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Don’t Jump to Conclusions About the Killer

225 points by maayank 14y ago

japhyr 14y ago
I cringe every time I hear perpetrators of mass shootings described as "evil". Evil implies a presence of something bad. It's an easy label that allows people to hate the perpetrator. It's much more accurate to describe the perpetrators as cold, empty, detached. That is frightening, because there is no hope of reasoning or bargaining with someone who is truly detached from emotion. There is no such thing as evil. I appreciate this reporter for offering a more accurate picture of who these perpetrators really are.
- corin_ 14y ago
  > "There is no such thing as evil." Surely that depends on your definition of the word, and by most if not all definitions it definitely is possible to be evil. Maybe nobody can be pure evil, as in nothing but evil, but if you let that rule out calling them evil then you can equally say there's no such thing as nice, mean, clever, stupid, etc. etc. Evil (adj) 1 a : morally reprehensible : sinful, wicked b : arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct 2 a archaic : inferior b : causing discomfort or repulsion : offensive c : disagreeable 3 a : causing harm : pernicious b : marked by misfortune : unlucky (Merriam-Webster)
  - japhyr 14y ago
    Nice, mean, clever, stupid, etc. have no religious connotations. "Evil" and "sin" have heavily religious connotations, even if their etymologies are not entirely rooted in religious traditions. President Obama, who used the word "evil" this week, also said this was a time for "prayer and reflection". It's hard to be elected president without making these kinds of religious references. Denying the presence of evil, as the term is often used, has nothing to do with words such as stupid, clever, etc.
    - corin_ 14y ago
      As an atheist I don't base my use of words around what is believed in religions, I go by dictionaries.
- lusr 14y ago
  > It's much more accurate to describe the perpetrators as cold, empty, detached. The article states that, according to the Secret Service, 78% of these school shooters are NOT cold, empty, detached (which would describe socio/psychopaths). Instead, they are severely depressed individuals. If you haven't ever been severely depressed (I have) it's probably quite difficult to understand, but these are people whose minds are completely, utterly, passionately and absolutely wound up inside, anxious and stressed about perceived incurable flaws in their character and the apparently unresolvable frustration, despair, resentment and anger those beliefs generate towards themselves - and in these very sad cases, towards others. On the outside they can appear completely normal and even happy (I went to great lengths to hide my inner turmoil during my depression); don't mistake that for what is going on on the inside. "Depression", sadly, is a dirty word in society. Unfortunately this feeds into and reinforces the exact set of dysfunctional beliefs that drive the severely depressed individual towards, and sometimes over, the edge. Imagine feeling like a broken human, only to have society reinforce that depression means you're broken; it creates a secondary, even more powerful disturbance in your mind. This causes the depressed to withdraw even further, which is even worse for a depressed individual (notice how all of these people withdraw from normal activities before the shootings), and pretty much guarantees a horrible end.
  - _delirium 14y ago
    If anything, they seem less detached than many "normal" murderers who are for some reason less often seen as "evil". There are many people in the US who have killed multiple people, but in separate individual killings, which requires being able to treat killing as something you're able to do repeatedly, perhaps even over the course of years. Particularly common in organized crime or in drug gangs; just becomes part of the job. That's a bit scarier to me than someone snapping in a single incident. (Scarier both in psychology of the killer, and in a fear-for-personal-safety sense: I am much more likely to be shot by a gang member than in a Columbine-style incident.)
- deleted 14y ago
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- etherael 14y ago
  > That is frightening, because there is no hope of reasoning or bargaining with someone who is truly detached from emotion. This position is strange, you think the only position from which you can reason or bargain with another person is if they are emotionally attached? I purposely try as hard as I can to live a life completely free of emotional entanglement, I think emotion is largely useless. By this measure I suppose I would be cold, empty, detached. I choose to be this way because appeals to emotion are usually weak and lacking in actual reason as support. I can't understand why anyone would look at a wrathful, violence laden action like mass murder and think that the problem is that the offender is not emotional enough.
  - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
    You cannot appeal rationally to that which has no utility function.
    - etherael 14y ago
      You think you can't have a utility function without emotional justification, I assume?
      - TeMPOraL 14y ago
        A big part of your utility function is what you care about. Caring is an emotion. There are no separate "rational" and "emotional" parts in brain; parts of your utility function manifest through what you feel.
      - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
        All justification/utility is ultimately either emotional, instinctual, or cultured.
  - lusr 14y ago
    Why do you believe emotion is useless? I cannot think of any aspects of our psychology that are useless (they evolved for a reason). Negative emotions are fundamentally indicators of a cognitive dissonance and are absolutely invaluable in maintaining a healthy system of introspection. Your profile shows you're also a programmer so here's an analogy I use internally: negative emotions are part of a monitoring system built into our brains that inform us when an assumption in our set of operating beliefs (our personality source code) has been violated. (You get angry when your beliefs about 'fairness' are violated, you feel disappointment when your beliefs about e.g. 'relationships' are violated, etc.) Positive emotions fulfil a similar role, in the opposite direction by reinforcing the value of the beliefs you've created, although negative emotions are more interesting because your response to the emotion can be extrospective ("I feel angry because that guy cut me off on the road and that violates my beliefs about fairness; I'm getting out my tire iron and teaching him the right way to do things") or they can be introspectively rational, controlled and empowering ("Should I revisit my beliefs about fairness to be more in tune with reality, where people make mistakes?"). People with dysfunctional belief systems and rigid attitudes towards their beliefs are prone to depression (i.e. their belief systems do not serve them well given reality, either through distortion or inadapation). From an evolutionary perspective, I suspect extrospective analysis was more useful ("I'm angry because the other ape has stolen my lunch, and resources are scarce, so I'm going to punch him in the face"), which explains our default, instinctive "emotional" response to emotions, but as civilization develops and the rules change, introspective responses (which encourage co-operation) are more useful (but more fraught with dangers such as depression, which is a kind of reinforcement feedback loop of negative emotional states, beliefs and poor assumptions). Nevertheless, the high value of emotions remains present. If anybody reading this finds this personal philosophy interesting, I highly recommend reading David Burns' "Feeling Good" for an exhaustive listing/discussion of emotional states and responses, and constructive ways of dealing with these experiences.
- olavk 14y ago
  Perpetrators of mass killings seem to be very much emotional, filled with anger, resentment and bitterness. I don't think you would go through the trouble of killing other people if you are detached from emotion. Why would you?
- tomjen3 14y ago
  Can we use the term 'defect', then? As in "the computer was defect, so I put in the junk heap"?
- bluekeybox 14y ago
