Mass Shootings

[anvi]

I understand your point, angus.  Sorry for my smart-ass reply, maybe without the smart.  Anyway, I certainly agree that both being desensitized and over-indulgence in empathy can incapacitate us, make us unable to help others.  Bertrand Russell always used an example that stuck me as Buddhist-flavored in a way.  He pointed out that sympathy unaided by knowledge could prompt people to do things like call immediately for a village mass when the plague broke out in some area, only causing the plague to spread that much faster, while knowledge without wisdom could cause things like WWI.  Well, WWI was caused by lots of stupidity too, but the point stands.  Empathy by itself ain't enough, and too much of it can be quite counter-productive.  The magical balance between them that can empower people to really help one another is that elusive thing.

[angus]

But what do we do?  You can't very well have all young men report for psychiatric evaluation and then assign them certain liberties, and deny them others, based on those evaluations.  First, that would be extremely expensive.  Second, and more importantly, that would violate the principle of equal treatment under the law.  What could have prevented this bizarre case whereby some 20-something lunatic went on a killing spree targeting women just because he wasn't getting laid?  Short of fundamentally changing our outlook on fundamental human rights, I can't see what might have prevented it.

[anvi]

Not all tragedies like this can be prevented, of course.  And while better mental-health practices would generally be desirable in the U.S., it seems to me that 1.) if anything, this kid was getting over-indulged and 2.) in my own experience with therapists, I sometimes have felt that they actually encourage people to dwell on their own preoccupations rather than be more attentive to those around them.  I don't know that either of these was the case in this instance at all.  In any case, I think it's probably folly in the end to hope that we can nurture 300 million plus people enough to prevent them from doing crazy things.  I think it's probably more reliable to regulate gun ownership for everyone.  I don't know enough about the subject to say exactly how, though, and I won't pretend that I do.  But even if we had more sensible regulation, violence in our society has lots of causes, some historical, some social, some economic, some personal, some caused by extreme forms of illness, and they differ in varying degrees in every case.  The more we go round and round in circles in search of the right answers, the right incentives and so forth, the more many of us do get desensitized as these things keep happening.  I just meant to say that increasing desensitization will also only make the problem worse, more pervasive, and we'll only be able to stay that way until, one terrible day, it hits closer to us.  Intuitively, it makes more sense to me to keep the most deadly weapons under lock and key than our compassion for one another under lock and key.  But I don't have the answers on this one.  People more knowledgable than I am about it need to have a real, prolonged discussion about it without accusing one another of inhumanity and treason.  What do we do?  Engaging more and not less has to be where it starts.

[angus]

increasing desensitization will also only make the problem worse

I agree.  It is becoming so frequent, though, that it's hard to be shocked anymore.  I think that was the point that Gramps was making.

I think we should be careful about how we engage.  I can tell from your post that you do as well.  This is a tricky issue.  I was having a conversation tonight in the Jacuzzi with a retired teacher from a local Catholic high school about this sort of thing.  He was interesting because he had watch teen-agers for the last 40 years.  He was convinced that the prevalence of violence in videogames and movies are a big part of the problem.  Yeah, that's the standard old guy answer, but I think that he's making a good point.  If you grow up learning how to shoot people virtually, then maybe it's not a big stretch to think you can do it for real.  On the other hand, millions of kids play games and watch R-movies every day and they don't go nuts and start shooting people.

[anvi]

Yeah, I don't know about the movies and video games argument.  There may be some cases in which watching violent movies or video games increases the likelihood, the psychological ease, with which people act violently toward others.  I just gravely doubt even in those cases that it's the major or inciting cause.  What percentage of people who have watched lots of violent films or even played violent video games have committed violent crimes?  I don't know if there is such a thing as a reliable empirical answer to that question, but whatever the number is, it probably falls far short of establishing correlation.  That means that most people who watch violent films or play violent games can easily resist turning to violence against others.  Hell, I played lots of shoot-em-dead video games at arcades and on Atari when i was a kid, and for a long time I was a huge boxing and martial arts fan too, and I have no criminal record.  All that being accepted, there are probably innumerably better things a kid can do with their time than indulging in lots--not none, but not lots--of violent entertainment--even if it doesn't make one a murderer, it probably almost never helps one improve one's outlook on life.  But another thing that occurred to me today was how much of a gender issue this may be too.  How many mass shootings in the past two decades have been perpetrated by women?  I ask because I don't know the number.  It might not be zero, but I guess it's pretty rare. 

[angus]

it probably almost never helps one improve one's outlook on life. 

Maybe, but it has been suggested that playing violent games can make you smarter.  In 2010, Lorenza Colzato of Leiden Universiteit in the Netherlands published a study which presented evidence that violent video games like "Call of Duty" and "Resident Evil" cause significantly increased performance on certain tests.  I remember that my son happened to read that in the little American Airlines magazine in the seat pocket on a flight back from Mexico.  He was 5 years old at the time, and became very excited to tell us about it.  I could see the link.  My wife would have none of it.  Since then, many other studies have corroborated these findings.

As for mass-murdering females, they are few and far between.  According to Mother Jones, of the 62 mass shootings--defined as four or more killed in a single episode--in the US since 1980, only one has been perpetrated by females.  The rest were male shooters, among whom 75% were white.  There's quite a bit written about the differences between males and females, but basically the pseudocommando ego is a manifestation of maleness.  This goes back thousands, if not tens of thousands of years, in our species.  I mentioned this phenomenon in the "gender abortion" thread as well.  Males are more vulnerable to slights and challenges precisely because boys are taught from a young age that successful males exert social dominance, achieve a high social status, command respect, and demonstrate authority.  Kill the mammoth first and you become the alpha hunter.  Become the alpha hunter and all men want to be like you, all women want to be with you.  This generally becomes a serious problem when males so outnumber females that poor males with few prospects can't find a mate, which is precisely why we ought to think about public policy with regards to sex selection of babies.  I concluded that this would not be a big problem in the US, but I'm really not an expert in that field. 

Even putting aside social issues issues like sex selection of our offspring, when we remember that men are also taught to value economic independence and sexual success we can see why those men who have failed in these aspects of manliness might become marginalized.  Granted, most men who become marginalized do not go on killing sprees, but when you combine that with the culture of death and the glorification of killing in movies and games as well as easy access to weapons, it isn't hard to understand why the killing happens.

The female construct, on the other hand, is nurturing.  To be sure there are feminine failures as well.  Halfway houses are full of them, but because of the peculiarities of womanliness, the failed woman generally harms only herself (and her children, if she has any) when she becomes marginalized.  This is probably an equally important problem, but because its effects are subtle, and because they don't show up as quickly, we think we can ignore them.

Ha!  that's my stab at uninformed pop psychology 101. 

[traininthedistance]

I had become somewhat desensitized to them... but this one actually affected me a lot, for several reasons.