but what REALLY needs to be done is that Americans need to be taught that you do not have tantrums and resort to violence when you do not like the way things are going. I truly believe it is this one thing that results in so much more gun violence here even though other countries have similar gun ownership numbers. It's a weird cultural thing.

I recall some years ago reading an interesting discussion of the kind of dynamic involved. In that case it was in the context of contrasting this type of mass shooting with the "urban gun violence" attributed mostly to black inner city youth. The argument came down to entitlement - that you see this kind of shooting from someone raised with an expectation that the world owes them something and so when they are not the rich happy successful whatever they lash out at the world.

The context of that argument was why you never see this specific kind of thing being perpetrated by poor black kids - because they never have that expectation and entitlement in the first place. It's almost always white suburban kids.

That was a long time ago and I've forgotten the details, but it makes a certain intuitive sense to me.

The study I just cited, brenda, supports that reading.

“The pseudocommando is a type of mass murderer who kills in public during the daytime, plans his offense well in advance, and comes prepared with a powerful arsenal of weapons. He has no escape planned and expects to be killed during the incident. Research suggests that the pseudocommando is driven by strong feelings of anger and resentment, flowing from beliefs about being persecuted or grossly mistreated. He views himself as carrying out a highly personal agenda of payback. It is argued that revenge fantasies become the last refuge for the pseudocommando’s mortally wounded self-esteem and ultimately enable him to commit mass murder-suicide.” (Journal of American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law, March 2010)

Interesting. This theory makes more sense to me wrt teenagers killing fellow classmates that they feel have wronged them in some way, but to take out a classroom of little kids because you're angry at your parents? I cannot comprehend that.

Yup.

Oof. A former coworker just posted on FB - her son is in the elementary school a mile from this one. I can't imagine.

I find "evil" to be loaded in a different way; trending towards the cosmic/mystical/supernatural, but that's just my opinion.

wrod.

The problem I have with both "evil" and "mental health control (ugh)" in this context is that both basically serve to absolve us from taking a hard look at ourselves. They close off the possiblity that there are actual changes we could make that could reduce the chances of things like this happpening.

You can't eradicate either one from the world. But we (broadest possble we) seem to accept that we also can't influence how those things manifest, which is not at all the same thing.

These rampages aren't coming from people who are schizophrenic or having a psychotic break. And they're not really indicative of sociopathy (though there's obviously some lack of empathy). I'm pretty sure the profile would be what's classed as a Personality Disorder.

But tracing it and looking for at-risk life changes (as one journal put it: "Methods most prominently used include firearms by males who have experienced challenging setbacks in important social, familial and vocational domains.") brings up other privacy issues.

I wouldn't want to fall onto a watchlist because I was going through a divorce.

On a broader cultural level, I do think there's a kind of rot and sickness in the American sense of entitlement. When it's thwarted it seems to bring on the rage and rampage.

Lots of people are that, especially now, hopefully they aren't all looking for a "Second Amendment remedy."

Interesting.

UPDATE: NBC and CNN have retracted the identification of Ryan Lanza as the name of gunman of the Newtown school massacre. The New York Post and NBC's Pete Williams have reported it could be Lanza's brother, Adam, 20.

That might explain some of the confusion about (a) whether the shooter was 20 or 24, or (b) why there were initial reports of two shooters.

Yeesh.