I'm getting friggin' irritated

I'm not wearing any pants...

Me neither.

LOL

Even a clock that does not work is right twice a day.

The biggest problem to identifying potential mass killers and other destructive persons is that odd behavior is common to so many individuals who, it turns out, never make such a move. If the man in Colorado had seemed that dangerous I am certain his family would have alerted somebody. Likely the warning would have fallen on deaf ears, because the police are short handed and can only react anyway and other government agencies have been cut to the bone and so pay no heed. You can't convict someone until they do something and you can rarely detain anybody for the same reason. It remains circular until a criminal act is in progress.

I've not read any of this yet - another example of avoidance behavior - but on first glance, I disagree. We will always have psychopaths and sociopaths, people going off on strange mental trips, whatever the assertions, but this guy's ability to acquire all that by internet is ominous to me.

Hey! Me me me!!!

Just goes to show that you are ignoring the wrong people.

I'm sorry -- I know this is off topic -- but what thread did Robert respond too? I always love to see his thoughts on things since he seems to be a careful thinker in a big picture sort of way. Can you link that thread?

I'm of the opinion that this was is a rare occurrance and it is relatively independant of the executing media--in this case guns. One has to remember that there are 3E8 people in this country, and an incident like this (usually murder suicide) happens say fifty times a year involving 6 people. Ususally it only involves two or three fatalities and twice that many causalties, so it doesn't make the media splash that the Aurora , or the Cathy Gilford, or the Virginia Tech incident did, but then many of these incidents don't get the flash as they may have used cars, or arson, or another method that didn't involve firearms. One has to remember that sick people are everywhere--Ted Bundy, and Timeless--Jack the Ripper, and sometimes they use guns, sometimes knives, sometimes poisens, and sometimes their hands.

As for recognizing these people before they committ heineous acts--that is the proplem--there are some signs that are pretty good. Animal cruelty for one is a pretty good indication of a severe psychosis, but some signs are mere quirks that make individuals individuals and not mass murderers. Until such time that society enforces conformance and/or continuous monitoring what happened last Thursday is going to sporatically happen.

As for the risk, as I previously said there are 3E8 of us in this country, and about 300 (50*6) will be addected each year at the hands to some psychosis. That's a one in a million chance--and on that level, stairs and ladders present are a greater general hazard.

Rap

Animal cruelty isn't a sign of a severe psychosis at all.

What you're thinking of is the alleged three signs of a sociopath/psychopath in childhood......cruelty to animals, firelighting and bed wetting. The research that I last had a look at on these isn't looking too good on supporting them as reliable indicators by the way, though I dont claim to be well read on this.

Risk of incidents like this doesn't automatically increase with population....the US is a country that has a lot of them relatively speaking.

I have recently heard that, as knowledge increases, more reliable signs like certain sorts of comments on some websites that attract weapons fanatics and patterns of accrual of weapons are becoming evident, but are also patterns that some who will not go on to a mass killing show.

I agree with Robert on another thread that cultural aspects are very important as is the kind of publicity that goes with these events.


And I agree with Andrei that reducing these tragedies to ritualized arguments about guns is awful to see.

I don't have any idea how to respond, though. All I can do is wish those affected well.

agree

this is probably it -

http://able2know.org/topic/194509-1#post-5054997

I see his point.

That would be everybody....

Some of these victims' families, or their friends, have begun asking for donations because they face exorbitant medical expenses, and may be unable to work, etc. And maybe we could try to bring some attention to their needs.

One of them, Caleb Medley, was shot in the head, he has lost his right eye, has some brain damage, and is in a medically induced coma. His wife Katie, who was in the theater with him, gave birth to their first child today.

This couple was struggling before the shooting, they have no medical insurance, and Caleb's medical bills could cost up to $2 million if he recovers fully.

This is the Web site that was started for him--so far its raised a little over $180,050.
http://www.calebmedley.com/help

Another shooting victim in need is Petra Anderson, who is also seeking donations, because she is struggling with her injuries at the same time her mother is battling terminal breast cancer--so medical costs for this family are high. And Petra's story is quite remarkable--a birth defect in her brain helped to save her life.

You can donate to a fund for the Anderson family here
http://www.indiegogo.com/readytobelieve

So, some of these shooting victims need more than just sympathetic thoughts or prayers, they rather desperately need money. But people should be somewhat cautious about sending money without checking out the sites soliciting donations because some scams may start to appear.
This site, https://givingfirst.org/ endorsed by the governor of Colorado, is reputable and it has raised $2 million in a fund for the shooting victims. A substantial donation to that fund was made by Warner Bros.

