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It may have been a factor in a few cases, but I think people are being called out there for blaming a CIA program for school shootings rather than the woeful la

It may have been a factor in a few cases, but I think people are being called out there for blaming a CIA program for school shootings rather than the woeful lack of mental health care and easy access to guns.

detrites 3y ago
> It may have been a factor in a few cases This is not something to casually dismiss.
logicchains 3y ago
>rather than the woeful lack of mental health care and easy access to guns Easy access to guns and lack of mental health care has been a thing in the US for over a century, but curiously mass shootings only started happening a few decades ago, so maybe something else is the cause? Interestingly mass shootings started happening around the time that certain psychiatric medications came into widespread usage, medications for which homicidal ideation is a know but very rare side effect. It makes sense that even if a side effect is super rare, when millions of people start taking the drug you'd expect the rare effect to happen on a regular basis.
- _kbh_ 3y ago
  > Easy access to guns and lack of mental health care has been a thing in the US for over a century, but curiously mass shootings only started happening a few decades ago, so maybe something else is the cause? Interestingly mass shootings started happening around the time that certain psychiatric medications came into widespread usage, medications for which homicidal ideation is a know but very rare side effect. It makes sense that even if a side effect is super rare, when millions of people start taking the drug you'd expect the rare effect to happen on a regular basis. Except that these drugs are likely used in lots of places in the world, and that large school shootings often is a uniquely American concept.
  - retrac 3y ago
    Not to the same degree. The United States is a major outlier on this. Psychiatric medication, in general, are prescribed at much higher rates than in most other wealthy countries. And not by like 50% more, but like two times or even ten times more, depending on the drug class. In particular, putting children on antidepressants, benzodiazepines, antipsychotics, or stimulants is much less common in most places. For example, of children under 19 in 2012, about 0.5% of Dutch or German children were prescribed antidepressants, while it's 1.6% of American children: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/293642487_Trends_and_patterns_of_antidepressant_use_in_children_and_adolescents_from_five_western_countries_2005-2012 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/293642487_Trends_an... Similarly, among the general population, Americans use some 3x as much benzodiazepines per capita as Canadians. And the Canadians are drug crazed compared to the Australians, who use about half what the Canadians do.
- eggy 3y ago
  Well, California leads the pack on mass school shootings with the toughest gun laws around, and it is the 28th lowest in rank in mental health ranking in 2022 per this reference which weighs 15 factors: https://mhanational.org/issues/2022/ranking-states https://mhanational.org/issues/2022/ranking-states Interestingly, a small percentage of violent crime is directly attributed to mental health issues. Most self harm. The definition of "mass shooting" leads to discrepancies like 20 vs. 600 for 2020 depending on which agencies definition is used. By number it looks bad for the US even if per capita compared to other countries. But more than half of all gun deaths in the US are suicides, and mass shootings are less than 0.5 or 0.2 percent of all homicides depending on which span of years you use. I am a less of a gun control advocate than one for mental health access and prophylactic measures. Gun control is a red herring. The genie is out of the bottle. Bad people will procure guns or make them from parts or scratch. Not that hard really given the demand and money available to do it by drug cartels and other criminal organizations. Politicians keep saying "Guns are the number one killer of kids in the US". Based on a NEJM study that defines "kids" as 1 to 19 years of age. 18 and 19-year-olds are adults. Most deaths involving guns occur in the 17 to 19-year-old span are typically gang related. It also includes suicides ("In 2021, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (26,328), while 43% were murders (20,958), according to the CDC.") and citizens defending themselves with guns and being successful at it along with the police shootings in self defense. Suicides still occur in relatively large numbers in countries with few guns in the hands of their citizens. They just use another method. As the PSA from the 70s stated, "Matches don't start forest fires. People do." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNEW4Ha040w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNEW4Ha040w) And I would add "Guns don't kill people. People do."
  - ttyprintk 3y ago
    That the definition changes only affects arguments about the type of gun. Low-count definitions correlate assault-style rifles that California has tried to ban. High-count definitions correlate with handguns. You started with school shootings, singling out California. Texas is by far more prone to mass shootings and I wager statistically equal to California per-capita. Hawaii has nearly-as-strict gun laws as California but incomparably lower violence by any measure. It’s a better example of your argument. The linked mental health web site ranks it at 7. On the other hand, the death toll in undisputed mass shootings has skyrocketed since the defeat of the assault weapons ban.
- Geezus_42 3y ago
  You mean to say they started a few decades ago, around the time actual high quality guns began hitting mass adoption in the US? Sure, we've always had guns, but it wasn't until after WW2 that actually decent quality guns began filtering down to the masses. Within a couple decades most gun owners had significantly higher quality arms than would have been available just a couple decades before.
  - jibe 3y ago
    WW2 ended 77 years ago. Surplus guns like the M1 carbine (“assault rifle” equivalent) were available mail order, no background check, for $20. A lot of time and other things changed in culture before mass shootings and crime took off. Television for one, deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, drug culture, immigration reform, Vietnam war. If you believe that latent school shooting desire was always present, and just lacked a tool, you’d probably see it manifest in some way.