  Cold, emptiness, and detachment is also characteristic of snowmen. Snowmen usually don't commit mass murders. There has to be some other factor, and usually that other factor is aggression of a type where you stick pins into a voodoo doll and derive pleasure from doing that. That is what Christians call evil (deriving pleasure/release from inflicting pain), and it is a pretty specific concept actually. You don't have to be Christian or even believe in supernatural to understand it. I noticed that people who claim that evil doesn't exist simply have a completely messed up (I suppose, by schooling) moral compass, and they have no idea how common that aspect of human personality is (and that it nearly always has negative consequences both for the bearer and for society at large).
  - nitrogen 14y ago
    You are reading far too much into the mindset of someone whose history we don't know. In fact, this whole thread has devolved well below the minimum standards for rational discussion, relying instead upon knee-jerk reactions and cargo cult assumptions.
    - bluekeybox 14y ago
      I wasn't reading into someone's mindset so much as trying to show that there exists a concept of evil on which most people can agree on. I like your support for standards and rational discussion, however, so peace be with you.
- joshuacc 14y ago
  "There is no such thing as evil." It's worth pointing out that one of the standard definitions of evil in the Christian tradition (since at least St. Augustine) is as a sort of privation, or lack. That is, evil isn't considered to be a thing that exists, but the lack of some good which should exist . It's somewhat analogous to a hole in a shirt. The hole is the absence of something that should be there. I find that this actually dovetails nicely with your description of the perpetrators as cold, empty and detached. (Whether this was actually the psychological state of the killers is an open question.)
  - drumdance 14y ago
    My issue with the word "evil" is that its popular use serves to distance the perpetrator from everyone else, as if he's been infected by the Devil. No doubt he's infected with something, perhaps even something that could be cured or mitigated with therapy, but it's not supernatural or part of God's mysterious plan. Similarly, I don't like the use of the word "miracle," which was used a lot during that Hudson River plane crash a few years ago. God did not intervene, as many suggested. Rather, a well-trained pilot did his job to perfection, and all thanks should go to him and the institutions that provided him with that training.
- japhyr 14y ago
  To clarify a bit, I appreciate most that this reporter is not over-simplifying these cases. In his own words, "Perpetrators of mass murder...are complicated." I don't speak in absolutes about emotion. I know most of these perpetrators have led very emotional lives. The pain they have felt is probably greater than almost everyone else's pain. But it seems to me that once they have begun to carry out their plans, they are well beyond making an emotional connection with anyone else. They have nothing left to lose, and you can't bargain with someone who has nothing left to lose.
- dinkumthinkum 14y ago
  Nonsense. Don't be fooled. Evil is the intentional causation of calamity and this incident is exactly that. No serious person is claiming "evil" has extension in and of itself. I don't see why under your view "evil" is any less a phenomenon than "cold" or "detached." I suspect it is just more in vogue to have that view.
scotty79 14y ago
I think of the murderers as having some kind of hardware bug. We have evolved special safeguard that prevents us form killing the people we live with and people we meet daily. It's crazy that we do live in proximity of other people and meet them if you think how dangerous single person can be when this safeguard fails. All the search for reasons why the person killed is little bit like creating fake narratives to kind of natural bizarre event. If person is able to intentionally kill then there's something wrong with that person and we have to deal with it. You may investigate how it came to be that this safeguard was damaged. Maybe the person underwent military training or just had a childhood equivalent to that. Most likely there is something wrong with the brain of that person that was there from the beginning or manifested during puberty or manifested as a result of shock of some sort. "What was the murderers reasons?" is the most irrelevant question of all.
- zethraeus 14y ago
  Whilst it might be accurate to describe depression's root cause as a 'hardware bug' it is a much more common bug than you seem to assume. It seems more appropriate to me to view it as a case of hardware specialized for one purpose systematically failing for another. The former is some evolutionary root, and the latter is modern society. One of the most interesting parts of the linked article is the implication that people going postal are not so different from you and me. You seem to disregard it.
  - scotty79 14y ago
    > You seem to disregard it. In a way. I think that those people are not so different from you and me. With exception to the one thing. They have the antikill safeguard damaged. Looking for the cause of murder in the things you and me may have experienced as well and not go postal is in IMHO misguided. People should not look for what caused the murder but what caused the damage to the safeguard and think up ways to detect it and maybe even correct it in advance. I don't think it's depression. Depression is whole other kind of hardware bug. And the antikill safeguard damage is also more common than you might expect. Many times a year there is a news about some guy killing his wife and children and often himself after that. It's so common that it's not even a big news. They call it extended suicide but I think in many cases that's not the right description.
kghose 14y ago
I've read about killings before, I lived through 9/11, but for some reason these killings struck me really hard. Even more than school shootings. Perhaps because I think of the cinema as sanctuary - a place of make believe where we go to escape (move over places of worship!) but mostly because I wanted to really know motivations - why did he do it? Especially when it turns out he's not a person who tortured animals as a kid etc etc. I want to know why a seemingly normal person can meticulously plan such a senseless act of destruction.
- Ygg2 14y ago
  Why is there a need to find out why? Killing spree is a lot like thunderbolt. It has no prediction why it struck, in the path it stuck. If you only want to minimize risks of future murders, then don't read/watch the news. Each time a murderer has his/her face shown, she/he is glorified in even tiniest of ways (i.e. comic book villain), with a number of murders he/she committed put in front line, number of violent copycat acts will spike.
  - corin_ 14y ago
    It's completely incorrect to say there is no explanation why it struck. Maybe it's true that it was impossible to predict, maybe it's true that we will never find out the cause, but can be 100% sure there is a cause.
    - Ygg2 14y ago
      True. There is some semantic mismatch.
arturadib 14y ago
Think outside the box. I've lived in the US for 10 years, and I follow plenty of world news. It is clear that Columbine-like shootings are (mostly) an American phenomenon. [1] So what is it so special about the US that makes this a recurring problem? Is it poor parenting, without much communication? Is it societal pressure, i.e. Mr Popular vs Mr Loser? Is it easy access to guns? Is it the disproportionate amount of media attention that these cases give to depressed folks with low self-esteem? Is it all of the above? None? I imagine severe depression happens everywhere, but there's got to be something in the US that turns depression into mass murder. I wish someone would analyze the problem from outside the box, not inside. [1] Before someone jumps the gun about international news, note that terror and drug/gang crimes are very different. They have clear, consistent motives. Columbine-like stuff is puzzling- their motives seem to be all over the place, hence why to this date experts are still trying to figure them out.
- coenhyde 14y ago
  I know American's do not like to hear this but I am of the opinion that it's easy access to guns which is the cause of these mass murders. Now that Australia has gun control, the crazy's just stab a few people. It's very hard to kill so many people with a knife. If you take away easy access to guns then sure the hard criminals will still have guns but the wannabe criminals and the lunatics will do less damage.