I'd rather focus on these other aspects of this tragedy rather than the gun issue, or what motivated the shooter . The gun control debate is endless, and the gunman's motives really won't make any difference to the victims, or to anyone else. Whatever we learn about him won't help to prevent the next incident.

The number of acts of selflessness and heroism I've heard about have been very impressive--people who shielded friends and loved ones with their own bodies to protect them, and who died as a result, or who remained to aid someone rather than try to escape. It's very moving to hear of things like that. Those people really deserve more attention than the man who perpetrated this horror.




•

true if we dont make changes off of what we learn, which is probable.

I pretty much agree with Raprap's take here. These events are exceedingly rare but exotic, so it's human nature to overreact to them and try to eliminate them because accepting that there will always be a risk feels like defeatism to many. The simplistic reaction is always to try to prevent (absolutely, if possible) such rare horrible events. The part that is counter-intuitive to most people is that preventative security is nearly impossible, and reactive security and culture modification are the best we can do to reduce the odds of this happening again and how we react really matters the most (our security is not built on preventative security it is anchored on reactive security and the threat of what society will do in reaction to the violation), but if you don't accept the reality that there is some degree of risk for this event that is inevitable, and that there are diminishing returns as you go about trying to reduce the risk, and that there is always a cost of some sort to doing so then the position is a mere fantasy. Reality is simply not as amenable to having complex systemic issues resolved by intuitive looking tweaks. Reality is a lot more chaotic and less controllable than this.

These events can't be eliminated, and banning guns will have only a small effect on how many people die this way (it's not all that much more than the government has killed when trying to take people's guns away in places like Waco and Ruby Ridge to put it into perspective). I still support the general idea of gun control and more regulation but it honestly doesn't make much as much of a difference as the public's obsession (to the point of fetishization) with mass murderers and that we let these things become cultural events is something that poses a much greater risk (though obviously not sating curiosity is a tougher tradeoff than just not having guns) yet we aren't willing to stop rubbernecking.

In other words I think the fact that we are talking about it has a greater impact on its likelihood of recurring than banning guns would. The limiting factor is nearly always the availability of disturbed individuals willing to throw their lives away for fame. That we grant these killers fame and notoriety is probably the single biggest thing we change. Norway's reaction was healthier. Not trying to reflexively let the killer change them, trying to keep the killer on the ground, not a martyr and not an obsession. A healthy self-awareness of the impact of their reaction is what they have an

If I had to advocate one single thing here it would be that the media avoid naming the killer and didn't pore over his every pore (I will already never be able to forget this face, having seen it and read it dissected so) trying to outdo themselves for the rubbernecking society. Denying these killers their fame and notoriety will do more to reduce these cases than gun control will.

I still think Gun control can help (especially for mass murder when it comes to large magazines and infantry weapons), mainly because the next best weapons for these killings are nowhere near as good (witness that he tried bombs, but nobody died from them) if you intend to get out alive. But that all can change very rapidly, and how a culture treats it makes a big difference.

The weapon of choice for mass murder in the last ten years has been overwhelmingly the suicide bomb, the biggest reasons this is less prevalent in America is not due to superior "bomb control" but due to cultural differences in how death and suicide is viewed and how few people are willing to "martyr themselves" in our culture.

My problem with most gun control advocacy is that it's sometimes like trying to just wish away bad things. Bloomberg's big soda fight will save more lives, just not in ways we care about as emotionally and not in ways we are as prone to become so irrational about.

My main argument is that society does not view these singularly horrible events rationally. Gun control can help us a bit but in most people's minds this is expressed as "if we just could ban these things we'd stop all these senseless killings" when in reality the rate at which people are killed is influenced by culture and society much more than by the available toolset. I'd love to see greater restriction of particularly dangerous tools (especially weapons that can kill many people at once, as their utility as defensive weapons is even more negligible than guns in general) for no reason other than there's not a huge downside to trying that but getting society to understand and react to risk better would be a much better thing than if there were suddenly no guns tomorrow. This is the most peaceful secure time in human history, it is so not because of the regulation of weapons but because of the evolution of society (like globalism, economic contagion is the world's greatest peacemaker right now). Complex systemic solutions aren't usually solved by simple solutions but our brains are wired to try to look for simplistic solutions that can fit a simplistic narrative arc and in the process the frenzied reaction is, in my opinion, about as dangerous to us as the guns are.

That would be great....if we did it. What we do is pick some people to blame (often more on whim than knowledge), hammer them, then call it a day and go home.

Super idea there to avoid talking about the collectives culpability. Thus we are likely to do just that. Norway we are not, we dont start from a common understanding that people in our collective go bad in ways that the collective has some control over, we are still trying to get to that level of education. THe only way to get there is for these kinds of events to get a full examination, which you desire to prevent.