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Reader JD writes:

I used to be on the board of a regional mental health services provider and have been thinking about mass shootings and their cause. It’s pretty clear that we are dealing with the ego deflation of a generation of special snowflakes who enjoyed participation awards in school, but find the real world after school (high school or college) less solicitous. The South Carolina church shooter was quoted as being ‘on a mission’ . . .

and scoped out three different venues for his attack [mall, college, then the church] over a four month period. The Aurora puke’s record with his shrink show the same desire for notoriety as he dismally failed in his post graduate education. The Newtown monster’s ego was was being stoked, post school, by his delusional mother.

All three pukes carefully selected venues where they would not be challenged, so they would achieve the maximum measure of notoriety.  Sharing the celebrity spotlight would have been a failure in their warped minds. Confirmed by the total absence of escape plans after their actions.

Until American society goes back to celebrity based upon achievement, rather than outrageous misbehavior, losers at the margin of society will have clear incentives to embark on ever more depraved actions. Who today can mention even one Nobel Prize winner in the last three years? The Kardashians are front and center in everyone’s mind, though. The mental health community certainly knows aberrant self gratification is driving these losers, but they have painted themselves in a corner elevating unworthy egos as a cornerstone of their treatments and overall policy.

Banning flags and guns is a waste of effort and a total distraction from the real cultural causes of this continuing nightmare.

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50 COMMENTS

  3. Bowl head couldn’t make it through 10th grade-that’s pathetic not any kind of example. Was he psychotic? I just know he’s an evil shite. Newtown was clearly not able to function in public. And Batman is insane/ evil…I sure as hell don’t blame Nancy L. for doing essentially all the heavy lifting. Shouldn’t have taught the boy shooting and had better gun safe…and who thinks their progeny is going to murder them in their sleep? Where do you get the monster ego slant? I have a(grownup 30’s) son who’s had mental breakdowns and non-violent criminal trouble…at some point you have to take responsibility for your own life. Yeah my mom told me I was special-she told both my brothers they were special too. Back in the 50’s and 60’s everyone didn’t get a trophy either…

    • It’s an easy explanation. It’s more difficult to accept the idea that theses killers are aberrations in humanity that have always been present and there is not a damn thing we can do about it. Calling children special and creating narcissists does NOT equate to creating low life murderers. That said, there is value to losing and knowing you lost/failed, but if that knowledge created killers, we would be much more awash in the blood of innocents because NO ONE is a winner all the time.

  4. “Who today can mention even one Nobel Prize winner in the last three years?”

    Sorry. I stopped paying attention to the Nobel Prise when Prez. Obama received one for doing notning.

    • Malala Yousafzai just won it.

      Afghan Taliban got on her school bus and shot her in the face. But she lived to stand in front of the UN general assembly and more or less tell Taliban to go fuck themselves.

    • Yes, I was going to say that and add Al Gore. If there’s one thing that has less credibility than the SCOTUS it’s the Nobel society.

      • CARTER whined for years that he deserved it for Camp David but he risked nothing. Then he got a comped one for bashing Dubya.

        Ray

    • Who today can mention even one Nobel Prize winner in the last three years? Obozo the Clown! I agree, after Obozo got the Cracker Jack Prize, the thing has the worth of a cat turd.

    • Don’t forgery about big Al Gore getting one for his inconvenient lie. Not sure he ever even took a science class as a political science major.

    • The Nobel prize has lost much of it’s prestige and needs to be replaced with something else. How about a nice trophy with a You’re Number #1 on the bottom.

    • I agree. There is no need to remember these “winners” unless discussing the absurdity of the whole thing or possibly to help your score when playing a trivia game.

      Also, not knowing the winner of the prize does not transform these already famous people into the unknown. At least the celebrities mentioned are mostly just distractions and annoyances rather than people that have had actual negative impact on my life.

  5. “Banning flags and guns is a waste of effort and a total distraction from the real cultural causes of this continuing nightmare.”

    That’s entirely the goal and entirely the point. Politicians can distract their subjects from real issues, and the public can distract themselves from having to solve real issues.

    • As the middle class gets hollowed out and the poor sink further we create more fringe behavior. If more people had good jobs to go to there would be less trouble. Ferguson, Baltimore, Roof- lack of opportunity is the common thread.

      • During the real depression of the 30s there were many more poor than now with very little crime. Money has nothing to do with it.

        • I wasn’t really talking about overall crime, more about the fringe. Right wing extremism has ebbed and flowed with the economy and recent riots seem to be general boilovers.

      • “As the middle class gets hollowed out and the poor sink further”

        THANK OBAMA.

        “If more people had good jobs to go to there would be less trouble.”

        BS.

        ” Ferguson, Baltimore, Roof- lack of opportunity is the common thread.”

