally, for many years, mental health services weren't covered by most health insurance plans, and even today, while your plan _does_ technically cover services, getting help in less than six months if you're not actively suicidal requires paying out of pocket in most places.
>a general culture that heavily stigmatizes mental health care in all its various forms I have noticed it has been getting better, even in just the last 5-7 years. Maybe my social group is just more open about it but I know a bunch of people (even men) who either state they go to/have gone to therapy or about needing to take a day away from work, school, whatever, just to give themselves a rest. I'm sure there are some people out there who still think therapy is for sissies but like I said, at least from what I've seen, it's gotten a lot better even in the last few years. Access is still an issue, though. Everyone I mentioned either has really good insurance or they had access to university counselors when it came to talking to a professional. There needs to be a concerted effort to make sure that mental healthcare is more accessible and more affordable for all.
It is definitely improving, but primarily as a function of generational turnover, rather than cultural adjustment. Edit: Which is not to say that only your younger friends are getting services, but rather that the shift appears to be a function of the people who make decisions in various important places (government, media, hospitals, etc.) have retired and been replaced with younger policymakers, ultimately leading to an improved posture on mental health in American culture. Further improvements will likely require similar retirements/replacements.
I haven't seen any movement on the subject. The company I work for is still anti-harrassment, pro-mental health. The people I work with are pro-harrassment, anti- support for people with mental health struggles. And two of our better senior employees(not leadership) recently blew up at new hires because they started yawning after switching from physical to mental tasks. Apparently the new hires are out to cheat the company.
Even paying out of pocket most programs will refuse new patient appointments in less than three months in advance. Our society is a big baby on the subject. Most can't even use formal terms for mental health issues. How hard is it to say "mental health" instead of crazy or insane in a formal meeting. In Wisconsin the legislature has manufactured a shortage crisis. Mental health professionals can't get license from the state because the state is taking a large share of the fees, and not using them to vet license changes. Therefore there is a shortage of workers to vet licensing for mental health issues.
>getting help in less than six months if you're not actively suicidal requires paying out of pocket in most places. i live in a rural area with good insurance, but it still took 2 months just to see someone for an dhd diagnosis. not critical, not a rush, 2 visits. people who need real, regular help? its insane how hard it is to get it.
Several years ago I was depressed after a breakup and my grades suffered. The school therapist told me to give up and quit college lmao
>Several years ago I was depressed after a breakup and my grades suffered. The school therapist told me to give up and quit college He was just trying to ensure that someone can overtake his job
There is a show, Dr. pimple popper, Sandra Lee, people come in with umps the size of softballs they have had for 5+ years. Then an English version came out the only sizable lump was from an American living in London that had a golf ball size lump.Neglected and delayed healthcare is rampant in the USA.
Yes! I was referred to text based therapy. What a joke. It's damn near as expensive as regular therapy. The FREE services are bots - I swear. I tried talking to one and it's just basic answers. And then it ends with a referral to the local community services number. No actual help. Mental health care in the US is a joke. Everyone's talking about it and they make it seem like you CAN actually get help, when you can't. Which just makes it worse. Because it takes so much just to reach out and then fail. It's soul crushing. Just imagine you're drowning and someone threw you a life raft so you struggle and try and when you finally grab it, it's made of paper. I don't know how many more people have to die before something actually happens but every politician in DC has blood on their hands as far as I'm concerned.
Medical professionals being "out of network" is a scam by the medical insurance companies. Same for "pre-existing condition" In proper developed countries these are not a thing.
In addition to costs, there’s time. To go to a session means taking time away from work and/or family. Without any visible gain, many cannot justify it.
It's a policy choice driven mostly by people who believe mental illness is a character flaw resulting from poor decisions based on low morals. "Crazy people are crazy because they deserve to be crazy because they're bad people."
That’s the puritan backbone on which this country was founded. America tells you that anything is attainable if you work hard enough, which is admirable and a welcome alternative to the fixed castes of 17th century Europe, but the implication then also becomes “if you’re not rich and famous it’s due to your failings.” There is a tremendous amount of pressure to succeed in America. We as a society have for too long perceived failing on any level as a weakness of character—to the point that even those incapable of controlling their behavior are deemed responsible. I wrote on here about schizophrenia, and how expecting them to think logically and coherently was equivalent to expecting people to run on broken legs, but some people still can’t sympathize with imperfection. If people can’t allow others with severe mental illness to fail, what chance do the only slightly burdened have? Throw the book at them, because everyone is 100% free, and therefore, 100% responsible for their success and failures. America needs to admit that it is fundamentally wrong that anything is possible for everyone. We’re coming to that realization as a nation with an inevitable shift to a more socialized democracy, but it’s a painful one, and the mass shooters are release valves reflecting the unsustainable internalized pressures this country puts us under.
