it's a beautiful tune, but pretty heartbreaking lyrics.

This sounds reasonable.

This does not. Do you have a citation or any support whatsoever for this? Because otherwise, it sounds entirely made up and probably wrong.

You even say that this is overall a good thing, but then imply that it is responsible for a bad thing, with no basis for that assertion.

despite my title, it's not really the end results which interest me, but the states of mind and how they come about. obviously, for many people, simply making means more difficult is the solution to preventing tragedies.

i'm curious if there are people here that deal with young people and have noticed how things have changed and remained the same in the last decades. i can only compare my own teenage memories to what i hear about these days. i don't actually know any adolescents, currently.

As I said earlier, I don't believe that the desire or willingness to kill is overall increasing. Decreased crime rates, including homicide rates, would support that the desire and willingness to kill, may in fact be decreasing.

Regarding young people specifically, I have many family members and friends who are educators and deal with issues with students anywhere from elementary school to high school. Their anecdotal experiences support the thesis I've read about in articles, that the Internet and social media make emotional and psychological bullying much more widespread than in previous generations and leads to the expected problems associated with that.

I believe that there are studies on those issues, regarding teenage depression, suicide, screen time, Internet usage, social media usage, etc, but I don't know about the quality of those studies. Depression and suicide rates have indeed increased over the past 15 years though, and are at 30-year highs. It is not conclusive, but would make sense, for cyber bullying to be one of the primary factors.

Does the above answer your question? That regarding the issues you raise, perhaps nothing has qualitatively changed since your youth, but perhaps the Internet and social media have made quantitative changes in the amount and extent of psychological bullying, resulting in increased depression and suicide.

It is entirely made up and probably wrong.

that all makes perfect sense to me.

Adults use the internet too. And so do people who understand bullying behavior and it's weakness too. The media is just as well for responding to bullying as it is for facilitating it.

And depression and suicide among adults has risen as well. I addressed young people, because that's what Mat asked about. The data shows a rise in depression and suicide among all ages, and the sharpest rises are not even among young people, it is among middle aged people.

There are other analyses showing overall happiness to be down, when correlated with Internet usage. A possible explanation for that besides bullying could be only seeing other people's good things and bragging about their lives on social media, while hiding the bad things that go on, which leads to grass is greener mentality and increased dissatisfaction with people's own lives.

Why don't we have them every day?

As others itt have pointed out, there just aren't that many people with the willingness for killing.

Why are they on the rise? Why are fidget spinner sales on the rise?

They're trending. Young people are impressionable.

That initial unique event seems the hardest to push through. It gets easier and easier after each subsequent event. It's no longer unique. Before Columbine something like this was outrageous. Perhaps seemingly impossible in the mind of a teenager. Now it is a real option in the mind of those who are outcast and angry.

People can also compare themselves more broadly. Back in the day you'd be largely oblivious to the lives of those around you. Now, you don't own that jetski that the kid in your suburb is flaunting all over Facebook. Maybe you don't go on holidays and have family friendly experiences that the kid next door flaunts with pictures and videos on his Facebook. And on and on.

This isn't bullying, but plays an important role in expectation-development and adjustment.

In any case, this whole internet narrative is a bore. Give me something more controversial.

P.s. I just noticed you covered this as well. Ignore my post.

In our times, and in the West as we know it there is a powerful basis of the intellect, or intellectual thinking. Historically mankind displays the beginnings of the intellect by observing ancient Greece, the home of Greek philosophers, scientists and statesmen. this Greco-Roman age would be considered to run from about 740 B.C. until the 15th century.

Prior to those times the individual man had more of a direct perception of the object of cognition which included knowledge of the cosmos. The intellect or logic wasn't needed, so to speak , for it hadn't developed as of yet. Therefore we have Aristotle creating logic. or the reasonableness of Plato, or the meanderings of Heraclitus.

As usual it would be wrong to assume that man was then as he is now in all aspects especially his cognitive and knowledge gathering abilities.

We have continued in our age with an even more powerful intellectuality such that it is the possession of the common man, we're all smart. Differences arise secondary to the jargon of the platform such as the sciences , law and especially medicine.

If we go back 10,000 years in ancient India, we come upon the Vedas and Vedanta philosophy which are an echos of a comprehension which wasn't written down but passed to the individual only to be written in the age prior to the age of the Greeks(Egypto-Chaldean).

When this ancient Indian looked into himself and the origins of Man he saw Love, the warmth of a breezy Love to which he noted as the source of existence.All to that of which he sought was this sourceful Love, and in this the various Gods of the pillar stand evident.

The Buddha is the apotheosis of this source in which he gives his disciples guidance as to how to deal with life and the living; times , they are a changing. At the same time as the Buddha we have Socrates bringing forth out of his disciples answers to the questions of eternity. the Buddha gave answers and Socrates gave few but elicited from his disciples answers from within the man, the intellect with its power.

We are the children of Socrates but no longer have the ability to think on the objects of cognition such as the ancient Greek philosopher. The ancient Greek, when perceiving the object of cognition, saw in a picture like consciousness the spiritual basis of the sense bound object. They were together as parts to the whole and in this we have the wonderful philosophies of Grecian times . This Greek man knew that the thoughts were not his but of a higher cosmic origin.

Times change, religions lose their buff, and we implicitly believe that our thoughts are possessively ours or that the thoughts are an addition to the object of observation, the concepts intellectually driven don't count. this is the modern science, the thoughts may lead us to a fork in the road but they are no more than tools to the object of observation.