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    - corin_ 14y ago
      Maybe... but two big differences. First: I live in the UK. I've never wanted to kill someone. If I could legally buy a handgun and use it on a shooting range I would. Let's say someday I, for some reason, become a psycho and want to kill people. Right now I don't have anything like a gun to use, best I could come up with is a kitchen knife. Under US gun law, I'd have a glock, even though when I purchased it I had no intention of using it illegally. Second: Imagine a psycho in a country where you can't own guns. He could buy a gun on the black market - hell, you can even do that online with bitcoins now - but a.) this creates a waiting time between when he wants to do it and when he can do it, during which he might change my mind and b.) there's a chance he might get caught while buying it - if it's legal to own and carry a gun, then he a killer isn't breaking a law until he starts killing, so a smaller chance of preventing him.
paraschopra 14y ago
I'm getting convinced about an interesting new theory on free will. Our free will isn't exactly "free", and is not certainly a conscious act. What we will is determined by the genetic predispositions and a historical interaction of the self with environment. This creates a feedback loop and the self takes one of the trajectories for which it is NOT responsible. Yet, the consequences of the actions are faced by the self in an immediate sense (imprisonment, sadness, happiness). This creates an unfair situation. So, in a way, _I_ am not responsible for my actions, yet the blame is put on _me_. EDIT: grammar
- nodemaker 14y ago
  This is certainly true of animals, but we as human beings do have the power to control the direction of the feedback loop.In other words we have the ability to decide how we respond to external stimuli, a truly unique ability in the animal kingdom. "Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant. Therefore, we can predict his future only within the large framework of a statistical survey referring to a whole group; the individual personality, however, remains essentially unpredictable" - Viktor Frankl, Man's search for Meaning
  - paraschopra 14y ago
    We respond to external stimuli in a unique way, true. I'm not saying free will does not exist, but YOU as an agent do not have that will. It's actually a combination of genes + historical feedback loop between environment and you. When you are asked to pick between a color (red or green), on what basis do you pick that color? The recent book on Free Will by Sam Harris: http://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Sam-Harris/dp/1451683405 http://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Sam-Harris/dp/1451683405 is relevant here.
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zyb09 14y ago
I don't think there was a rational motive behind this, or we would have heard about it by now. What the scary truth seems to be is, that these individuals are in a severely distorted state of perception, in which the killing of people becomes justifiable for them. He has most likely a extreme case of depression, psychosis or something else along those lines, of which the causes need to be investigated. But there will never be a reasonable "why", other then a sad story of a human being, who's life went wrong at one turn or another and in the end his mind malfunctioned. To prevent this from happening, I'd argue, given the amount of people, the complex society we live in and the unfortunate circumstances some people experience in their live, we need to accept that disturbed personalities like these sometimes "happen", and I'm not sure how to avoid that. In my opinion, the most effective prevention would probably be to restrict easy access to lethal weapons. When we realize that (sadly) our society can produce minds like this, we have to make sure you can't buy smoke grenades at a pawn shop.
rauljara 14y ago
"Psychologists describe depression as anger turned inward." Correction: Freud described depression as anger turned inwards. Specifically, he described anger at external forces (your mother, etc.) turned inwards. In his view, the only way to get rid of depression would be to allow this anger to express itself against the actual external force. This is very, very far away from the majority view of modern psychology (which has dismissed the vast majority of Freudian thought), but I still hear it repeated all the damn time. The reason I think it's important to correct it is that therapies based on Freud's notion of depression not only aren't helpful, they in many cases made a person worse. It turns out, getting a person to focus on all the things that should make them angry in their life is, in fact, not helpful for their general mental health. It is true that depressives tend to think a lot of shitty things about themselves. More successful cognitive behavioral therapy (which has been clinically proven to be as helpful as antidepressants in treating non-severe depression), tries to train people to think of alternatives to those shitty thoughts without necessarily saying which one alternative is right. Turns out, getting in the habit of thinking not just the worse thing possible is actually quite helpful. It gets you out of the rut your in.
- eatitraw 14y ago
  Good point, his description of depression doesn't really match with what I was told by a person who was diagnosed with depression. Actually, this tiny bit of the article makes me skeptical about its whole content. "Complicated"? - highly likely, but I think the author probably underestimate the real complexity.
  - kahawe 14y ago
    As someone who is suffering from depression and tried therapy, I think this is too vast a topic to sum it up in one poignant description like that and there are definitely different "complicated minds" and each one of them can experience it differently. So, it is as valid a description as any other because it can have just as many different root causes. The same is true for the "complicated" part - ultimately, both are rather superficial summaries probably for the sake of brevity, so while not appreciative of the actual issues, both do fit in the article since the intentions weren't to really analyze anyone's state of mind.
pdog 14y ago
"Resist the temptation to extrapolate details prematurely into a whole." The author of this article spent a decade researching the Columbine tragedy[1]. Here, he's describing how readily mass tragedies and shooting sprees lend themselves to misinformation by the media and mythologizing by the public. We can think of the perpetrators as always being loner outcasts, but the effort to make sense of their motives isn't that simple. They might be clinical psychopaths or suicidal depressives or paranoid narcissists or something else. [1] - http://www.columbine-online.com/ http://www.columbine-online.com/
tokenadult 14y ago
From the submitted article: "At this very moment, the police have probably gathered a great deal of evidence from James Holmes. They may well have a clear read on his motives right now. It is vital that they share this information fully with the public, but just as vital that they conceal much or all of it while they conduct their investigation. Testimony from friends, family and survivors of the massacre is also crucial, and witnesses are highly suggestible. Information must be withheld in the short run to safeguard corrupting their stories." This should be ROUTINE practice in police investigations, to guard against corruption of witness testimony, but, alas, we all know counterexamples. Moreover, it is a professional ethics violation for prosecutors to make excessively detailed statements to the press (who are always willing to ask for as many details as they can get) about the course of an investigation in progress and about possible motives for a crime when the accused has not yet been put on trial. The principle of "innocent until proven guilty" is STILL important, despite many cases we can observe where it appears to be violated. The human mind leaps to supposing explanations and forming a narrative around new, disturbing events. The mind is a "belief engine" http://www.amazon.com/The-Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-Construct/dp/0805091254 