The lead caption says it best: To stop the spectacle of mass killings, we need to keep them from being spectacles.
What's stupid about all this, is most of them aren't even spectacles; they are almost completely parlayed into major events by the reporting media. I'm sorry, a double murder is not national news, and yet, every time it is outside a domicile it is reported as a mass shooting. A classmate of mine and his sister were murdered by a jealous ex just off campus in an apartment; were that across the street in a Texas A&M food court, it'd be the massacre of the decade. It was a terrible outrage, but ultimately of a limited scale and scope, and needed no action beyond ensuring the murderer would be put to justice and the grief-stricken comforted. The exaggerative reporting has gotten to the point that I'd forgotten the threshold for mass-shooting is four victim fatalities; I'd bet a poll of these stories would show the words "mass shooting" and "Newtown" spike at 3 casualites, fatal or no, and including the shooter (so long as it is outside a home or ghetto).
Anyone remember how the Empire State Building murder (I
refuse to call it a "shooting" due to the new-found connotation with mass-murder) was reported as an active shooting, when it was a single guy, with a single personal beef, with a single other victim, whom he killed, and them left the scene with intent to escape? But because it was broad daylight outdoors, we were supposed to think it was a terrorist act. The panicked cops were a larger demonstrable risk to the general public than the murderer ever was (hence they shot/grazed/spalled 8 of them)
The people who commit these types of shootings are pathetic, insecure losers looking for their 15 minutes of fame.
Do you really think an Autistic shut-in man-child like the Newtown shooter was capable of such an extroverted motive? It's plain he was sought to destroy his mother and everything he thought she valued once he learned she was to have him committed. These crimes are hard to predict precisely because they are very diverse in cause, though similar in effect. Most of these guys are losers as a direct symptom of their having severe problems in their thought processes which preclude them having normal/successful interactions with others.
Gun free zones are typically put into place as a misguided attempt to safeguard precious/vulnerable human life; these killers are out to inflict as much pain on 'whomever' as possible, so they will seek out places with that which we hold most dear. Schools/malls would probably be targeted whether guards, CCWs, or barbed wire are there to deter them or not.
TCB