        BS – criminals resisting arrest, and OUT OF TOWN JIHADIS AND LEFTISTS paid by SOROS to start riots is the common thread.

        “I wasn’t really talking about overall crime, more about the fringe. Right wing extremism has ebbed and flowed with the economy:

        RIGHT WING? Roof BURNED THE AMERICAN FLAG. Just like your pals do.

        ” and recent riots seem to be general boilovers.””

        ALL LED BY LEFT WING SCUM.

  6. Um No. I don’t think you can blame anything other than the fact their are over 300M people in the US and their sanity is normally distributed, so occasionally you’re going to get a six sigma wack job whose going to shoot up someplace. I don’t think the overall culture shifts the distribution of sanity/violence around too much, If our culture was in such decay why would crime rates be plummeting?

  7. so they would achieve the maximum measure of notoriety

    That’s what we think because we don’t think like them. What they want is a body count. A body count. Which is why they attack where people are defenseless. It guaranties a body count.

    • “They can gas me, but I am famous. I have achieved in one day what it took Robert Kennedy all his life to do.”
      Sirhan Sirhan, body count: 1.

      Different killers have different motivations. Most of them have it within their control whether to survive the day themselves. That’s a complex decision, for having to endure the consequences, but for some of the more depraved ones, it’s a positive in that surviving allows them to experience their notoriety first hand.

  8. Odd how a person involved in the mental health field doesn’t lay blame on the abuse of legal psychoactive drugs pushed by Big Pharm, but instead on “culture” he happens to dislike.

  9. I used to work in mental health too, and I’m not shy to say it is a dismal failure for the most part. The term, “revolving door” is no joke, it is spoke within the professional community. There is always a debate as to who sits on the bottom of the heap, mental health programs or the prison system. Frankly, after visiting the penitentiary, they have greater freedom to offer activity programs than a large mental health hospital. In this we are and have developed a cultural norm, one where we where blinders.

    • The mental health field is one of the biggest frauds ever perpetuated on society…it has never really helped anyone except the people who are employed in that field – they earn a living at the expense of the people who seek out their help thru counseling etc…its all a sham.

  10. As one of the “snowflake” generation, we did ask to be raised this way. Rather than just pointing and shouting at the symptoms why don’t we treat the disease. So in short I agree with the article. Also there seems to be a really shit level of compassion for people these days. Not caring about people makes it easier to marginalize them into what ever group be it crazy, poor, black, liberal, ofwg.

    • If you think about it, the lack of compassion goes hand-in-hand with “not my responsibility; not my problem.” As I am sure you are aware, our society has evolved to eliminate responsibility for anything from the individual and put it on some faceless entity (ex: government) because responsibility carries liability which can be very expensive, and we all know how that worked out.

  11. I have to imagine most of these guys used to get bullied so mercilessly in childhood they killed themselves quietly on their own during puberty, without involving anyone else.

    • taken on balance, this is a preferable outcome. Let the wackos do themselves in rather than innocents, and for everyone elses sake don’t publicize it. Our overly connected world via the wonders of the internet makes knowledge of all these unfortunate events available and reminds me of something my father used to say to me, that sometimes its better not to know something because “ignorance is bliss” – having them go away quietly and without upsetting our mostly normal life is desirable.

  12. Were AR’s and AK 47’s around 50 years ago? Yes, so this isn’t new technology allowing these killings. Was murder around 50 years ago? Yes, so nothing new under the son. But killings of strangers (not robberies and such) and people who have done you no wrong seems to have increased. What has change? The importance of a solid family and its members seems to have dwindled to a nice idea but not common practice.

    • You could by dynamite, DEWATS, 20mm Anti Tank Rifles, new machine guns, all the best last one via the mail and we did not have half as many issues as we do today.

    • What’s new, post-columbine, is the idea that mass murder will get you as much air time as shooting the President, without having to go up against the Secret Service (although idiots like Squeaky and Hinkey seemed to do all right in that match-up).

      It’s a murder for hire scheme. You kill enough people, and the networks will devote billions of dollars worth of air time to making you famous. The networks get what they want, a ‘story’ that they can keep ‘reporting on’ for a solid week without having to do any real work, and the killer gets what he wants, 10,080 minutes of fame.

  13. Any attempt to lay blame on a single cause is just ridiculous. These are exceptionally rare events. In a country of 300+ million people, we have, what, less than a dozen nutjobs a year try to get famous by killing strangers? That’s way too small a sample to draw any conclusions from, especially since most of them are killed or kill themselves at the end of their attack. So you’re left trying to guess at their motivations by what they leave behind.

    Anything you want to blame, be it videogames, “cultural rot”, pharmaceuticals, bullying, whatever, I can point to hundreds of thousands of other people who had similar experiences and not only didn’t choose to kill, but the thought never even crossed their mind. Likewise, I can probably find a common thread between any small group of people, but it’s not necessarily a significant factor in their behavior.

