Some Mass Shooting Thoughts Under the Fedora

I’m not a big fan of publishing manifesto of killers. The last thing a society that pushes fame and notoriety above all needs to do is give people desperate to feel important a platform. Alas in an instant information age where the value of clicks overwhelm all else, there is zero chance that such sober restraint would take place.


As said manifesto has been put out there two things jumped out at me right away. The first was the declaration that the we are destroying the world environmentally. For this fellow’s entire life he has been sold a bill of goods that the world had five, ten fifteen, 25 years left before we’re all doomed. There’s nothing like convincing people they have no future and nothing to lose to get them to do something horribly stupid and/or horribly wrong.


the 2nd thing of note to me was his conscious choice of a target where people were unarmed and his suggestion of others to do the same. Gun free zone like “drug free zones” are only as free of such things as those willing to follow rules make them and the people most willing to follow rules are not the ones people need protection from. Those who keep insisting on maintaining “gun free zones” are simply managing game preserves for killers.


We don’t have a lot of details on the 2nd shooting spree in Ohio other than it was fortunate that police were in the area and thus were able to respond in about a minute, yet there were still multiple fatalities and over a dozen wounded. Now I don’t blame the police they can only do what they can when they get there and they did their job well. If anything illustrates the need for people to be able to carry it’s this situation. Police can only react when they get there, people already on the scene can react at once.


Finally I want people ( other than potential Democrat candidates for office who I selfishly encourage to keep spouting nonsense about gun and bullet control throughout the election season ) who are arguing for more Gun control to consider something. Until the campaign against so called “Saturday night specials” guns were ubiquitous everywhere, high schools had gun clubs and shooting teams. Being armed was very common, young people had guns, old people had guns in fact my mother regularly carried a gun.

Yet it is only in recent memory that we have seen these kind of mass shootings on a regular basis, particularly from young people. People who as Stacy McCain put it:

“are succumbing to despair and rage, believing their lives are worthless, without meaning or purpose. Seeing no hope for their own future as individuals, they project their nihilistic sense of doom onto society at large, and resort to a sick “blaze of glory” fantasy”

Stacy McCain Two Mass Shootings in 14 hours. Thoughts on the Gamification of Terror

So that raises a rather obvious question:

If GUNS are the problem, why were we not seeing shootings like this regularly in my youth? What is the cultural difference a cultural difference which has taken two generations to completely work it’s way through society through film, TV and our schools that has so changed the population that might cause our youth to have such a callous attitude toward the value of life, not only their own but of others?