when i was a lonely, ostracized teenager, i fantasized about murder/ suicide an awful lot.

i also had a lot going for me in terms of support from friends, family, and lack of any real desire to harm anyone for the fantasy to become anything else.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/loca...200754714.html

every time i hear about one of these shootings, i am only surprised they don't happen more frequently. and the gun debate is uninteresting to me. ban them; don't ban them. that's not the problem or solution for me.


why and how has our society become (always been?) so broken?

here's a sample of murder/suicide songs:

I think the answer has something to do with empathy and access to deadly weapons.

There's a huge gap between fantasy/ casual thought (even speech) and what people really mean and believe. The few who really mean it are filtered by fear/practicality/etc

That leaves almost no-one. Unfortunately ~0% of millions is still a fair few.

I want to be clear. Ban all the guns you like. That's not my argument. I want to know why the desire and willingness to kill is increasing. Why is empathy disappearing

I don't think there's any denying it is increasing? Is it realistically violent video games? Is bullying getting worse? Are parents too busy to parent...

To emphasize Chez's point, millions of Middle-school and High-school kids (in USA) are in school for the majority of the year and no killings occur. In fact, the most dangerous thing school kids do is ride to school on the school bus or play on the monkey bars or are occupants in vehicles or drive vehicles. But math/statistics does not count when emotionalism drives perceptions.

As to the psycology of the situation with individual young perople, who are usually more impressionable, you would need to consult experts in the field. That may help with explanations or it may not. And it may be more inconclusive than otherwise.

Society is not a broken thing. It flows and fluctuates. Which is why a good grounding in history is essential to help understand the human condition and all its waywardness and assumed pecularities.

I can't say I even slightly understand the mind-set of a school shooter. No answer i can provide will really get at the truth of the matter.

Maybe it's a simple thing of numbers: much larger population now than the 60s and before (double, if I'm not mistaken) = more terrible incidents and more wonderful ones too.

Dont worry it is going to be like that every day eventually with the aholes we have for "leaders" and the mfers that vote them to their positions without a single care in the world for ethical behavior and substance of personality.

Society is broken down to hell because it's not scientific society yet and because we have overpopulation (an amazing enemy of progress), bs beliefs not founded in reason, emerging technological power of one that is more and more lethal, and money culture that values only selfish crap around money power and nothing bigger usually and because politicians are mfers that deserve to be annihilated by antimatter. But of course all can be saved easily. Call it what you want but its founded on reason and science eventually. It is the rational thing to love and care for others. It is how it all gets better with more education and compassion and responsibility that is rewarded. You need cooperation and competition in balance. You need a far more fair and forgiving/understanding world. How easy it all is if you only get it.


There is absof%^&%lutely no excuse for allowing some naive idiot at age 19 to have an automatic weapon that can kill hundreds from proper vantage point without any desire by the system to say no to this bs and regulate it without removing the right to have reasonable defense for yourself. You shouldn't be able to enter schools without monitoring devices that are based on smart technology screaming for every gun that is introduced. Every gun must be detectable at a distance like cellphones or even stupid library books eventually. When a convergence of irrational coincidences starts happening in public areas the system must be suddenly your opponent.

Anyone who has guns and buys ammunition must be instantly online in a database that monitors their activity in terms of purchases and frequency. This will make it harder to accumulate a lot of lethal power without getting endless abuse by authorities for the patterns emerging leading to constant monitoring of your life. If you have a legitimate reason prove it and defend it.

If you go back in the life of most of those killers in schools you will witness amazing abuse at wide range of levels by family and classmates. I was bullied all my life in primary school and high school and never yielded to these aholes, i was always defending myself never snitching, never crying about it to teachers and always ready to forgive them and give them another chance every day. Because this is the rational thing. To defend yourself and stand up to them and yet to still give them the chance until the aholes wake up and facking get it finally that its better that way and they can never defeat your superior ethical intellect that way. They have nothing on you but their own barbaric inability to accept friendship.

Truly somewhere along the line you meet many kids that are losers and evil sobs, selfish aholes and unethical players because their parents know no better. These losers will erect easily the killers of tomorrow with their indifference, games, insults and abuse. In a world that guns are available easily at some point someone will go for it if they have had enough or were raised the wrong way or got influenced by careless mfers including big name politicians and their positions. And the sadness is that they cannot see in that moment that even if only one in the group they target is actually a decent person, if not all of them, at that very moment which ignores this possibility they have cynically become the monster that they always hated, alas now in a way that is truly irreversible. So the "monsters" that made them have won finally for good. This is the moment of final loss, loss of humanity, loss of possibility, loss of faith in the individual human spirit.

To defeat this culture of selfish behavior you need great parents, you need cultural values, you need math and science like there is no tomorrow and plenty of world literature including traveling. You need politicians that are not afraid to accept when they are wrong, that learn from it, they cooperate with political opponents often enough and change their minds towards wiser positions that solve problems and unite people not towards dividing positions that proliferate evil. You need to step away from the bs tribalism that we have erected. You need to redefine your ego as the defender of something greater than the moronically obvious instant gratification and persistent yielding to insecurity.

first time i read a masque post all the way through. i liked it.

i still wonder about, specifically, video games. when i was in high school there was nothing that resembled games like call of duty, for instance.

http://callofduty.wikia.com/wiki/Fil...death_BOII.png

http://callofduty.wikia.com/wiki/Fil...Death_BOII.png

Alienation. That's also the smallest point possible to make to show why it's not video games, which connect people and also raise awareness of violence with both absurd and honest portrayals.