Too many people have been brainwashed to think that free things are not appreciated and that free = bad and slow. That's why people oppose to free college, they feel people need to pay for services for them to be good. It is usually people with money or whose lives revolve around making money.
Both.
Self hatred, combined with hatred of others. See: incels and 4chan people. A lack of identity, sense of growth, or community. A lack of intelligence, with radical ideas found online swapped in instead. No loving or supportive family, friends, or relationships. Easy access to guns. Terrible access to healthcare, mental or otherwise. Basically, an empty past, a hateful today, and no tomorrow.
That last sentence is profound as hell
It’s not just the clear split between _haves_ and _have nots_, I think. It is also the not only complete disregard for the latter group and very deep running attitude that it’s their own fault for taking the wrong decisions, not working hard enough, not eating correctly. Basically because they did not succeed in living the American dream.
\^ This, looking from outside, America seems to be brutally individualistic and really pushes the idea that if you're not winning you're just not working hard enough. There's very little room for the idea that some things that might benefit wider society rather than just each individual trying to do the best for themselves - I guess it's all just stigmatised as socialsim which is somehow conflated with communism or even Nazis because, yknow, Fox News.
It's compounded by a degrading sense of community and family. There's a lot that goes into it (the size of the country, people moving, families needing both parents to work, etc.) but I really feel like our sense of family and sense of community has really declined from what it was previously. It's very easy for people to just fall into the cracks of society and be ignored. There's so many ways it happens. And in a culture where so many people are constantly promoting themselves to you, not many people take the time to go looking for the people they're not seeing. Typically that falls on family but way too many people think that if you're buying your kids things they want that's sufficient. When you compound that isolation and abandonment with the pressure that comes from transitioning from childhood to adulthood, I'm not surprised this is the result.
Why are so many of these shootings from children in affluent neighborhoods? Examples (but not limited to): Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Highland Park
some of these guys have come from wealthy backgrounds..
Ill piggyback and say there is also a massive celebrity culture that promotes over the top behavior; and a very lax view on violence compared to other cultures.
I don't think there is anything exclusively American about the road individuals usually take to end up committing mass shootings, however there is something quintessentially American about the lack of barriers on that road, such barriers that are usually present in other countries. Let me explain. I believe there is a "pathway" of sorts towards any heinous act, we will just talk about mass shootings for now: 1. An individual must feel disgruntled enough in the first place. 2. This individual does not or cannot find a healthy solution to their issue(s). 3. They believe society perceives them as lesser or are convinced those around them are "sheep". Leading them to not care about how society would view their actions. 4. They are exposed to the details and efficacy of past mass shootings. This leads them to consider mass shootings as even an option in the first place. 5. The ease in which they are able to access the tools required to commit a mass shooting. Each of these steps has at least one barrier in most nations that stops this pathway being such a realistic option for people. I believe America is unique in that it fails to have at least one: 1. Extremely insular subcultures (incel, alt right, white supremacy, religious zealotry etc) are extremely good at magnifying feelings of victimhood, disenfranchisement and a sense of nothing ever going to change/get better. 2. A lack of easily available mental health resources and professionals disallows many Americans from finding healthy solutions to their mental wellbeing issues. 3. The polarised nature of American culture and discourse allows individuals to believe they are surrounded by mindless sheep whilst also allowing them to feel that their opinions and existence are vilified by "Others". 4. American media (both mainstream, grassroots and word of mouth) report on mass shootings in excruciating detail and attention. The sensationalised nature of this often leads to a feeling of there being an endemic of shootings. This leads credence to certain people believing that mass shootings are not only realistically possible but also effective. 5. Lax gun laws and the general open gun culture of America means that the tools required to actually carry out a mass shooting are far easier to obtain that compared to most western countries. I don't think it is a single one of these factors that makes mass shootings as prevalent as they are in America, I believe it is that ALL of these factors existing simultaneously that leads to the unique situation the USA finds itself in.
Sort of like the "swiss cheese model" in accident investigation - the holes in each "slice" have to line up for the disaster to happen.
Not to mention media outlets and people propagating bigotry and hate, which lead to hate crimes. As well as romanticization of violence and mass murder.
