In all seriousness (as we are being serious) the Judge Dredd series in 2000AD used to do storylines about "future shock", in which people were driven mad by the pressures and brutality of modern life. Many of the stories had them sniping at people followed by a bloody police response. Art imitating life or just a very precient comic?
I do believe it is a global phenomenon- just made more lethal over here by the ease one can pick up high-powered weaponry.
Your question is kind of a dead end. There's no stock answer. We'd have to go out and ask people or something.
It's as open a question as it gets.
Like I say, the modern phenomenon of rage massacre began with the Post Office shootings in the 1980's, and it seems incredible to me that nobody bothered to look at what made that environment particularly lethal.
Being the '80s, this was a period of brutal downsizing and wage freezes, when employees were thrown into cut-throat competition to meet targets. I have no difficulty imagining what it must have been like to work in an office where any fuck-up would be punished with dismissal or demotion, and the effect that must have had on employee relations.
It's useful to refer here to Muzafer Sherif's Boy's Camp experiment...
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=595
...in which he attempted to generate aggression between two groups of kids by putting them in direct competition for resources. He was so succesful that they had to stop the experiment.
Now try to imagine a situation where you're in darwinian competition with everyone around you, and nobody is on your side, and it's not hard to see how this metastisizes into murder.
Finally, try to think what your experience of high school was like - I'm willing to bet that it was a hell of a lot more like Heathers than it was like American Pie.
My head's full of stuff like this, I'll be happy to keep going if anyone thinks it's interesting...
The problem is though that the more individualistic and competition-oriented society becomes, the more most people within it simply respond to the problems it causes by taking it out on and blaming one another: in the same way that locking more people up generates more crime which generates greater public demand for longer sentences, it's a process that feeds on itself.
I was reminded of this just a few weeks ago when there was that survey saying that British and American kids were the unhappiest in the Western world. What most interested me was the response to the survey, in which instead of saying "well, let's have a look at what other countries do, we don't have to copy them slavishly but let's see what we can learn", most of the discussion (it seemed to me) rushed to two conclusions:
1. "it's not because other countries have better welfare states, we need to make that quite clear right away" ;
2. "what these kids need is more discipline, now".
Less thought, less intelligent discussion, more "get the bastards", in other words more of what made the problem in the first place. Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
You begin to understand why I've come to love cats so much?
Rodent I agree. I was really paying a compliment in my twisted way. Of course a question that leads us to look away from knee-jerk responses and toward the real world is open. It's the opposite of a dead end.
Seems to me, back in the '80s when going postal was a relatively new thing people used to ask those sort of motivation questions a lot more.
Heather's was right on for my high school experience. In fact there was a string of suicides there in the years after I graduated.
I'd be very interested in reading more about this kind of stuff.
The Robber's Cave experiment reminds me of some rules of thumb for managing groups of engineers doing R&D. Basically it boils down to, anyone whose office is physically farther away than a hundred yards or so tends to be viewed as incompetent, dishonest, an enemy. We called that the "chimp tribe distance" where I worked.
Some people deliberately abuse the tendency, but it's pretty strong even when everybody is trying to "be good."
One might try to draw some kind of pinko comparison to the number of "terrorists" in Iraq over time, as conditions got worse and worse there.
Communists! The lot of ya!!!
The answer is quite clearly to arm anything with opposable thumbs and we'd never see anything like this ever again....
According to a recent article by Dinesh De Souza, any murder where more than 25 people die is the fault of atheists.
iLL MaN -- Excellent point! That's why murder rates in the U.S. are so low. Plenty of guns to defend ourselves with. You take a place like Japan? Defenseless. Terrorists everywhere.
Forty years ago, it was almost unheard of for middle-class people to snap and murder their peers and colleagues
The upper classes, now that's different. Half the aristocracy were trying to knock off the other half in increasingly inventive ways, in the hope of inspiring Agatha Christie's next book.
I have no difficulty imagining what it must have been like to work in an office where any fuck-up would be punished with dismissal or demotion, and the effect that must have had on employee relations.
The Ax" (dir. Costa-Gavras) is perhaps the movie reference you're groping for.
I'm not so sure that it is rage. I think it is a fundamental disconnect. Perhaps rage is fed by the disconnect, but think of how disconnected people are to not only other people, despite cell phones, internet, etc., but disconnected to the land, to the origin of their food, to their communities, even to the land. I'm old enough to remember sitting on the front porch in the cool of an evening and chatting with neighbors, growing our own food in gardens, some raising chickens, knowing the local butcher by name. Children and teenagers had actual work to do and the responsibilities that came with it. They were also made to face consequences when they did not fulfill their obligations. Sometimes the punishment involved pain, such as paddling. It is out of favor now, and it may be true that violence begets violence but it may also be true that pain begets compassion for those suffering. If a child grows up without ever suffering from pain, then how is a child to learn that pain hurts and be able to understand that inflicting pain hurts the other person. Children are isolated from human interaction by the very technology that is supposed to make life better.
I dunno. I don't have children. But, I think if I did, I wouldn't hesitate to insist on them interacting with other people, teach them that unacceptable behavior results in pain of one kind or another, that pain hurts, and to emphasize with other living beings.
