Returning for a moment back to the original theme, before it became a gun prohibition advocacy thread. (Hint: there are murderers that use cars. A heavy SUV ran at full speed into a crowd can rack up higher count than puny seven; there are such cases. So why not focus instead on the factors that stimulate people’s aggressive tendencies? Solve or at least alleviate that, and everybody is better off. But no, the focus has to be on the effects instead on the causes. Meh,)
What was not mentioned here as a factor is the society’s fundamental suckiness in communicating clearly.
Sometimes you get to be an outsider. You don’t really fit in, your social relations are few and weak if any, the crowd is busy talking with each other and ignoring you pretty much regardless what you do. To add insult to injury, they soon start pairing off and being obnoxiously happy together. And it HURTS like hell. Even significant physical pain can be easier to bear.
So you spend the time outside staring at an empty box with painted face, halves of coconuts over your ears, turning knobs on the box and talking to it, sweep the long stretch of dirt and burn lights along it at nights, doing exactly what you see others doing that makes them successful, but no, the big birds that bring them nice things never appear on your island. What’s wrong? The shape of the box? The coconuts? The things you are saying to the box? But it must work somehow, you saw others doing the same things and the birds came in.
The social communication is mostly based on nonverbal cues. Which, when you are poor at recognizing them, and poor at recognizing faces/people in general, means you’re screwed. Royally screwed. Or, more accurately, not screwed. You do things by the book, looking for the expression changes described in literature, trying to make your own, and it goes a little off as even if you do your end right, the time for software emulation vs the hardwired circuitry that you don’t have and others do means that the timing is off. With the bulk of data you are guranteed to either outright not see or miss because of focusing to a subset you CAN see better, you end up seriously underperforming in comparison with others. And it is the comparison that matters, the relative score. Out of desperation you use some easily observable metrics - gaze tracking, eye contact length and count - to give you at least some interpretable data; and the data tell you that you quite don’t have to be there, that the people ignore you. Screwing with the variables you can influence won’t bring any statistically significant change in even such distant indicators.
And nobody tells you what’s wrong. Nobody. You are playing chess and can’t see the other players’ pieces. Then you end up checkmated on all the boards, and the patterns of your pieces vanishing are good enough at most to buy you a move or two more. But checkmate it is. Always. Regardless on the stakes; it is not only about getting laid, often it is just about social recognition, social validation. But no, you aren’t given even that. And nobody tells you why.
If you are smarter than the average, it gets sort of better and sort of worse. You get to talk with somebody occasionally, usually a male, which you don’t exactly want but better than nothing at all - and usually it is to solve some problem they have, usually of a technical nature. It feels good at first. Over the years the good feelings gradually wear off and buying the social time with knowledge doesn’t work for you anymore.
The social interaction is a highly complex state machine, with lots of feedback paths mediated with nonverbal cues, mostly visual. With diminished ability to read these, good luck navigating the pattern of the states. Even if you can, holding on to guesswork and checklists for conscious interpretation of the weak cues you should but aren’t processing subconsciously, it won’t get you far; you quickly get outcompeted by the nearest schmuck who not only doesn’t have to exert much effort but even enjoys it. Lots of work, to naught. Then, exhausted and feeling like a squeezed out lemon, you get home and read some easy book, like one of the Pattel’s electronic warfare ones, or some metallurgy. Easy reading, no plethora of characters to remember, no relationshippy messes to make sense of that only hurt you (yes, even these things can be “triggers” too when the subject gets too wounded over time). And try to have a chitchat with a girl about antenna radiation patterns in a bistatic radar jamming scenario, degradation of materials in space environment, or neutron-induced swelling in alloys, despite the inherent fascinating nature of the problematics; try it, I dare you. Exceptions exist, are rare and far between - and you get outcompeted there too, the chess game just lasts a few priceless moves longer.
Fast forward a decade or two. Of the same, day by day, year by year. Gradually you become bitter and disliking people - remember the social pain issue, the circuitry shared with physical pain processing that is triggered with feelings of social rejection. You get a pattern of torture inflicted to you by the rest of the society, with the society insisting it is their right to do so - and that they aren’t doing anything wrong when they don’t communicate in a way that’s at least somewhat readable. No way to get a post-mission debriefing, no way to get data that could make the next attempt an infinitesimally more probable to not fail. It gets more and more difficult to not hate the world.
Under this load, some withdraw; books are helpful here. Some commit suicide, others get on antidepressants (thank you, pharma). Some get the unlucky combination of variables external (socioeconomic environment) and internal (nature+nurture) that ends up with them getting embittered and hurt (remember the social pain factor?) enough to inevitably lash out and take out a few with them. The gym shooter from couple years back is another example (find the link yourself). And there will be more, gun bans or not.
The society will then refuse to accept their part in the mishap, put all the blame on one of the victims they call the perpetrator, focus on the late part of his plight where the fabric of his personality was already visibly unraveled and conveniently ignore their little and individually meaningless (and adding up) roles many many years earlier when the person in question was still easily “salvageable”, when a little acceptance and open and honest communication still could do a lot of good. No, this will never happen, and the same patterns will keep repeating. No, I don’t have a solution to suggest. But I just had to say something.
And to return back to the new theme, and to annoy some of the local hoplophobes, one final link:
http://www.cncguns.com/
…Because in every piece of metal there is a hidden precision part.
