What about the other victims of mass shootings, and who is really to blame?

John_C_87

@Galvanise
Are you saying the mass shootings are caused by a quantity of money?

John_C_87

@ZeusAres42

In whole truth the answer of blame is simple, the person or people closest to the shooting in position of return fire and do not end the shooting are to blame. The connection to established justice is lost in the pursuit of civil arguments because those people will not have adequate to hold them civilly responsible directly, thus the pay to victims and others is minimal.

just_sayin

@John_C_87
I don't mean to be disrespectful, so please understand this comes merely from a place of curiosity.  I initially thought you might not be a native English speaker, but that doesn't appear to be the case.  Your language is often overly verbose and convoluted.  Why do you do that?  Why do you avoid brevity and clarity in your posts?

John_C_87

@just_sayin

so please understand this comes merely from a place of curiosity 
Aw.... hug....,Bring it in....No a_ _ grabs!

I initially thought you might not be a native English speaker, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Why do you do that? Giving Christianity it due it was the religion of Christianity who brought proper English to the America's in the educational systems of England and America. I speak English, I do not speak proper English and it is literally the independent Constitutional Right of what a freedom of speech looks like having no cost.

Why do you do that?
Which post.

In many cases it may be due to an attempt to preserve and protect constitutional right and the common defense towards a general welfare is complex. The freedom of speech is set in order of lesser importants than a right of the search for the more perfect state of the union to established justice.

just_sayin

@John_C_87
Thanks for the response.

John_C_87

@just_sayin
Your welcome.....if I may ask which post or posts? 

John_C_87

@Galvanise

It was the British Empire. Nothing to do with Christianity.

If either of you were a credible witness it is not shown here by a connection made to truth, whole truth, and nothing but truth. Christianity, even when claiming it had nothing to do with education in the British Empire, an assembly of the church of England is hard to establish as fact. Let alone removing it from the America's after the colonies had fallen and it is the Bible that was used as education through the new forming nation. Are either of you confusing where or how education may have started with who the people had been that instructed as teacher which spread proper English to "us heathens"... 

Dee, are you hitch hiking with your thumb out?

  

Barnardot

@ZeusAres42 I did a lot of research and on the Monsters show on TV they point out the point that there is a difference in what the law thinks a person is sane and what the shrinks and society thinks a person is insane. There has got to be a cut off point because the point is that there are dgress of insanity and that is why the court will say that that most psycho persons are sane to stand trial and the test is weather or not they knew what they were doing at the time and weather is was right or wrong. Because in the end we all have to be responsible for what we do.
So in the end it does not go down well to call these people victims when the reel victims like families and friends are infected by what happened all there lives. 
But when you look at other countries they all have psychos to but it is only in the US where people shoot up the place so much. So in the end it is not the lack of councilling and treating psychos that needs to be done the most we have work harder to take a way the biggest factor and that is the horrible gun culture that we have here. I reckon that were going to save a lot more people by getting it in to the heads of every one that it is there attitude on guns that is the biggest problem and not just the attitude of psychos.

Bogan

If you use the media and present images and messages glamourising smoking, illegal drug use, misogyny, gang behaviour, school shootings, juvenile criminal behaviour, violence as a first r3esort to solving personal problems, the criminal misuse of firearms, and mass murder, then gee willackers Margaret, you should not be surprised if there is an upsurge in all of these social problems. 

MayCaesar

The fact that a certain view causes some people to derive wrong conclusions does not at all compromise that view. For instance, the Third Newton's Law is often misapplied by people attempting to generalize it to something like "every benefit comes with an associated cost", or "whenever someone becomes happier, someone else's misery increases". Yet the Third Newton's Law is as close to a scientific fact as it gets; there is no issue with the law, only with the reasoning of those misunderstanding it.

Mass shooters are obviously huge outliers mental-wise, and combined with the fact that the term "mental illness" is not very strictly defined (in scientific literature it is typically characterized by systematic "disturbances" in regular mental processes, yet what is a "disturbance", in turn, is determined by what is the norm, and the latter is quite blurry), it is easy for one to assume that every mass shooter is mentally ill - which may or may not be true. However, even if it is true, it does not imply the opposite: that every mentally ill person is more prone to becoming a mass shooter than the general population. There are mental illnesses that inhibit one's aggressive tendencies, making such people, in fact, much less likely to apply violence on such a scale than the average "mentally healthy" person. What we are dealing with here is a basic logical error, and it has nothing to do with the specifics of the topic.

