A Recipe for Making Mass Shooters

Now that we’ve had another horrific mass shooting grab the nation’s attention by the pussy, it seems like a good time to get the post that I had wanted to write after the last horrific mass shooting but, being a part-time blogger and a full-time citizen just couldn’t quite get around to.

Because Ye Olde Blogge is based primarily on psychological findings, we are, by necessity, concerned about motivation: what motivates mass shooters to mass shoot everyone? After the Atlanta Asian massage parlor shootings, we posted about the three types of mass shooter. No spoilers, you’ll have to go to the article to find out what they are!

This time we’ll use the research of Jillian Peterson and James Densley as reported on in Politico in their article, Two Professors Found What Creates a Mass Shooter. Will Politicians Pay Attention? These two eggheads decided to see if they could waste a few government dollars and get rich off of their hatred of America by looking for commonalities between mass shooters. What a waste of time, amirite? We all know the commonalities: white shooters are trouble young men that society has failed, Black men are rabidly violent madogs that must be put down, and anyone with a vaguely Arabic sounding name is a Islamic terrorist bent on cutting off all of our heads and giving us all monkeypox.

Petersen’s and Densley’s idea was that if we could understand the commonalities of mass shooters, then we might could start preventing them. I know. Crazy, right? Leave it to some CRT-loving socialism indoctinating university pRoFesSoR types to come up with something as lamebrained as that.

Here’s what they did:

• DATABASE:
  • They took every mass shooting (killed four or more) since 1966. You know why 1966, right? America’s first campus mass shooting at UT Austin’s tower, right? Seventeen dead. Thirty-two wounded.
  • They took every shooting at a workplace, school, or place of worship since 1996.
• INTERVIEWS:
  • They interviewed the parents, siblings, spouses, childhood friends, friends, co-workers, and teachers of 180 shooters.
  • They interviewed five mass shooters in prison.
  • And, they talked to some people who had planned, but didn’t execute, mass shootings.

Here’s a summary of their findings:

THE PATH: There seems to be four ingredients to the making of a mass shooter:

1. Early childhood trauma: physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, parental suicide, extreme bullying. Some kind of early trauma has happened.
2. A dysfunctional reaction: self-loathing, isolation, hopelessness, and despair. Rejection by peers.
3. A crisis point: A straw breaks the camel’s toe and now the kid is acting differently.
4. Suicide attempts: Sometimes. But the self-loathing that drives suicides begins to be externalized and focused on a group. They’re looking for someone to blame for their grievances.

SUICIDES: Mass shootings are suicides. As stated in the forensic psychology analysis of the Atlanta mass shooting, there is a thin line separating suicide and homicide. The mass shooting is a suicide that’s decided to take other people with them. They’re hoping that the good guy with the gun takes them out. It’s the goal.

THEY COME IN WAVES: It’s not your imagination, mass shootings tend to cluster. It’s like a contagion. One monkey gets a good idea, all the other monkeys see it, and suddenly everybody wants to go amass shooting. Given the amount of violence that has been primed in our society, expect things to get worse before they get better. It’s almost as if SCOTUS and other conservative elites want violence and chaos to be occurring. Hunh, go figure.

NEITHER NOR: There is no one solution, but it isn’t either or, either. It isn’t address guns or mental health; it is address guns and mental health.

• Single most effective prevention: Gun lockers and trigger guards. Storing guns safely is the single most effective way of decreasing gun injury and death rates. That extra step helps people cool off and change their minds. It pre
• Effective mental health check-ins: Monitoring the mental health of those around you and being able to intervene effectively helps prevent problems from arising and getting out of hand. We need to invest in providing mental health services and linking people up with them. Training people who work in schools and other institutions in suicide prevention and basic counseling skills would go along way to filling in the gap.
• Red-flag laws: Because so many of the mass shooters had clear warnings of what was coming, you’d think someone would’ve red flagged their dumb asses and taken away their guns, but instead, we’ve made it easier for them to keep their guns. But, many states that have red flag laws don’t use them effectively. Police, teachers, and other folks need to be trained in how to use them.

Lack of Political Will or by Political Design

We’ve known for a long time what needs to get done to stop mass shootings and gun violence in our country. We lack the political will to do it. Now, it is just ridiculous. We’ve had so many and we keep doing the same stupid shit after everyone, it’s pretty clear that there is someone pretty high up in the pecking order that wants it to continue.

Someone in the Republican-conservative hierarchy wants 40,000+ Americans to die every year of violent horrible preventable gun violence. Someone wants hundreds of thousands of Americans to be traumatized by gun violence every year.

Whoever that person or those people are, they are psychopaths. These gun deaths serve a purpose for them, so we have to suffer through them. That need is to keep us divided as a nation, inflict trauma and stress on us all, and encourage mass psychosis. That purpose is to make us more easily manipulated. An

What happens every election? The Republicans trot out some racist demagoguery and whip up the racial animus in the subconscious of white suburban voters and they vote Republican by the droves like some kind of demented Pavlov and his drooling fucking dogs.

Image Attribution

“Forest Descent” by Robert Drozda is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.