WW, Mr. D'Souza is correct - only fundamentalism can save us from liberal terror, as the shining example of Iran has shown.
HDB, trust the French to come up with a film praising workplace shooters! Let's just hope Ms. Malkin doesn't notice it. Or The Ladykillers, for that matter.
And Demokat, there's merit in your argument, and I don't want to speculate too heavily on the causes of this latest massacre.
All I can do is look at previous incidents and search for trends - in workplace killings, it tends to be people who had worked for years in high-stress environments and believed they were about to be laid off.
In schools, it tends to be kids who have been mercilessly bullied. As adults we seem to forget the casual brutality of high schools, the way that being fat, skinny, tall, short, smart, stupid or just plain different can mark you as sub-human.
I could go into great detail on the culture of Columbine High, but I'm sure you could imagine.
The point is that when massacres happen, we point the finger at guns, at Hollywood, at rap or rock music, at the parents, at the kids themselves, at generalised concepts of evil.
Nobody points at the school or at the office itself - nobody points at a culture which puts its citizens in fierce competititon with each other for ever-dwindling resources and declares those who don't match up as undeserving losers.
Nobody's prepared to look the environments that have repeatedly created killers and ask what it is about them that throws up such incidents.
Check out the blogs - how many people are asking the same question?
None that I've seen.
I should point out that there are always lone psychos, dumbass wannabe-Jihadists and hateful assholes who commit mass-murder too.
I'm trying to address those murders which can be seen as having sprung from a specific cause, rather than paranoid feelings of persection.
I'm also only looking at this from one narrow angle - I could go on about this pretty much indefinitely, but I've addressed the impulse to murder for notoriety before....
http://flyingrodent.blogspot.com...ing-
happen.html
Project Wannabe - I was being facetious. It's ok, you weren't to know.....
Did you hear some of the tape that the shooter left? Like the London bombings tape it was the same Your fault, Your fault, Your fault. And the same Look at me, Look at me, Look at me. The desire for publicity (posting it between shootings.
I would say it may have something to do with powerlessness.
In an old society malicious and rageful powerlessness might take the form of anonymous letters or witchcraft - a secret enjoyment of power. Being powerful in our society means being visible more than anything. But rage and hatred and malice are pretty much a part of any society of humans.
But this is only blogging speculation of course.
Do keep doing serious as well as flippant.
If there's such a thing as a profile for workplace/school shootings, it doesn't usually include mental illness - a few have had histories of mental disorders, most haven't.
As KB points out, there seems to be a common thread between the 7/7 bombers' immense self-regard and victim complexes and the Virginia killer. Narcissism at its ugliest...
What should concern us most is that these guys (and they're not always men) are usually quite sane, and witnesses generally describe them as calm during their rampages.
We probably won't find out the truth about this incident for some time - the media generally rushes to find a reason for such crimes, variously accusing previous shooters of Nazi sympathies, drug abuse etc, allegations that are often false.
I'm still not hearing many people asking why we're producing these killers though. I hear a lot of anguished debates about guns, but I've never heard anyone point out the crucial fact that something changed in the eighties that made the massacre commonplace.
I appreciate that everyone is focused on this particular incident rather than the phenomenon itself, but sooner or later we're going to have to sit down and ask a lot of questions, and we might not like the answers.
Wasn't the first of these shootings in Austin in the Sixties? It's referred to in Richard Linklater's Slacker.
It certainly was Justin, Charles Whitman - an ex-marine.
But the perps have been getting younger. And the killings more frequent - most since 1993.
Video games ? Decline of Christianity ? After all, the UK was fairly well armed in Victorian times, no licensing of any kind, though weapons were more expensive and not semi-automatic. When Beetle was bullied in 'Stalky & Co' it didn't occur to him to take out the culprits with his saloon pistol. Or if it did, Kipling didn't write it down.
As Holmes said : "I should be very much obliged if you would slip your revolver into your pocket. An Eley's No. 2 is an excellent argument with gentlemen who can twist steel pokers into knots. That and a tooth-brush are, I think, all that we need."
In fact, it looks as if Holmes would have been incarcerated in today's age. He must have used very low power cartridges, similar to those recommended for home defence in the US (to avoid killing people 2 rooms away).
From "The Musgrave Ritual"
"I have always held, too, that pistol practice should distinctly be an open-air pastime; and when Holmes in one of his queer humours would sit in an arm-chair, with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it."
The notion that America has seen a decline in Christianity in recent years is one that hadn't occurred to me, what with that whole third "Great Awakening".
I don't think it's useful to draw any comparisons between the Victorian era and the 21st Century, any more than it is to compare modern America to Tombstone. We're in apples and oranges territory here - it's like raising the Nika riots.
I'm open to arguments that violence in popular culture is an influence, although there was no lack of violent imagery in the sixties and seventies.
The idea of justice through violence has been pretty much at the heart of American culture since The Last of the Mohicans, at least.
I don't doubt that there's also a copycat element, which would explain why school shootings have become more common.
Like I say though, it's the '80s that strike me as the critical period in analysing this problem.
Just in case anyone thought I made all this stuff up...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world...cas/
6580421.stm
...See you in six months.
Yeah, I saw that and thought of this piece.
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