    The sad, scary truth is that these are fundamentally broken people who, in most cases, have been f–ked up for a very long time before they act out. Trying to suss out a single cause of that sickness from the messy chaos of a human brain is virtually impossible.

    • +1000 And well said. After Sandy Hook one of the Fox newies, in a moment of rare self-reflection, wondered aloud if, perhaps, the media attention wasn’t a contributing factor to spree killings. Of course it is. But a free country’s news reporting can no more allow itself to be held hostage to the chance that some nut-job wants to be “famous” than can violent video games, war films, detective novels, or boxing matches—all of which at one time or another have been seized upon as a “cause” for someone committing an unspeakable act of violence. None of these things are “causes” for nut-cases killing or maiming people any more than is a society that authoritarians like to claim is “too” free. Spree killers decide to commit mayhem because they want to. They don’t start shooting people because they were forced to by a dysfunctional society.

  14. By observing Apple’s analysis, all the problems are due to little virtual video game Confederate soldiers carrying little virtual Confederate flags in Gettysburg Civil War ipad games.

  15. The fact that few Americans can remember the names of any recent Nobel laureates, is actually one of the few positives of our dystopian age. Unless the person in question is, in some meaningful way, able to appreciate the specific work and/or discovery the Nobel was granted for, all he has to go by, is that a bunch of progressives told him that this or that guy is smart and great. Which is a dynamic we have waaaaaaay to much of already. Cutting edge science being what it currently is, very few people are really in a position to make much sense of it at all, much less independently determine whether a laureate got the price for genuinely performing the most qualified work, or simply for being politically correct.

    • And part of that reason is because we no longer have very many journalists that are willing to wrap their tiny little brain parts around technology and science for it’s own sake and translate it for the common man. Unless of course it can used to push a political agenda. It’s to the point no one trusts the reporting anyway.

  16. This is a good letter to the editor. I’ve often thought the same way regarding the root cause between the horrifying things that people do to get famous these days.

    It’s a really tenuous sort of cultural balance. While at the same time, people are becoming more and more anonymous in the real world, they’re being made to feel more and more special in their schooling and early lives, causing a feeling of intense insignificance and impotence, which itself leads many millions of people to join up with Twitter hashtag crusades, and very few to commit terrible and unacceptable acts of atrocity.

  17. To be fair, it’s not like the Nobel Committee has covered themselves in glory… There was the prize to Al Gore for making a slideshow, beating out the little old lady who smuggled hundreds of kids out of Nazi occupied territory, there was the prize to Obama for… … …? I dunno, when someone comes up with a reasonable explanation let me know…

    Criticizing me or anyone else for not knowing which foggy minded malcontent and their steaming pile of “message” got the Nobel Prize in literature this year is hardly fair. Let us judge folks by their accomplishments, not by whether some group of politically motivated fools in Stockholm decided to give them a shiny medal.

      • It’s gotta be more than making shitty promises. I promise to make sure every child in America has Waffles for breakfast. Or eggs, if they’re allergic to gluten. Or gluten free pancakes if they’re allergic to gluten, a vegan, or just a special snowflake.

        Where’s my Nobel?

  18. Absolutely horrid logic. Yes the newest generation is the weakest ever, but if you want to scapegoat their collective teacup culture, then you need a much higher frequency of mass murders.

    The real truth about mass murders is that they are committed by murderers–people with no conscious for their fellow man. And that is why I carry a gun.

  20. Our society accepts bad behavior and lack of accountability. And even worse, we have established a warped belief that it can never be changed for the better, so instead, we reward it.

    The people we vote into office with the power to change it, our elected officials, continue to lie, steal and sell out American freedoms. We, the voters, continue to reelect them, or stay home on election day because of the mistaken defeatist belief that voting doesn’t matter.

    Many politicians, welfare recipients (and those who manage and earn livelihoods off the systems), teachers/indoctrinators, and unionized government employees ALL share the common thread that there is little expected of them, and little accountability for poor performance and misdeeds. Go to work, don’t murder anybody and get fired, retire, receive the pensions, and continue to vote for the politician who promises to give you the most free stuff.

    When some evil little entitlement mentality puke decides to get his 15 minutes of fame by killing innocents, the only response our corrupt lawmakers can EVER make is to take away more freedoms from the law-abiding. Yet, we (society) keep reelecting these political whores again and again…..

    We have met the enemy, and it is us.

  22. The decision on Gay marriage is rooted in same cultural rot. We have been told that less than 3% populations feelings are hurt if we don’t affirm and celebrate their [biologically ] aberrant lifestyle.

  23. Want to stop mass murders? Ban the names of the people who commit them. They are now ‘Suspect 12’ and ‘Inmate 25062’. They do it for attention, they do it for infamy, they do it to be remembered.

    The best thing we can do is forget them forever.

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