This post asks readers a question:
With Columbine, the DC gas station/highway shooter, VA Tech and other college shootings, mall shootings, holiday shootings, and today's shooting (3.3.08 Wendy's Shooting), what do you see as the reason people - from teenage high schoolers to 50+ adults - are taking up the gun as their means of "getting even" and relieving their pain?
Please, I am really looking for reasons here - besides this being a sign the world is coming to an end...
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6 comments:
Impotent, marginalized, weak and socially misfit men see guns as a manly, attention getting, socially powerful and un-ignorable equalizer of all the pain they've suffered. Media romanticizes the "power" of a gun in the hands of a "cool male". They usually kill themselves because they are already dead. Taking others beforehand is merely a statement: You THOUGHT I was nothing...now I'm someone you cannot ignore, and I will not give you the power over me to try me and kill me...You've already done that. Men resort to violence for identity, women usually to "dependency roles", ie., insanity, emotional disturbances, physical illness feigned. I cannot think of a female mass gun murderer... can you?
I agree with what you are saying - for the most part. Guns are romanticized in the media, the individuals who do these things are given an inordinate amount of "air time," and they do seem as a majority to suffer from depression, inadequacy, and lack of social integration.
However, I do see young people (middle school -> college) falling prey to this, but what of the Wendy's shooter? He was 45. Far beyond the "no one likes me and I hate everyone" stage. Shouldn't he know that there are really other ways to deal with...whatever? He's lived and experienced and learned far more than someone my age. (And non of this explains the Illinois college shooter.)
As for a female mass murder...no, as of yet I can't think of or find any on Google.
While doing some research on this I did find an interesting blog talking about this issue:
http://drhelen.blogspot.com/2007/05/do-women-commit-mass-murder.html
I think perhaps you give too much credit to "age=wisdom". I'm 55 and I know people my age who are still in elementary school emotionally and socially, except that they've spent all the years of their life collecting baggage, hurts, percieved offenses and accumulated loneliness. The isolation is not an "event" but a cumulative effect on a person. (I don't know if you ever saw the movie "Falling Down", but I think it expresses this). The Columbine type kids do it out of adolescent rage, the Wendy's/Postal workers do it out of deep and persistent pain. I had a blog post on the Virginia Tech guy a while back also
http://pithlessthoughts.blogspot.com/2007/04/not-another-one.html
oops
http://pithlessthoughts.blogspot.com/2007/04/not-another-one.html
Your question is a good one, why kill "innocents"? I can only believe that if we could delve deeply enough into someone else's pain we'd find a connection. On a very personal note, many years ago I contemplated "murder suicide" as a rational way out of my personal despondency. When I read a story about a man who did that in the newspaper and it actually made sense to me, I knew I needed help. (The link to "Life, Death and Love" on my blog is a mss. that was written during that time of my life, but I've left out a couple of chapters for the sake of my kids). I have compassion for those whose pain leads them to horrific solutions, but I also reel at the sheer incomprehensibility of actually carrying out such harm on others in the name of one's own suffering. "I don't know...." is probably the best answer.
Steve
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