- nemo44x 3y ago
  Mental health care, well I’d use a different word than “care”, but the institution system took a lot of crazies off the street. It had a lot of other issues too but it may be time to revisit it instead of just passing out pills to everyone. As for why we see more mass shootings today I think you need to consider that until the late 90s a shooter wouldn’t get publicity outside of their locale. So copycat shootings didn’t occur. On top of that the insane amount of psychoactive pills we prescribe. And no way to get people off the street early via institutions. Lastly a general decay in our society, family structures, and communities.
- retrac 3y ago
  > mass shootings only started happening a few decades ago There are instances of people running amok with firearms in the early 20th and 19th centuries: > On August 13, 1903 [in Winfield, Kansas], 30-year-old Gilbert Twigg, armed with a 12-gauge double-barrelled shotgun, opened fire at a concert, killing six people and wounding at least 25, before killing himself. Three others died in hospitals afterward. If we allow for clubs and knives alongside firearms, I'm fairly sure the phenomenon has happened since the beginning of time. It was certainly rarer in the past. High-powered firearms were less common. And I think the very idea was simply less common. I suspect it's a mimetic virus, basically, a type of social contagion. They need to be an angry sociopath to begin with. And then they need the idea planted in their head. And it needs to be re-enforced repeatedly, a chain of thought that becomes inhabited in their minds, until it becomes realized. The pattern of media coverage, outrage, and social modification in response (metal detectors in schools, etc.) is doing that re-enforcement. A shooter's face will be in the media, they will be the most hated person in their immediate community for the rest of living memory, and they will be the most hated figure nationally for about 15 minutes. The victim community might even be so terrified as to modify the law and policies at schools because of it. If there's any emotion that could sum up the motivation for the average spree killing, it's a generalized revenge on society. Those reactions are rewarding to someone who is seeking revenge; they made their impact.
- dangitnotagain 3y ago
  Vegas shooting was done by a(presumably fired) contractor who ran a CIA funded safe house on American soil. They used special munitions only government agencies can buy. Before the shooting it was accounted (and reported in papers) a homeless woman was shouting (paraphrased) “they’re going to shoot you, you’re all going to die!” The man who did the shooting was a white terrorist and these run government contracted “safe houses” all over America.
  - tru3_power 3y ago
    Do you have any sources to back this up?
    - dangitnotagain 3y ago
      The woman and the munitions (and the white guy) were all described in various news sources. The “civilian” run CIA contracted safe houses you may take with grains of salt, yet this is how things have been done for a long while. The CIA actually lost some of their best operatives, assassinated on US soil by this thought control power coup. Also their navy seals, marine super soldiers, and countless others (who will go on uncounted.) Whitemanistan America has been the most dangerous place in the world for lawful military assets over the last 6 years.
      - brookst 3y ago
        So that’s a “no” on sources, then?
      - giardini 3y ago
        Please continue.
  - giardini 3y ago
    What "special munitions"? Stephen Paddock used a "bump stock" on otherwise stock off-the-shelf rifles. The same could be done with almost any semiautomatic rifle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCFQhh0Q1Ws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCFQhh0Q1Ws
- bart_spoon 3y ago
  Mass shootings did not only start happening a few decades ago. The Texas University shooting occurred in '66. That seems to line up with a timeline of surplus cheap, military grade firearms trickling into society.
  - adamrezich 3y ago
    when my my mom went to the same high school I did, 30 years earlier (70s), kids would leave hunting rifles and shotguns in racks in their unlocked pickup trucks in the school parking lot and nobody gave a shit or felt threatened at all whatsoever. nobody stole these guns and used them to commit crimes, at the school or elsewhere.
- Aunche 3y ago
  I'm referencing times that I wasn't a part of, but my impression was that mass shootings weren't so popularized until Columbine. Previously, mass shootings were simply not something that crossed people's minds as something they could do. I suspect that now it's "trendy" for mentally deranged people to shoot up a building, but it will eventually pass, just like how there used to be a lot of serial killers in the 80s.
School-Cotton 3y ago
There are lots of countries with easy access to guns and virtually no public access to healthcare. The US is just the only rich country that meets that description. But the US is the only country, rich or not, that regularly experiences school mass shootings. So there must be some other factors at play (no I don’t think it’s MKULTRA).
- heresie-dabord 3y ago
  > the US is the only country, rich or not, that regularly experiences school mass shootings. So there must be some other factors at play A few other sociological factors to consider given that the phenomenon of school shootings in the US has established itself in the past 50 years.[1] The US population has doubled since 1950[2]; this means an increase in the (unaddressed) need for adequate health care and especially mental health care. Domestic US gun business has grown its profits in this period of population growth. And, of course, the US is one of the few countries with a constitutional guarantee to protect its gun business, which results in political gamesmanship in a time of profits, instead of real social policy. [1][a] _ https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Number-of-mass-school-shootings-and-deaths-from-1940-early-2018_fig2_324617091 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Number-of-mass-school-sh... [1][b] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(before_2000) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th... [1][c] _ https://www.chds.us/sssc/data-map/ https://www.chds.us/sssc/data-map/ [2] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...
some_random 3y ago
Did you really just write "It's plausible that some three letter agency is operating programs to compel citizens to commit mass killings, but let's talking about My Thing because it's more important"?

