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Laura Terrell's avatar

"Entire message boards and online sites are dedicated to lionizing mass- and school-shooters as heroes, holding them up in the pantheon of other suicide shooters as people who are owning the libs (Anders Breivik), killing Blacks (Buffalo supermarket, Dylan Roof) or Jews (Tree of Life Synagogue), all while making an unmistakable political statement (the Texas “RWDS” shooter, along with all of the above)."

This is why we need to follow the lead of New Zealand after their mass shooting and black out these individuals in the media. The guns are of course the main problem but the media is also a substantial part of it, too. It incentivizes this crap. Now people worship mass shooters the way serial killers were.

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Jeoffry Gordon, MD, MPH's avatar

This essay, as usual, is spot on. The polarization of Americans is not just functionally the same as the Muslims vs the Hindus, or the Israelis vs the Palestinians, or the Serbs vs the Croats, or the Taliban vs the Afghanis, it is becoming politically identical. What is different is our establishment (government, media and all) keep describing the events as the result of individual action (mental illness). There will be no mitigation without recognition.

Whatever happened to the basic function of ANY government is to have a monopoly of violence?

Finally you cite Peterson and Densley whose parsing of the data gives us great insights. Like most analysts you overlook a deeper, more political truth they uncovered: 73% of studied mass shooters were the victims of child abuse trauma. The epidemic of child maltreatment reflects a deep, deep failure of our society in its basic responsibilities.

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