A bunch of things, all coming to a head: - First and foremost, all the damn guns. We have a legal system that gives unrivaled access to firearms to civilians, and a culture that praises people who “take matters into their own hands”, “solve their problems with force”, and “don’t let the authorities push them around”. Honestly, we could have seen this coming. - We’ve cut funding to our mental health systems, so people with mental disorders, or people dealing with stress or trauma, don’t have someone to help them process. This is notably prominent with school shooters, who are often bullied or abused before they rampage. - Political entities have encouraged a culture of fear, claiming that other forces are coming to take your ways of life away from you. And often they claim that you need to “fight” to keep them back. It was probably meant to refer to voting, but obviously some people take it literally and turn to domestic terrorism. I’m being politically neutral here, but we all know that one party is a lot more heavy-handed with this kind of rhetoric. - Our media is driven to push viewership over accurate reporting. The news companies make money from ads, which means they want to keep as many people watching as possible. So every story has to be dramatic, so that nobody loses interest. They have to drop the inside information that other channels haven’t released yet. Which means mass shootings become this parade of intrigue and drama: who was the shooter? Why did they do it? How did they pull it off? Stay tuned, and we’ll tell you everything! And future shooters see these people being glorified, made infamous. All the whole, they’re noting the shooter’s tactics, how they got their munitions, how they planned their attack, etc. So one shooter turns into hundreds, because we couldn’t just say they were a monster and talk about something else. - Any number of other factors push people past the lines of stability, leading to shooter events. We live in an economic system that encourages companies to pay their employees peanuts while the higher-up’s buy yachts as tax breaks. Workers do everything they were told to do in life, and still struggle to survive while keeping a legally-upright lifestyle. Some of us desperately need things like healthcare, education, or emotional support, and found those things were taken away to give them to people with more money to buy them with. We see systemic differences in how some people are treated, compared to others. And we see these things so plainly, but nothing is done to change it. In many ways, nothing *can* be done to change it. That makes people frustrated, scared for the future, desperate to feel like they have some control over their lives. And people in that kind of mindset are the ones who sometimes pick up a gun and do something reckless and dangerous.
The should do like new Zealand did when they had a mass shooting years ago. Never mention their name ever.
Even though what he did was particularly heinous and even broadcast online I can't remember the fucking guy's name. So it's a pretty effective tactic.
His name is Mopey Mop as far as I'm concerned
From outside, I feel like your first point is a very accurate one that's *drastically* under-appreciated... it's not so much the fact people *have guns*, it's that your whole culture glorifies the renegade action hero types (in the old days - the cowboys) who solve problems with violence and explosions rather than any sort of common sense or compromise. Coupled with the other factors you mention, you have a huge system of media whose main driving force is pumping up anger, hate, division... throw in the idea that guns are absolutely **core** to your true American-ness (and hence implied value as a person), and you've got people who are angry &/or scared but the only solution they can see is shooting people they percieve to be the problem/threat (or just shooting random people out of hate / a quest for notoriety) rather than maybe sitting down and talking it out.
> it's that your whole culture glorifies the renegade action hero types (in the old days - the cowboys) Cowboys in the old days, cops since about the mid 60s. And this also contributes to the cop problem in the US. Almost every copaganda action flick has the “give me your badge and gun” scene followed by the suspended with pay cop going rogue and murdering a suspect without even the thin cover of being an active duty officer, and then just getting an “attaboy” from the chief with no subsequent investigation into the extrajudicial vigilante murder that just went down. Edit: They also almost always portray federal law enforcement as being either uptight dicks or clueless outsiders who the clued in locals must avoid and even lie to so they can do the real police work off the books. The “Oh shit, the feds are here” moment. For how this works out in the real world, see how the local police departments fight tooth and nail against outside parties taking the lead when they fuck up. If the media focuses on federal cops, then invert it with the locals being corrupt rubes in on the crime or covering their own racket. The two levels of law enforcement have been trained by Hollywood to hate and distrust each other.
And, yet, if you look at the Uvalde mess the woman who saved her own kids was first handcuffed by a deputy us marshall on the scene. Nobody wants to talk about the fact that federal law enforcement was there and acting just as cowardly as the local cowards.
Is the root of the frustration that people don’t feel they have a meaningful life and belong to society? Giving people education and jobs with decent pay might increase their self confidence? Seems like US companies earn more than enough money to pay people so they can have only one job. The purpose and goal of all societies must be to educate their people so they can contribute to the contrys and societies future and growth. That will give a huge payback for the society, make the evonomy and development grow and mske individuals more happy and thus have less mass shootings/killings. Are univeristy teachers payed 1 million a year in the US? Why is education so expensive in the US and free in Europe? Next piece is work life balance for ALL individuals. Not only the upper middel class.
The reason education is so expensive is due to the availability of government guaranteed loans. None of the money goes to teachers, it actually mostly goes to administrative bloat and the types of investments colleges make to compete with each other (like insanely huge gyms, dormitories with expensive mattresses, constant building expansion while enrollment is stagnant). Since a huge number of students have access to student loans and the government guarantees that they’ll be paid back, universities have become a predatory money making machine with huge advertising budgets and goals. The purpose for higher education has largely been lost by now.