What's the difference between peddling fantasy combat and a combat fantasy for real life?

The same difference between a video game marketer and a weapons marketer.

There's always been suggestions that games/music/etc are responsible. Never seemed plausible.

Except for one thing which is when the game becomes like training. I've met people who think they could fly a plane because they've clocked so many hours on flight simulator games. It's possible that makes them more likely to have a go if the opportunity arose. Maybe some shooting games are like that as well.

Video games have been studied and the associations with aggression never justify the whole range of association one can make with anger. For example video games don't hurt and so it follows forth that they wouldn't influence aggression caused from being hurt.

Training type games increase confidence in our abilities without making any difference to anger.

That confidence can be well founded if the training games are real enough.

That's experience for confidence in recognizing both fantasy combat and a combat fantasy too.

Alienation is more challenging than video games and combat simulation training.

Accounting for alienating influences, video games have a clearly seen connection component. We play video games and those encountering alienating influences can tell about in games and the communication environment which surrounds games.

Prejudice is an alienating influence. Every connection you can make in video games, prejudice may disrupt. I'd hypothesis about prejudice instead of video games.

So I guess that's why we don't have schools shootings everyday, students are not hurt, angry, alienated, and/or prejudiced for whole to do that everyday regardless of the influences which can be indicated.

Its not violent video games. There's a plethora of decent quality studies showing no such associations. South Korea would be the school shooting capital by far. I CBF digging up the studies though, so form your own conclusions.

Here in Australia, it seems like common sense now that if you have access to dangerous stuff, you're more likely to cause danger or be a victim of it. Very strict gun regulation seems so obvious to us because it worked for us.

No redneck hillbilly or his buddies are ever again going to be able to defend their freedoms by force against their own government. They don't need guns to protect their freedoms. They need brains.

There is one study I found interesting. High intensity games like call of duty found to protect against Alzheimer's and dementia more broadly.

Would love to hear thoughts on the below.

First, some background. I worked with kids as a coach, referee, volunteer, etc. for 25 years: From 5yr olds through college age. I, also, was a stay at home dad of two sons.

The dynamic which became painfully clear to me about halfway through those 25 years was this:

1) Kids find their niche/group earlier in life than when I was young. The outliers have a very difficult time as middle school turns to high school.

2) We are all so connected/able to see what everyone else is doing/enjoying, that it weighs heavily on those who have trouble connecting in the real/non-online world.

3) Adults continue to find ways to put bandaids on open wounds which need kind ears, understanding and love. i.e. Schools which institute drug testing. Those who truly need activities/social outlets involving their peers are shunned, kicked out, ostracized. i.e. The idea of more guns, or more prisons, or criminalizing drugs.

4) More and more adults have less and less as trickle-up economics has become an upside-down waterfall, thus driving greater and greater numbers of parents to work 60-80hr weeks at low wage jobs.

We accept most of the above because we are a competitive country. We are the USA!

If we are going to continue to accept the above (and I don't think we should), then we need some serious changes in how we run school activities and sports.

Beginning at an early age, schools must find ways to engage ALL children in one or more extracurricular endeavors. Almost as important, those activities must be spotlighted on a regular/rotating basis. This should continue through high school.

For example: instead of every Friday being high school football night. Each Friday should be a festival of multiple activities, sport, academic, fun. One Friday is band, cross country and video game competition night. The next Friday is soccer, debate and visual arts night. The next Friday is chess, football and car night. And so on and so on.

This may sound simple and, I think, awesome, but those who buy into the American ideals of exceptionalism, greatness and machismo, despise ideas like this. They think it means we're being soft, when in reality we would be choosing the more difficult/rewarding path.

No child left behind policy of social activities.

Not bad. Some difficulties perhaps in ensuring that the ones who don't want to attend, have to attend. Some just like to read or watch movies and neither of these are social.

Movie night/Book night.

Attending any given Friday would not be mandatory, but teens would catch on pretty quick to the fact that all of a sudden no one is telling them what's the coolest, like we do now with high school football in this country.

If this idea were started in elementary school, kids would grow up respecting each other's individuality and talents to a greater degree. Clearly there would still be issues, we are humans; but, so many avenues for inclusion and recognition would be open that are not open now.

I could see it possibly working as an interschool initiative where the events combine students from various local schools. Not sure if it would work for each school individually though.

I was only considering the small subset who are sufficiently alienated and murderous to be seriously inclined to do something such as shooting up a school. Them feeling confident they will suceed in the mass killing rather than flunking it could be a bad thing.

If games make people less alienated than that's a good thing.

Mass attrocities have been fairly constant until recently in the USA when the occurances jumped. I'd bet my bottom $ that's the thing that changed was the internet - it tends to maximise eveything, good or bad. That might change a bit as society adjusts and reorganises.

Sure there's something wrong with american culture that might make it slightly higher than elsewhere but mostly it's the guns.

Oh, yeah but when playing along with setting aside information concerning guns, there is a whole menu of things which may be said might influence behavior available to dally with.

Mat,

Social media. Teenagers are too vulnerable to the sheer magnitude of worthlessness of tweets and likes/dislikes.

I know I sound like a old fogey (im 45 yo), but back in my day you had to actually confront via physical altercation if you wanted to bully someone. Now you just slander them online from the safety of your basement.