This is modern science which believes in "facts" or those which are driven under the microscopic or telescope or any measurable basis such as the meter somewhere in a tomb in Europe so that all can reference in the pursuit of science. the concept is insignificant but only a means to an end. Chop that bastard up to find those little parts and pieces as underlying reality.

I know, its long but a little history can help for it gets worse. "Out of the blue" I am stating that the process of the intellectual or intellectual thought is a destructive process within the being of Man . The precursor to a thought is that matter in annihilated and the thought enters into this space which is the reflector to the soul of a man. One thinks within the nervous system and in the process the physical being of man is destroyed.

In the intellect the thinker cuts and chops off parts and pieces of reality and gives it stasis, a frozen picture and in this we suffer pain. Just as the corpse of a man destructs just so does the intellectual thinker of our times perform his destruction of being.

We think, and in a sense aberrantly, and there arises "fear" and "hate" the journeying maladroits of the river of our thoughts, our barrier to fecundation. The entire western culture has basis in history and a timeless presence in "fear" and "hate" . The thoughts broken down to our speech and written words, abstractions or which we all are aware and actually speak to proudly are the consequence of our river of "fear".

This is our burden and we are helped as the "Ego" or "I" , a body of man, progresses through this "fire" of life, not by receiving it as gift but through obstructions to progression within this life unto the next. the highest body of the human being,his "Ego" progresses only through hindrances and its concomitant sister "pain".

All of this appears disgustingly disturbed unless knowledge of recurrent lives and karma comes forth which does and will give one solace and understanding of the human soul and his spirit, the "Ego", a progression of the human being. One cannot study reincarnation and karma without gaining seeing the human being new, a powerful life of the Divine Immortal.

Something in society must be missing today, that was present at some point in the past. I am not convinced that anger and violent thoughts are more prevalent now, leading to more frequent school shootings, while overall major crime is way down today, versus a time in the past when school shootings were unheard of.

Also, the desensitized/copycat explanation sounds valid but may not be causal to the increased violence, but corollary.

Here's a less crazy theory: We didn't screen for depression in the past nearly to the extent to which we do so today. Related: I don't have hypertension or diabetes purely because I avoid doctors. Heck, I'm not even drunk right now since it hasn't been verified by the authorities.

I'm not sure they buy this explanation. Would've been the first cause to be tested and/or controlled for.

My crazy theories certainly wouldn't be bought by academics either. Nuanced explanations where something positive also has negative side effects or where something negative also has positive side effects are ill-favoured compared to simpler theories. For good reason goddamnit.

You are overestimating the intellectual capacity of journalists and academics.

Easy access to guns + copycat explanation are all you need to explain the increases in mass shootings. I'm not sure why people feel the need to seek out some deeper reason, other than a desire to avoid the obvious explanation that easy access to guns is responsible.

Countries with less/more difficult access to guns don't have this problem. In fact, no other developed nation has this problem anywhere near the extent that the US does.

I'm going by memory here, but from statistics I've seen, US households with guns are 40%+ more likely to have a homicide occur. They are 240%+ more likely to have a suicide occur. They are 100 times more likely (10,000%?) to have an unintentional death occur than they are of successfully defending themselves against others.

When the assault weapons ban was instated from 1994-2004, mass shootings and casualties went way down. When the ban expired and was not reinstated, mass shootings and casualties went way up, including an increasing pace over the last several years.

Are all of those things just random correlations? Why can't the simple answer be, the desire for those negative things is present in some % of society, which has not changed (or is decreasing), but easy access to guns has made actual occurrences of those things proliferate?

I'm open to other reasons, if someone can cite and rationally support them, but at this point, the search for something deeper just seems like a desire to avoid banning guns.

Two generations ago, tons of kids had rifles in their school locker because reasons, and that was right after WWII and the lawlessness of the Great Depression.

Sorry, but easy access to guns and copycat do not explain the underlying cause here, which is what Mat is asking.

What makes todays shooters more willing to pull that trigger?

This would be a great point if the murder rate were rising over time.

Um, the rise in school shooting versus the decline in murder rate should support my idea that there is more going on than just easy access to guns and facebook.

My guess is that any data would, in your opinion, support your idea. Granted, that would also be true of anyone else in this thread.

There were shootings back then too, but they were less nationally publicized, and they were largely not mass shootings, as rifles then did not kill as many people as quickly and easily.

And you are wrong, copycat alone could be a solo explanation that primarily accounts for it, regardless of any stance on gun control.

What the data shows, though, over decades, is that both the number of mass shooting incidents and casualties resulting, decreased when the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban was instated, and then after 2004 when it expired and was not reinstated, both the number of mass shooting incidents and casualties resulting increased. You can look that up to confirm, or I can cite it later when I have time and am not phone posting, if necessary.

Can you cite any evidence that access to assault weapons + copycat does not account for the increase in mass shootings?

No, the decline in the murder rate shows that people overall are not more willing to pull the trigger.

The rise in mass shootings shows that when they do pull the trigger, it is more deadly - perhaps due to the nature of the weapons used being capable of killing much more quickly and easily.

Your thesis does not make sense, and if you believe it does, then you need to refute what I said above, as well as give good reasoning why something more must be involved.

The "murder rate" seems to general in relation to what's going on. And a bit narrow. Guns are present at murders, suicides, and accidents which happen at schools and beyond.

i think the copycatting makes a lot of sense. it now seems like a reasonable option for someone feeling suicidal/homicidal.