Today's news from the Associated Press:
"Mass public shootings have become such a part of American life in recent decades that the most dramatic of them can be evoked from the nation's collective memory in a word or two: Luby's. Jonesboro. Columbine. And Now Virginia Tech.
Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota State Department of Corrections, said the availability of guns was not a factor in his exhaustive statistical study of mass murder during the 20th century.
Duwe found that the prevalence of mass murders, defined as the killing of four or more people in a 24-hour period, tends to mirror that of homicide generally.
Duwe also found that mass murder was just as common during the 1920s and early 1930s as it is today. The difference is that then, mass murderers tended to be failed farmers who killed their families because they could no longer provide for them, then killed themselves. Their crimes embodied the despair and hopelessness of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, the sense that they and their families would be better off in the hereafter than in the here and now.
Despondent men still kill their families today. But public shooters like Virginia Tech's Seung-Hui Cho are different. They are angrier and tend to blame society for their failures. . . "It's society's fault ... Society disgusts me," Kimveer Gill wrote in his blog the day before he shot six people to death and injured 19 in Montreal last year."
Comment: in the Great Depression depair and hopelessness were turned inward. The mass murderers were unable to survive, to provide for their families. They didn't blame their victimes; in a crooked way they were protecting them.
Today's mass killers are not defeated by nature, but by society, by epidemic displays of differentiation: BMWs, Nike Airs, Starbucks Lattes.
The law of karma: for every action an equal and opposite reaction.
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2 comments:
Len,
YOu are a voice of sanity and reflection in these dark times. We do need to listen to what he said. One of my graduate students, who is from South Korea, said we need to pay attention to immigrant families more. I fully agree. We also do NOT understand mental illness. By demonizing Cho, we have distanced ourselves from understanding him and seeing what might have been done to prevent this awful tragedy. Keep the good thoughts coming.
Thank you, AG.
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