detrites 3y ago

> It may have been a factor in a few cases This is not something to casually dismiss.

logicchains 3y ago

>rather than the woeful lack of mental health care and easy access to guns Easy access to guns and lack of mental health care has been a thing in the US for over a century, but curiously mass shootings only started happening a few decades ago, so maybe something else is the cause? Interestingly mass shootings started happening around the time that certain psychiatric medications came into widespread usage, medications for which homicidal ideation is a know but very rare side effect. It makes sense that even if a side effect is super rare, when millions of people start taking the drug you'd expect the rare effect to happen on a regular basis.

_kbh_ 3y ago
> Easy access to guns and lack of mental health care has been a thing in the US for over a century, but curiously mass shootings only started happening a few decades ago, so maybe something else is the cause? Interestingly mass shootings started happening around the time that certain psychiatric medications came into widespread usage, medications for which homicidal ideation is a know but very rare side effect. It makes sense that even if a side effect is super rare, when millions of people start taking the drug you'd expect the rare effect to happen on a regular basis. Except that these drugs are likely used in lots of places in the world, and that large school shootings often is a uniquely American concept.
- retrac 3y ago
  Not to the same degree. The United States is a major outlier on this. Psychiatric medication, in general, are prescribed at much higher rates than in most other wealthy countries. And not by like 50% more, but like two times or even ten times more, depending on the drug class. In particular, putting children on antidepressants, benzodiazepines, antipsychotics, or stimulants is much less common in most places. For example, of children under 19 in 2012, about 0.5% of Dutch or German children were prescribed antidepressants, while it's 1.6% of American children: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/293642487_Trends_and_patterns_of_antidepressant_use_in_children_and_adolescents_from_five_western_countries_2005-2012 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/293642487_Trends_an... Similarly, among the general population, Americans use some 3x as much benzodiazepines per capita as Canadians. And the Canadians are drug crazed compared to the Australians, who use about half what the Canadians do.
eggy 3y ago
Well, California leads the pack on mass school shootings with the toughest gun laws around, and it is the 28th lowest in rank in mental health ranking in 2022 per this reference which weighs 15 factors: https://mhanational.org/issues/2022/ranking-states https://mhanational.org/issues/2022/ranking-states Interestingly, a small percentage of violent crime is directly attributed to mental health issues. Most self harm. The definition of "mass shooting" leads to discrepancies like 20 vs. 600 for 2020 depending on which agencies definition is used. By number it looks bad for the US even if per capita compared to other countries. But more than half of all gun deaths in the US are suicides, and mass shootings are less than 0.5 or 0.2 percent of all homicides depending on which span of years you use. I am a less of a gun control advocate than one for mental health access and prophylactic measures. Gun control is a red herring. The genie is out of the bottle. Bad people will procure guns or make them from parts or scratch. Not that hard really given the demand and money available to do it by drug cartels and other criminal organizations. Politicians keep saying "Guns are the number one killer of kids in the US". Based on a NEJM study that defines "kids" as 1 to 19 years of age. 18 and 19-year-olds are adults. Most deaths involving guns occur in the 17 to 19-year-old span are typically gang related. It also includes suicides ("In 2021, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (26,328), while 43% were murders (20,958), according to the CDC.") and citizens defending themselves with guns and being successful at it along with the police shootings in self defense. Suicides still occur in relatively large numbers in countries with few guns in the hands of their citizens. They just use another method. As the PSA from the 70s stated, "Matches don't start forest fires. People do." (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNEW4Ha040w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNEW4Ha040w) And I would add "Guns don't kill people. People do."
- ttyprintk 3y ago
  That the definition changes only affects arguments about the type of gun. Low-count definitions correlate assault-style rifles that California has tried to ban. High-count definitions correlate with handguns. You started with school shootings, singling out California. Texas is by far more prone to mass shootings and I wager statistically equal to California per-capita. Hawaii has nearly-as-strict gun laws as California but incomparably lower violence by any measure. It’s a better example of your argument. The linked mental health web site ranks it at 7. On the other hand, the death toll in undisputed mass shootings has skyrocketed since the defeat of the assault weapons ban.
Geezus_42 3y ago
