One common trait, these male shooters tend to have middle-class or upper middle-class parents, and will not be able to attain the same social-economic status. 40 years of austerity in the United States is helping to produce a few males that feel it would be better to kill than to go on living. Conservatives talk about anything other than a country needing to address wealth inequality, SES, austerity, generational wealth transfers, a social safety net.
While it’s true that the American right has hollowed out the middle class since Reagan, I’m not going to pin massacres like this on “economic anxiety”. I’ll leave that explanation to the chin-stroking centrists at the NYT who don’t want to alienate racists, misogynists, and ammosexuals.
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Ah yes… the only economic anxiety argument… As if the ongoing radicalization of young white men isn’t a perfectly cromulent explanation somehow.
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That’s true of damn near everyone in every generation following the boomers, yet despite that fact, most people still don’t go out shooting up schools and churches; such piss poor excuses for evil behavior does not hold water.
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The suicide rate is also up Products - Data Briefs - Number 241 - April 2016 This isn’t about good vs. evil.
Feel free to keep telling yourself that, yo.
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People commit suicide for lots of reasons, not just “economic anxiety”. The following bit from that report is germane to the larger topic, though.
The most frequent suicide method in 2014 for males involved the use of firearms (55.4%),
Maybe, just maybe, we can reduce both mass shootings and opportunistic suicides by, y’know, making firearms less readily available in this country.
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Oh, that makes far too much logical sense…
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Give me a break.
Women and minorities have far fewer advantages going for them than middle-class white guys, yet it’s almost exclusively the middle-class white guys committing all the mass shootings.
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Odd how that works out, innit?
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If massacring innocent people isn’t evil, the word has no meaning. Germans were feeling a ton of economic anxiety in the 1930s too, you know. Anyone who thinks that in any way makes what happened next less of an abomination can go to hell.
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Not true. The 2017 Vegas shooter, who currently holds the record for the biggest body count, was 64 years old and had plenty of financial security. He had grown up raised by a single mother under a lot of financial insecurity and his absentee father was a convicted bank robber so he had definitely done better than his parents.
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That doesn’t explain the older, economically stable mass shooters like Las Vegas, San Ysidro, Aurora, and Fort Hood.
The best documented common attributes are white men with a history of violence toward women or extreme misogyny.
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I think it boils down to something much simpler:
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Evil people exist.
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Weapons of war are easily available in the US.
1 + 2 = mass shooting events
Gun availability is the problem.
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And then there is this:
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