Originally published at: Most mass shooters driven by personal grievance, and about one quarter by conspiracy theories and hate | Boing Boing
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One quarter of too many is still too many.
What the American ones all have in common is easy access to high-powered firearms. Entitled but insecure men, domestic abusers, and right-wing conspiracists would be more prone than most to want to own them as masculinity totems, security blankets, and props in their fantasies.
And the Australian ones? What is their excuse? Oh…wait…
I was wondering if the word, “White” was missing from this profile.
The typical attacker was a 34-year-old man motivated by personal grievances
… or Cops, as they are commonly known.
Since there is no way to even begin to talk about gun control, and this is mostly about personal grievances, what is going to happen?
Anyone for a Purge?
Absolutely. Men.
No, thanks. I’m trying to quit.
I’d guess that conspiracy theories and hateful ideologies are driven by personal grievance too.
Would be more useful to separate out workplace shootings from terroristic attacks. I rather suspect the motivations in these two groups are pretty dramatically divergent, and the demographic identifiers would likely diverge as well.
I would think there’s some garden-variety crime that reaches the level of mass-shooting, too. I mean, Breaking Bad season 3 alone would add up to half of these…
White people being the majority (~60%) means they make up the majority of criminals (murders/rapists/thieves, etc.) Stereotyping minorities as criminals is just inaccurate racist rhetoric. (And men make up the vast majority of violent crime. We’re terrible.)
Alas, the flags of a mass shooter, such as spousal abuse and sudden unemployment,
Domestic violence is a huge indicator of future violence. It needs to be treated way more seriously than it is.
Absolutely. The causes are much different and effective solutions will be different as well.
I do not see how these are mutually exclusive, though. For example, men who go to their ex’s workplace to shoot it up, they’re operating from a very ‘hateful ideology’ that they’ve been taught. Most people aren’t happy when they break up, but they don’t believe it’s an insult to their manhood that must be avenged.
mass shooters are a very small subset of the general population, which breaks down as follows
The statistics don’t support your arrow.
I assume @anon33932455 was being a little facetious there. Your point about mass shooters as a whole being a very small (but obviously very impactful) subset of the population goes more toward de-bunking the implication made by @badger911 here.
Presumably by a HS student who hasn’t yet taken a course in basic statistics. I’m assuming @anon61221983, @jerwin and @anon33932455 all did. You, I’m not so sure (per @chenille below you’re not so great on HS math either).