You mean to say they started a few decades ago, around the time actual high quality guns began hitting mass adoption in the US? Sure, we've always had guns, but it wasn't until after WW2 that actually decent quality guns began filtering down to the masses. Within a couple decades most gun owners had significantly higher quality arms than would have been available just a couple decades before.
- jibe 3y ago
  WW2 ended 77 years ago. Surplus guns like the M1 carbine (“assault rifle” equivalent) were available mail order, no background check, for $20. A lot of time and other things changed in culture before mass shootings and crime took off. Television for one, deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, drug culture, immigration reform, Vietnam war. If you believe that latent school shooting desire was always present, and just lacked a tool, you’d probably see it manifest in some way.
nemo44x 3y ago
Mental health care, well I’d use a different word than “care”, but the institution system took a lot of crazies off the street. It had a lot of other issues too but it may be time to revisit it instead of just passing out pills to everyone. As for why we see more mass shootings today I think you need to consider that until the late 90s a shooter wouldn’t get publicity outside of their locale. So copycat shootings didn’t occur. On top of that the insane amount of psychoactive pills we prescribe. And no way to get people off the street early via institutions. Lastly a general decay in our society, family structures, and communities.
retrac 3y ago
> mass shootings only started happening a few decades ago There are instances of people running amok with firearms in the early 20th and 19th centuries: > On August 13, 1903 [in Winfield, Kansas], 30-year-old Gilbert Twigg, armed with a 12-gauge double-barrelled shotgun, opened fire at a concert, killing six people and wounding at least 25, before killing himself. Three others died in hospitals afterward. If we allow for clubs and knives alongside firearms, I'm fairly sure the phenomenon has happened since the beginning of time. It was certainly rarer in the past. High-powered firearms were less common. And I think the very idea was simply less common. I suspect it's a mimetic virus, basically, a type of social contagion. They need to be an angry sociopath to begin with. And then they need the idea planted in their head. And it needs to be re-enforced repeatedly, a chain of thought that becomes inhabited in their minds, until it becomes realized. The pattern of media coverage, outrage, and social modification in response (metal detectors in schools, etc.) is doing that re-enforcement. A shooter's face will be in the media, they will be the most hated person in their immediate community for the rest of living memory, and they will be the most hated figure nationally for about 15 minutes. The victim community might even be so terrified as to modify the law and policies at schools because of it. If there's any emotion that could sum up the motivation for the average spree killing, it's a generalized revenge on society. Those reactions are rewarding to someone who is seeking revenge; they made their impact.
dangitnotagain 3y ago
Vegas shooting was done by a(presumably fired) contractor who ran a CIA funded safe house on American soil. They used special munitions only government agencies can buy. Before the shooting it was accounted (and reported in papers) a homeless woman was shouting (paraphrased) “they’re going to shoot you, you’re all going to die!” The man who did the shooting was a white terrorist and these run government contracted “safe houses” all over America.
- tru3_power 3y ago
  Do you have any sources to back this up?
  - dangitnotagain 3y ago
    The woman and the munitions (and the white guy) were all described in various news sources. The “civilian” run CIA contracted safe houses you may take with grains of salt, yet this is how things have been done for a long while. The CIA actually lost some of their best operatives, assassinated on US soil by this thought control power coup. Also their navy seals, marine super soldiers, and countless others (who will go on uncounted.) Whitemanistan America has been the most dangerous place in the world for lawful military assets over the last 6 years.
    - brookst 3y ago
      So that’s a “no” on sources, then?
    - giardini 3y ago
      Please continue.
- giardini 3y ago
  What "special munitions"? Stephen Paddock used a "bump stock" on otherwise stock off-the-shelf rifles. The same could be done with almost any semiautomatic rifle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCFQhh0Q1Ws https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCFQhh0Q1Ws
bart_spoon 3y ago
Mass shootings did not only start happening a few decades ago. The Texas University shooting occurred in '66. That seems to line up with a timeline of surplus cheap, military grade firearms trickling into society.
- adamrezich 3y ago
  when my my mom went to the same high school I did, 30 years earlier (70s), kids would leave hunting rifles and shotguns in racks in their unlocked pickup trucks in the school parking lot and nobody gave a shit or felt threatened at all whatsoever. nobody stole these guns and used them to commit crimes, at the school or elsewhere.
Aunche 3y ago
I'm referencing times that I wasn't a part of, but my impression was that mass shootings weren't so popularized until Columbine. Previously, mass shootings were simply not something that crossed people's minds as something they could do. I suspect that now it's "trendy" for mentally deranged people to shoot up a building, but it will eventually pass, just like how there used to be a lot of serial killers in the 80s.