http://www.amazon.com/The-Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-C... and all of us would like to get an answer, even a quick and dirty answer that may be flat wrong, rather than have unanswered questions about a shocking news story. I remember well the speculation that swirled around the Columbine High School shootings some years ago. I was active in a different online community then, and a bunch of programmers were unembarrassed about going beyond the limits of their occupational knowledge to endorse various hypotheses about why the shooters killed their classmates. Right now we don't know why James Eagan Holmes shot movie-goers, evidently planning well in advance to kill many strangers. I'm not going to speculate about it. The public-health perspective on violence reduction is interesting, because it doesn't depend on knowing much about the motives of individuals. The theory is that certain risk-reduction measures work in general, minimizing the chance that some individual will engage in any kind of incident like the one in Aurora, Colorado. Gun control is such a sensitive issue in the United States that it is barely being discussed yet by politicians in connection with the incident this weekend, but differing national patterns of gun control have been mentioned by commentators who point to the example of Australia's response to the 1996 Port Arthur, Tasmania shooting http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/20/opinion/donohue-gun-control/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/20/opinion/donohue-gun-contro... http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/8502957/smaller-risk-of-getting-shot-in-australia http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/8502957/smaller-risk-of-... as the right way to reduce risk of further mass shooting incidents. That's food for thought. So far I am not aware of any reason for young people in residential neighborhoods in the United States to have what are called "assault rifles" for legitimate purposes, and I certainly would be glad to know that none are in my (crime-free) neighborhood. First edit: I see other Hacker News commenters are picking up on the submitted article's author's remarks on depression. This may be overgeneralizing too much from one example, even though the author also refers to a Secret Service study of the small number of examples of school shooters studied to that time. I think the author's most accurate point on that issue is "A vast majority of depressives are a danger only to themselves."
bmac27 14y ago
"Of course they’re sad; they’ve probably gone their entire day getting berated relentlessly, by the single person in the world whose opinion they hold most dear — themselves." This is the most important part of the article. All of us to some degree have wrestled with negative self-talk in our lives; a feeling of not liking yourself or just not being “good enough.” For some, it can be a steady, continuous feedback loop that’s difficult to break. I’ve wrestled with it myself. For me, it takes the form of the “imposter phenomenon” and it becomes more pronounced when I’m in groups of smarter people or when I perceive there to be particularly more at stake than normal situations. “What are you doing here, you’re not smart enough, how did you get this job, you’re not good enough to run a successful startup etc.” In the past, it’s caused me to freeze up, have trouble articulating what I want to get across or (worst of all) escape the situation entirely. As I’ve gotten closer & closer to where I want to be as it relates to the startup ecosystem and my place in it, that inner voice has gotten louder. So I can certainly relate to that aspect of it. It’s a battle that’s fought anew every day. And sometimes it does manifest itself in a more social context, e.g. “nobody cares about me, etc.” which can also be difficult to quell, particularly for someone who’s more of an introvert at heart. Left unchecked, I can clearly see how that can get the better of someone and send them down a destructive path, although I still think to take that anger and push it back out to society in such a violent way requires a synapse somewhere else misfiring. It's a good reminder that external stimuli alone aren't usually to blame for negative, depressing feelings.
grandalf 14y ago
It's just a complete waste of time to think about these kinds of things. Some humans malfunction and do this kind of thing. It happens quite rarely, and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. One's probability of being harmed by the occasional insane murderer (or terrorism for that matter) is microscopic compared to so many other things that we can actually do something about.
- drx 14y ago
  No it isn't. If a remediable cause can be found (for example, depression and society's attitude towards it), the problem can go away. And the problem is far from microscopic; not all murder-suicides are flashy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder%E2%80%93suicide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder%E2%80%93suicide
  - grandalf 14y ago
    I don't disagree that society's attitude toward depression and mental illness in general is far from enlightened. However when you consider how unexpectedly schizophrenia can creep up on people, or how unexpectedly PTSD symptoms can go from mild to severe (just two examples) even with significantly improved treatment we'd still have it happening now and then. And even if it happened only 10% as often, it would still represent a minuscule risk for most people, perhaps slightly closer to lethal asteroid impact than to lethal food poisoning from Sushi on the risk scale.
- jberryman 14y ago
  I understand what you're saying, but really "there is nothi that can be done to stop it"? What about outlawing firearms for civilian use, or even just not letting the assault weapons ban lapse? And don't tell me every angry/depressed yuppie kid who was going to go on a rampage when guns were easier to get than a drivers license is going to negotiate some black market underworld he knows nothing about to get his guns.
  - grandalf 14y ago
    Guns aren't necessary to wreak havoc. He could have brought in explosives, poison gas, knives, etc.
nikic 14y ago
Only tangentially related, but I'd like to know: The Wikipedia article on the incident says "The first phone calls to emergency services via 9-1-1 were made at 12:39 a.m. The police arrived within 90 seconds and apprehended the suspect." I'm wondering, can this be true? Are they really that fast? If so, impressive.
- refurb 14y ago
  There were policemen on patrol near the theater at the time. Otherwise that response time would have been more like 5-10 min (at the least).
- briannewman 14y ago
  According to the police chief, they had a lot of extra officers out on the streets as part of a summer initiative. Aurora is a typical strip mall suburb so it is feasible that a unit even a mile or two away could get there in 90 seconds, especially at that time of night with no traffic.
tlrobinson 14y ago
"Instead, buy my book!"
jorahmormont 14y ago
Slightly offtopic, I read a comment somewhere that asked what would have happened if the killer had been an Arab. It is interesting. When the killer is one of our own, we are able to quickly switch off group-think and acknowledge that the killer was insane. In contrast, when the killer is of an outgroup, we instantly assign group blame and then exact group retribution.
bootload 14y ago
"... The Secret Service’s landmark study of school shooters in 2002 determined that 78 percent of those shooters had experienced suicidal thoughts or attempts before mass murder. ..." With respect to Columbine, the same study noted this observation about targeted violence in schools. '... Many attackers felt bullied, persecuted, or injured by others prior to the attack ...' [0] The relationship between bullying and targeted violence appeared to be a serious enough problem for the Secret Service to consider and investigate. [0] Fein, R.A. Ph.D., Vossekuil, B., Pollack, W.S. Ph.D., Borum, R. Psy.D., Modzeleski W., Reddy M., Ph.D., "Threat Assessment in Schools: A guide to managing threatening situations and to create safe school climates", Chapter III, P17, United States Secret Service & United States Department of Education, Washington, D.C., 2002. (pdf, 754Kb) ~ http://www.secretservice.gov/ntac/ssi_guide.pdf http://www.secretservice.gov/ntac/ssi_guide.pdf

