That got him one bullet per trigger pull. That is why the body count is so low.

You have no comprehension of how many people would have died if he had been carrying an automatic weapon. I’ve seen such attacks happen. It is not something that you ever want to see where you live.

If anything, tagging agenda “x” to horrific tragedies like this only serves to further divide society and perhaps has the opposite effect of what you are trying to accomplish.

I think a single payer system for health care would be one of the best things to happen to the USA since the civil rights movement.  But, I certainly don’t think tying that agenda to this tragedy will help move that forward at all.

If your agenda is strong enough, it should stand on its own without trying to rest it on the shoulders of dead little girls.

Discuss gun control all you want.  But, I can assure you that trying to tie any agenda to this tragedy (progressive or conservative) will only result in emotional divisions and failure.

David Dobbs

As soon as the conversation about influence (not cause, but influence) turns to violent video games and other media, it feels to me like people turn into hyper-sensitive extremists and won’t event entertain the subject that there may be some affect. I wonder why people wont even consider the idea?And in my opinion, the affect of mass media is just one ingredient of eventual causation and we need to address them all.IMHO its like the NRA’s stance on gun control. Even the smallest concession that there may be some correlation means the whole argument is at risk. So rather than have a thoughtful discussion that could move us forward to improve the situation, we are stuck in a philosophical stand-off and things only get worse.

Technology makes a difference, and probably makes more of a difference than the ingenuity of an individual.

BTW I would think that ordering whole body body armor and a ballistic helmet along with assault weapons and XL magazines would be a pretty good indicator that maybe you should watch this guy. Isn’t that what we have all this spying on our every communication for?

Body counts are determined by ingenuity, not weaponry. A person armed with a brick could kill dozens of people if he were to choose carefully.

Urban civilization is less violent civilization, myths of the violence of cities to the contrary. As European countries urbanized in the 19th century violent crime decreased and property crimes increased. That the difference is cultural rather than structural is borne out by the pattern of crime rates in cities experiencing an influx of rural population, until the population stabilizes the rate of violent crime rises to rural levels.

None of these pieces indicate any particular awareness of the patterns in overall violent crime in the past few centuries, so I find the conclusion that spree killing is a genuinely “new” phenomenon to be a little suspect. Murder is not as common as it once was, individual crimes will tend to stand out because of that.

I am reading a bit of a false dichotomy here between “innate” or “chemical” and behavioral.  Actually, the mind body thing is kind of a red herring.  There may be observable brain features of a certain kind of schizophrenia but that does not mean that behavioral episodes that don’t link to a persist ant MRI signature (or whatever) between episodes did not also have a distinctive thing going on in the brain at the time.

(And by the way, I’m pretty sure that most forms of schizophrenia including the paranoid kind are culturally determined in detail.  Og the caveman would have been concerned about an entirely different kind of chip planted in his brain than Martin the Hipster.  There is a whole study of “culture bound psychiatric conditions” that goes into that.)

I do not accept the 1913 origin of rampage killings generally for humans or for Western society.  There are a number of prior examples.  

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/2012/07/26/the-jokers-wild/

Nice tautology you got there.

There’s no reason that we can’t define killing sprees as a symptom of mental illness. That’s not a tautology.

Hell, I made pipe bombs when I was in junior high school.

Yup. One of my friends did that for a middle school science project. I kept a hatchet in my locker, although I can’t quite remember why.