Another point worth making is that the variety of mental health issues is so enormous that talking about people with mental health issues in general being a victim of something is unlikely to make a lot of sense in, pretty much, any context. Someone who regularly deals with serious depression is facing a completely different set of challenges than someone who is prone to frequent uncontrollable anger outbursts. Someone who is far on the autism spectrum and is a brilliant mathematician, but a terrible communicator, lives a very different life than someone who is a professional tennis player with extreme bulimia nervosa.

Finally, on the topic of rationalization, victimization and responsibility, these are highly subjective concepts: on some level, one could say, we all are just following our biological programming, with no agency whatsoever. A mass shooter is as much of a product of his biology and environment as someone who advocates for a bill in Congress aimed at curbing the frequency of mass shootings. What is objective is observable effects of various actions one can take to try to address the issue. The "why" of mass shootings is a rabbit hole the depth of which Feynman described well in the famous interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA Whether me doing X will improve or exacerbate the issue or do nothing at all, on the other hand, is a very tangible question.
Different mass shooters have very different motivations. Someone who shoots up his school soon after graduating might easily just be a crazy guy, or a victim of bullying or some other grievances that drove him to madness. Anders Breivik's shooting was a completely different event, with the guy following a twisted, but deeply thought out ideology in a cold-hearted and pragmatic manner (I think, at least). Mass shootings in Iraq are a different kind still and are manifestations of a centuries-old phenomenon of violent martyrdom in certain religious branches.

Unfortunately, when it comes to media reporting, all these details have to be compressed into a short message, and a lot of complexity is inevitably lost. You may see a mass shooter referred to as a "white nationalist" or "far-right extremist" or "Islamist"; what you certainly will not see is a biography of that person showing how decades of his life slowly shaped him to become what he was. Not every white nationalist is going on a murder spree, so there has to be something special about those who do - but, at the same time, that something may be entirely different from the something special that would drive a communist revolutionary to shoot up a bazaar.
If mass shootings were happening all over the place, then certain trends could be found out. But in practice on the population scale, even in the most violent parts of the world, they are outstandingly uncommon, they are extreme outliers, and studying patterns in outliers is very difficult precisely because they are outliers. An outlier is something that breaks out of what is regularly expected, so finding regularity in outliers is a bit of a fool's errand. It is kind of like those journalists who find a few people past the age of 100, ask about their diets and then proclaim, "These are the diets you need to follow to have a chance to live past the age of 100", a suggestion that has virtually zero practical value and might even be completely untrue. I am sure that, across countless attributes, one can find an attribute shared among the 20 oldest people on Earth, yet that for the general population happens to have an adverse effect on their longevity.

There is even this funny paradox that exceedingly rare events tend to attract so much attention that people start seeing them as even more common than if they were relatively common. Virtually every national park in the US with a non-zero bear population has signs everywhere warning people of possible bear attacks - yet, on average, in the US 1.5 people a year die to bear attacks, an unbelievably tiny number; the tininess of this number does not prevent millions of people from taking bear sprays with them. On the other hand, over 30,000 Americans die in car crashes every year, yet people seem to be happy to drive 2 hours one way to a national park without a second thought - and pull a bear spray out of their trunk upon parking.

This is something that absolutely should be talked about when discussing mass shootings: that they are extraordinarily rare. Not as a reason to ignore them, but as a reason to understand that it is a very difficult problem to grasp, and that simple policy proposals based on superficial reasoning are not going to cut it. "Why are mass shootings more common in the US than in India?" Whoever can give a good and concise answer to this question is worthy of a Nobel prize. And no, the answer is not simply *insert your generic answer here that you have adopted from your favorite politician*

Bogan

Yeah, well, mass shooting may have been once "extraordinarily rare", but there was a time when they were non existent, and now they are becoming ever more of a problem.

If your society is running off the rails, and people are behaving in ways they have never done so before, then smart people look at those factors which have changed in their society, not concentrate on a single factor which was always present previously, but never made any difference in the past.

Barnardot

@MayCaesar @Bogan This is something that absolutely should be talked about when discussing mass shootings: that they are extraordinarily rare.

Well they are rare but the point is that there becoming not so rare if you look at the facts. The reason that they occur here more than India is pretty simple that even blind Freddy can work it out. There are more guns in the US than people. The Indians are lucky if they can find a bow and arrow. And in India they dont have a culture of making violent shooting movies they just have heaps of Bollywood movies were the actors are smiling and waring colorful glitter cloths all the time. And they dont have the dum amendment were every one has the right to beer arms. And they dont have high schools were the teachers cant discipline the kids. And the kids are so poor there that they haven't got the time to brood about little things then race home and smock a crack pipe and grab the 45 in there parents bedroom draw then go back to school then fill all the students and teachers with holes. So the point Im pointing out is that we have a real toxic culture in the US and its going to get worse and mass shootings are going to become less and less rare.