225 points by maayank 14y ago

I cringe every time I hear perpetrators of mass shootings described as "evil". Evil implies a presence of something bad. It's an easy label that allows people to hate the perpetrator. It's much more accurate to describe the perpetrators as cold, empty, detached. That is frightening, because there is no hope of reasoning or bargaining with someone who is truly detached from emotion. There is no such thing as evil. I appreciate this reporter for offering a more accurate picture of who these perpetrators really are.

corin_ 14y ago
> "There is no such thing as evil." Surely that depends on your definition of the word, and by most if not all definitions it definitely is possible to be evil. Maybe nobody can be pure evil, as in nothing but evil, but if you let that rule out calling them evil then you can equally say there's no such thing as nice, mean, clever, stupid, etc. etc. Evil (adj) 1 a : morally reprehensible : sinful, wicked b : arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct 2 a archaic : inferior b : causing discomfort or repulsion : offensive c : disagreeable 3 a : causing harm : pernicious b : marked by misfortune : unlucky (Merriam-Webster)
- japhyr 14y ago
  Nice, mean, clever, stupid, etc. have no religious connotations. "Evil" and "sin" have heavily religious connotations, even if their etymologies are not entirely rooted in religious traditions. President Obama, who used the word "evil" this week, also said this was a time for "prayer and reflection". It's hard to be elected president without making these kinds of religious references. Denying the presence of evil, as the term is often used, has nothing to do with words such as stupid, clever, etc.
  - corin_ 14y ago
    As an atheist I don't base my use of words around what is believed in religions, I go by dictionaries.
lusr 14y ago
> It's much more accurate to describe the perpetrators as cold, empty, detached. The article states that, according to the Secret Service, 78% of these school shooters are NOT cold, empty, detached (which would describe socio/psychopaths). Instead, they are severely depressed individuals. If you haven't ever been severely depressed (I have) it's probably quite difficult to understand, but these are people whose minds are completely, utterly, passionately and absolutely wound up inside, anxious and stressed about perceived incurable flaws in their character and the apparently unresolvable frustration, despair, resentment and anger those beliefs generate towards themselves - and in these very sad cases, towards others. On the outside they can appear completely normal and even happy (I went to great lengths to hide my inner turmoil during my depression); don't mistake that for what is going on on the inside. "Depression", sadly, is a dirty word in society. Unfortunately this feeds into and reinforces the exact set of dysfunctional beliefs that drive the severely depressed individual towards, and sometimes over, the edge. Imagine feeling like a broken human, only to have society reinforce that depression means you're broken; it creates a secondary, even more powerful disturbance in your mind. This causes the depressed to withdraw even further, which is even worse for a depressed individual (notice how all of these people withdraw from normal activities before the shootings), and pretty much guarantees a horrible end.
- _delirium 14y ago
  If anything, they seem less detached than many "normal" murderers who are for some reason less often seen as "evil". There are many people in the US who have killed multiple people, but in separate individual killings, which requires being able to treat killing as something you're able to do repeatedly, perhaps even over the course of years. Particularly common in organized crime or in drug gangs; just becomes part of the job. That's a bit scarier to me than someone snapping in a single incident. (Scarier both in psychology of the killer, and in a fear-for-personal-safety sense: I am much more likely to be shot by a gang member than in a Columbine-style incident.)
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etherael 14y ago
> That is frightening, because there is no hope of reasoning or bargaining with someone who is truly detached from emotion. This position is strange, you think the only position from which you can reason or bargain with another person is if they are emotionally attached? I purposely try as hard as I can to live a life completely free of emotional entanglement, I think emotion is largely useless. By this measure I suppose I would be cold, empty, detached. I choose to be this way because appeals to emotion are usually weak and lacking in actual reason as support. I can't understand why anyone would look at a wrathful, violence laden action like mass murder and think that the problem is that the offender is not emotional enough.
- eli_gottlieb 14y ago
  You cannot appeal rationally to that which has no utility function.
  - etherael 14y ago
    You think you can't have a utility function without emotional justification, I assume?
    - TeMPOraL 14y ago
      A big part of your utility function is what you care about. Caring is an emotion. There are no separate "rational" and "emotional" parts in brain; parts of your utility function manifest through what you feel.
    - eli_gottlieb 14y ago
      All justification/utility is ultimately either emotional, instinctual, or cultured.
- lusr 14y ago