School-Cotton 3y ago

There are lots of countries with easy access to guns and virtually no public access to healthcare. The US is just the only rich country that meets that description. But the US is the only country, rich or not, that regularly experiences school mass shootings. So there must be some other factors at play (no I don’t think it’s MKULTRA).

heresie-dabord 3y ago
> the US is the only country, rich or not, that regularly experiences school mass shootings. So there must be some other factors at play A few other sociological factors to consider given that the phenomenon of school shootings in the US has established itself in the past 50 years.[1] The US population has doubled since 1950[2]; this means an increase in the (unaddressed) need for adequate health care and especially mental health care. Domestic US gun business has grown its profits in this period of population growth. And, of course, the US is one of the few countries with a constitutional guarantee to protect its gun business, which results in political gamesmanship in a time of profits, instead of real social policy. [1][a] _ https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Number-of-mass-school-shootings-and-deaths-from-1940-early-2018_fig2_324617091 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Number-of-mass-school-sh... [1][b] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(before_2000) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th... [1][c] _ https://www.chds.us/sssc/data-map/ https://www.chds.us/sssc/data-map/ [2] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...

some_random 3y ago

Did you really just write "It's plausible that some three letter agency is operating programs to compel citizens to commit mass killings, but let's talking about My Thing because it's more important"?