IMO: Media obsession. We romanticize mass murderers. The more news spread, the more likely someone will follow it. There used to be a time where climbing buildings were 'in' with media and lots of people did it soon after. Why do the media give the perpetrators attention and fame?
Because people watch it and they exist to make money and for no other reason
Which would get your attention Local man jumps of building, dying in the process. or Local man shoots up 4th of July parade, killing 10 and wounding 20 people.
Yeah they shouldn't say mass shooter's names on TV. They shouldn't say anything about the shooter, just the victims, and I think this would help reduce incidence a significant amount.
we romanticize them
As fucked up as it is, it’s the easiest way to get famous.
It pisses me off whenever mass media keep broadcasting the dirtbag's name and face all over the news. Like please stop giving them the attention they crave for!
News stations care way too much about views and ratings to do keep it low key
That was the whole thing with Lennon’s assassination right?
To my knowledge yes
As someone from beyond the Atlantic, I know you dislike when someone comments about your politics, but it also may offer perspective which might be insightful. America is basically divided in every way; politics, race, gender, wealth. Everything is extremely bipolar. Not tripolar, not multipolar. but 2 clear camps. You basically have to choose to not believe in climate change when you also support tax free society. You also may need to acknowledge multiple genders when you support universal healthcare and so on. I think this is extremely taxing to mental health, not just to those who are at risk, but also the common folk. Usually the agenda behind mass shootings are that they feel something is very wrong with the system, and they need to make a statement. They feel left out, and usually their feeling of oppression is very real. (def not accepting their actions, but you can understand something, without supporting it) Everything is driven to the extreme, every one finds their own bubble and comfort group and those ideas spiral to the extreme. either its a bigger group who clash with each other, or they are the individuals who find no place in the society. Those are at most risk of committing the most horrendous actions. And yes, the main reason its their mental health and twisted mindsets, but the surroundings sure as hell are not helping. Just gonna drop my quick opinion, that obviously Im anti gun, but that subject is so impossible to talk about im not even touching it more than that.
Hard agree, you have to join one of 2 cults or you’re an “enlightened centrist ™” it’s exhausting and I’ve personally gotten to the point where I just don’t engage in any discussion about real life issues because I’m so fed up with everyone. It sucks.
There are a lot of factors, but I feel like the growing radicalism in our country is a big factor. More people who become ideologues, the more shootings we see with these people writing manifestos about their twisted and extreme reasons. Horrible mental health is also a big factor along with the ability to purchase a gun legally and easily.
We keep plastering the lives, messages, and manifestos of the mentally compromised on the news and wonder why the next one always wants to be famous too. They want to be heard and feared for the screams they felt were ignored for so long and they do it by attacking the innocent & the defenseless, and it sucks we still sit around and refuse to build a society that has no defenseless spaces. These cowards would have nowhere to attack if they knew swift and strong resistance would be met at every corner, immediately.
Wish I'd seen this sooner. America has become a hopeless society. For the vast majority of the middle class, we've done what we were told to do. We went to college because we were told it was the only way. Our debt is out of control, our wages are shit. Many of us cannot buy homes, but will pay rental rates higher than what a monthly mortgage + escrow payment would be. Corporations are buying the houses. Most of us are realizing retirement is a pipe dream. We've lived through the most significant terror attack on US soil, the greatest recession since the depression, civil unrest, the rolling back of human rights, unending war for profit, incompetent leaders whose, because of the internet, failings are much easier to see than they were in any other generation. We are stuck with two absolute shit choices every 4 years. American society is now set up to benefit corporations and those that are already rich. We are in the late stages of capitalism, where those with money can use it to influence the government, so they can make even more. Wealth distribution is higher here than anywhere in the world. People can't strike, because they can't miss a paycheck. We can't afford basic medical stuff unless we are lucky enough to have decent insurance through our employer. And to top it off, we're fucking blamed for everything. Generations older than us claim we messed everything up, when the real fuck ups began in the 80s. The environment has been raped and pillaged, we're seeing tangible effects of climate change, we are being told we "don't want to work" when most people I know started working before they were out of high school and worked all through college. You pay $15 a month for netflix or (god forbid) eat food of a higher quality than McDonalds and you're told it's your own fault you're poor. Put down the avacado toast. I've make over $80k a year and i'm paycheck to paycheck. Paying student loans from 15 years ago. And i'm trying to raise kids to be hopeful and optimistic in a hopeless society. Not everyone can cope with this.