  Why do you believe emotion is useless? I cannot think of any aspects of our psychology that are useless (they evolved for a reason). Negative emotions are fundamentally indicators of a cognitive dissonance and are absolutely invaluable in maintaining a healthy system of introspection. Your profile shows you're also a programmer so here's an analogy I use internally: negative emotions are part of a monitoring system built into our brains that inform us when an assumption in our set of operating beliefs (our personality source code) has been violated. (You get angry when your beliefs about 'fairness' are violated, you feel disappointment when your beliefs about e.g. 'relationships' are violated, etc.) Positive emotions fulfil a similar role, in the opposite direction by reinforcing the value of the beliefs you've created, although negative emotions are more interesting because your response to the emotion can be extrospective ("I feel angry because that guy cut me off on the road and that violates my beliefs about fairness; I'm getting out my tire iron and teaching him the right way to do things") or they can be introspectively rational, controlled and empowering ("Should I revisit my beliefs about fairness to be more in tune with reality, where people make mistakes?"). People with dysfunctional belief systems and rigid attitudes towards their beliefs are prone to depression (i.e. their belief systems do not serve them well given reality, either through distortion or inadapation). From an evolutionary perspective, I suspect extrospective analysis was more useful ("I'm angry because the other ape has stolen my lunch, and resources are scarce, so I'm going to punch him in the face"), which explains our default, instinctive "emotional" response to emotions, but as civilization develops and the rules change, introspective responses (which encourage co-operation) are more useful (but more fraught with dangers such as depression, which is a kind of reinforcement feedback loop of negative emotional states, beliefs and poor assumptions). Nevertheless, the high value of emotions remains present. If anybody reading this finds this personal philosophy interesting, I highly recommend reading David Burns' "Feeling Good" for an exhaustive listing/discussion of emotional states and responses, and constructive ways of dealing with these experiences.
olavk 14y ago
Perpetrators of mass killings seem to be very much emotional, filled with anger, resentment and bitterness. I don't think you would go through the trouble of killing other people if you are detached from emotion. Why would you?
tomjen3 14y ago
Can we use the term 'defect', then? As in "the computer was defect, so I put in the junk heap"?
bluekeybox 14y ago
Cold, emptiness, and detachment is also characteristic of snowmen. Snowmen usually don't commit mass murders. There has to be some other factor, and usually that other factor is aggression of a type where you stick pins into a voodoo doll and derive pleasure from doing that. That is what Christians call evil (deriving pleasure/release from inflicting pain), and it is a pretty specific concept actually. You don't have to be Christian or even believe in supernatural to understand it. I noticed that people who claim that evil doesn't exist simply have a completely messed up (I suppose, by schooling) moral compass, and they have no idea how common that aspect of human personality is (and that it nearly always has negative consequences both for the bearer and for society at large).
- nitrogen 14y ago
  You are reading far too much into the mindset of someone whose history we don't know. In fact, this whole thread has devolved well below the minimum standards for rational discussion, relying instead upon knee-jerk reactions and cargo cult assumptions.
  - bluekeybox 14y ago
    I wasn't reading into someone's mindset so much as trying to show that there exists a concept of evil on which most people can agree on. I like your support for standards and rational discussion, however, so peace be with you.
joshuacc 14y ago
"There is no such thing as evil." It's worth pointing out that one of the standard definitions of evil in the Christian tradition (since at least St. Augustine) is as a sort of privation, or lack. That is, evil isn't considered to be a thing that exists, but the lack of some good which should exist . It's somewhat analogous to a hole in a shirt. The hole is the absence of something that should be there. I find that this actually dovetails nicely with your description of the perpetrators as cold, empty and detached. (Whether this was actually the psychological state of the killers is an open question.)
- drumdance 14y ago
  My issue with the word "evil" is that its popular use serves to distance the perpetrator from everyone else, as if he's been infected by the Devil. No doubt he's infected with something, perhaps even something that could be cured or mitigated with therapy, but it's not supernatural or part of God's mysterious plan. Similarly, I don't like the use of the word "miracle," which was used a lot during that Hudson River plane crash a few years ago. God did not intervene, as many suggested. Rather, a well-trained pilot did his job to perfection, and all thanks should go to him and the institutions that provided him with that training.
japhyr 14y ago
To clarify a bit, I appreciate most that this reporter is not over-simplifying these cases. In his own words, "Perpetrators of mass murder...are complicated." I don't speak in absolutes about emotion. I know most of these perpetrators have led very emotional lives. The pain they have felt is probably greater than almost everyone else's pain. But it seems to me that once they have begun to carry out their plans, they are well beyond making an emotional connection with anyone else. They have nothing left to lose, and you can't bargain with someone who has nothing left to lose.
dinkumthinkum 14y ago
Nonsense. Don't be fooled. Evil is the intentional causation of calamity and this incident is exactly that. No serious person is claiming "evil" has extension in and of itself. I don't see why under your view "evil" is any less a phenomenon than "cold" or "detached." I suspect it is just more in vogue to have that view.

scotty79 14y ago

I think of the murderers as having some kind of hardware bug. We have evolved special safeguard that prevents us form killing the people we live with and people we meet daily. It's crazy that we do live in proximity of other people and meet them if you think how dangerous single person can be when this safeguard fails. All the search for reasons why the person killed is little bit like creating fake narratives to kind of natural bizarre event. If person is able to intentionally kill then there's something wrong with that person and we have to deal with it. You may investigate how it came to be that this safeguard was damaged. Maybe the person underwent military training or just had a childhood equivalent to that. Most likely there is something wrong with the brain of that person that was there from the beginning or manifested during puberty or manifested as a result of shock of some sort. "What was the murderers reasons?" is the most irrelevant question of all.

zethraeus 14y ago
Whilst it might be accurate to describe depression's root cause as a 'hardware bug' it is a much more common bug than you seem to assume. It seems more appropriate to me to view it as a case of hardware specialized for one purpose systematically failing for another. The former is some evolutionary root, and the latter is modern society. One of the most interesting parts of the linked article is the implication that people going postal are not so different from you and me. You seem to disregard it.
- scotty79 14y ago
  > You seem to disregard it. In a way. I think that those people are not so different from you and me. With exception to the one thing. They have the antikill safeguard damaged. Looking for the cause of murder in the things you and me may have experienced as well and not go postal is in IMHO misguided. People should not look for what caused the murder but what caused the damage to the safeguard and think up ways to detect it and maybe even correct it in advance. I don't think it's depression. Depression is whole other kind of hardware bug. And the antikill safeguard damage is also more common than you might expect. Many times a year there is a news about some guy killing his wife and children and often himself after that. It's so common that it's not even a big news. They call it extended suicide but I think in many cases that's not the right description.

kghose 14y ago

I've read about killings before, I lived through 9/11, but for some reason these killings struck me really hard. Even more than school shootings. Perhaps because I think of the cinema as sanctuary - a place of make believe where we go to escape (move over places of worship!) but mostly because I wanted to really know motivations - why did he do it? Especially when it turns out he's not a person who tortured animals as a kid etc etc. I want to know why a seemingly normal person can meticulously plan such a senseless act of destruction.

Ygg2 14y ago
Why is there a need to find out why? Killing spree is a lot like thunderbolt. It has no prediction why it struck, in the path it stuck. If you only want to minimize risks of future murders, then don't read/watch the news. Each time a murderer has his/her face shown, she/he is glorified in even tiniest of ways (i.e. comic book villain), with a number of murders he/she committed put in front line, number of violent copycat acts will spike.
- corin_ 14y ago
  It's completely incorrect to say there is no explanation why it struck. Maybe it's true that it was impossible to predict, maybe it's true that we will never find out the cause, but can be 100% sure there is a cause.
  - Ygg2 14y ago
    True. There is some semantic mismatch.

arturadib 14y ago

Think outside the box. I've lived in the US for 10 years, and I follow plenty of world news. It is clear that Columbine-like shootings are (mostly) an American phenomenon. [1] So what is it so special about the US that makes this a recurring problem? Is it poor parenting, without much communication? Is it societal pressure, i.e. Mr Popular vs Mr Loser? Is it easy access to guns? Is it the disproportionate amount of media attention that these cases give to depressed folks with low self-esteem? Is it all of the above? None? I imagine severe depression happens everywhere, but there's got to be something in the US that turns depression into mass murder. I wish someone would analyze the problem from outside the box, not inside. [1] Before someone jumps the gun about international news, note that terror and drug/gang crimes are very different. They have clear, consistent motives. Columbine-like stuff is puzzling- their motives seem to be all over the place, hence why to this date experts are still trying to figure them out.

coenhyde 14y ago
I know American's do not like to hear this but I am of the opinion that it's easy access to guns which is the cause of these mass murders. Now that Australia has gun control, the crazy's just stab a few people. It's very hard to kill so many people with a knife. If you take away easy access to guns then sure the hard criminals will still have guns but the wannabe criminals and the lunatics will do less damage.
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  - corin_ 14y ago
    Maybe... but two big differences. First: I live in the UK. I've never wanted to kill someone. If I could legally buy a handgun and use it on a shooting range I would. Let's say someday I, for some reason, become a psycho and want to kill people. Right now I don't have anything like a gun to use, best I could come up with is a kitchen knife. Under US gun law, I'd have a glock, even though when I purchased it I had no intention of using it illegally. Second: Imagine a psycho in a country where you can't own guns. He could buy a gun on the black market - hell, you can even do that online with bitcoins now - but a.) this creates a waiting time between when he wants to do it and when he can do it, during which he might change my mind and b.) there's a chance he might get caught while buying it - if it's legal to own and carry a gun, then he a killer isn't breaking a law until he starts killing, so a smaller chance of preventing him.

paraschopra 14y ago

I'm getting convinced about an interesting new theory on free will. Our free will isn't exactly "free", and is not certainly a conscious act. What we will is determined by the genetic predispositions and a historical interaction of the self with environment. This creates a feedback loop and the self takes one of the trajectories for which it is NOT responsible. Yet, the consequences of the actions are faced by the self in an immediate sense (imprisonment, sadness, happiness). This creates an unfair situation. So, in a way, _I_ am not responsible for my actions, yet the blame is put on _me_. EDIT: grammar

nodemaker 14y ago
This is certainly true of animals, but we as human beings do have the power to control the direction of the feedback loop.In other words we have the ability to decide how we respond to external stimuli, a truly unique ability in the animal kingdom. "Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself whether he gives in to conditions or stands up to them. In other words, man is ultimately self-determining. Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant. Therefore, we can predict his future only within the large framework of a statistical survey referring to a whole group; the individual personality, however, remains essentially unpredictable" - Viktor Frankl, Man's search for Meaning
- paraschopra 14y ago
  We respond to external stimuli in a unique way, true. I'm not saying free will does not exist, but YOU as an agent do not have that will. It's actually a combination of genes + historical feedback loop between environment and you. When you are asked to pick between a color (red or green), on what basis do you pick that color? The recent book on Free Will by Sam Harris: http://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Sam-Harris/dp/1451683405 http://www.amazon.com/Free-Will-Sam-Harris/dp/1451683405 is relevant here.
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zyb09 14y ago

I don't think there was a rational motive behind this, or we would have heard about it by now. What the scary truth seems to be is, that these individuals are in a severely distorted state of perception, in which the killing of people becomes justifiable for them. He has most likely a extreme case of depression, psychosis or something else along those lines, of which the causes need to be investigated. But there will never be a reasonable "why", other then a sad story of a human being, who's life went wrong at one turn or another and in the end his mind malfunctioned. To prevent this from happening, I'd argue, given the amount of people, the complex society we live in and the unfortunate circumstances some people experience in their live, we need to accept that disturbed personalities like these sometimes "happen", and I'm not sure how to avoid that. In my opinion, the most effective prevention would probably be to restrict easy access to lethal weapons. When we realize that (sadly) our society can produce minds like this, we have to make sure you can't buy smoke grenades at a pawn shop.

rauljara 14y ago

"Psychologists describe depression as anger turned inward." Correction: Freud described depression as anger turned inwards. Specifically, he described anger at external forces (your mother, etc.) turned inwards. In his view, the only way to get rid of depression would be to allow this anger to express itself against the actual external force. This is very, very far away from the majority view of modern psychology (which has dismissed the vast majority of Freudian thought), but I still hear it repeated all the damn time. The reason I think it's important to correct it is that therapies based on Freud's notion of depression not only aren't helpful, they in many cases made a person worse. It turns out, getting a person to focus on all the things that should make them angry in their life is, in fact, not helpful for their general mental health. It is true that depressives tend to think a lot of shitty things about themselves. More successful cognitive behavioral therapy (which has been clinically proven to be as helpful as antidepressants in treating non-severe depression), tries to train people to think of alternatives to those shitty thoughts without necessarily saying which one alternative is right. Turns out, getting in the habit of thinking not just the worse thing possible is actually quite helpful. It gets you out of the rut your in.

eatitraw 14y ago
Good point, his description of depression doesn't really match with what I was told by a person who was diagnosed with depression. Actually, this tiny bit of the article makes me skeptical about its whole content. "Complicated"? - highly likely, but I think the author probably underestimate the real complexity.
- kahawe 14y ago
  As someone who is suffering from depression and tried therapy, I think this is too vast a topic to sum it up in one poignant description like that and there are definitely different "complicated minds" and each one of them can experience it differently. So, it is as valid a description as any other because it can have just as many different root causes. The same is true for the "complicated" part - ultimately, both are rather superficial summaries probably for the sake of brevity, so while not appreciative of the actual issues, both do fit in the article since the intentions weren't to really analyze anyone's state of mind.

pdog 14y ago

"Resist the temptation to extrapolate details prematurely into a whole." The author of this article spent a decade researching the Columbine tragedy[1]. Here, he's describing how readily mass tragedies and shooting sprees lend themselves to misinformation by the media and mythologizing by the public. We can think of the perpetrators as always being loner outcasts, but the effort to make sense of their motives isn't that simple. They might be clinical psychopaths or suicidal depressives or paranoid narcissists or something else. [1] - http://www.columbine-online.com/ http://www.columbine-online.com/

tokenadult 14y ago

From the submitted article: "At this very moment, the police have probably gathered a great deal of evidence from James Holmes. They may well have a clear read on his motives right now. It is vital that they share this information fully with the public, but just as vital that they conceal much or all of it while they conduct their investigation. Testimony from friends, family and survivors of the massacre is also crucial, and witnesses are highly suggestible. Information must be withheld in the short run to safeguard corrupting their stories." This should be ROUTINE practice in police investigations, to guard against corruption of witness testimony, but, alas, we all know counterexamples. Moreover, it is a professional ethics violation for prosecutors to make excessively detailed statements to the press (who are always willing to ask for as many details as they can get) about the course of an investigation in progress and about possible motives for a crime when the accused has not yet been put on trial. The principle of "innocent until proven guilty" is STILL important, despite many cases we can observe where it appears to be violated. The human mind leaps to supposing explanations and forming a narrative around new, disturbing events. The mind is a "belief engine" http://www.amazon.com/The-Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-Construct/dp/0805091254 http://www.amazon.com/The-Believing-Brain-Conspiracies-How-C... and all of us would like to get an answer, even a quick and dirty answer that may be flat wrong, rather than have unanswered questions about a shocking news story. I remember well the speculation that swirled around the Columbine High School shootings some years ago. I was active in a different online community then, and a bunch of programmers were unembarrassed about going beyond the limits of their occupational knowledge to endorse various hypotheses about why the shooters killed their classmates. Right now we don't know why James Eagan Holmes shot movie-goers, evidently planning well in advance to kill many strangers. I'm not going to speculate about it. The public-health perspective on violence reduction is interesting, because it doesn't depend on knowing much about the motives of individuals. The theory is that certain risk-reduction measures work in general, minimizing the chance that some individual will engage in any kind of incident like the one in Aurora, Colorado. Gun control is such a sensitive issue in the United States that it is barely being discussed yet by politicians in connection with the incident this weekend, but differing national patterns of gun control have been mentioned by commentators who point to the example of Australia's response to the 1996 Port Arthur, Tasmania shooting http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/20/opinion/donohue-gun-control/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2012/07/20/opinion/donohue-gun-contro... http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/8502957/smaller-risk-of-getting-shot-in-australia http://news.ninemsn.com.au/national/8502957/smaller-risk-of-... as the right way to reduce risk of further mass shooting incidents. That's food for thought. So far I am not aware of any reason for young people in residential neighborhoods in the United States to have what are called "assault rifles" for legitimate purposes, and I certainly would be glad to know that none are in my (crime-free) neighborhood. First edit: I see other Hacker News commenters are picking up on the submitted article's author's remarks on depression. This may be overgeneralizing too much from one example, even though the author also refers to a Secret Service study of the small number of examples of school shooters studied to that time. I think the author's most accurate point on that issue is "A vast majority of depressives are a danger only to themselves."

bmac27 14y ago

"Of course they’re sad; they’ve probably gone their entire day getting berated relentlessly, by the single person in the world whose opinion they hold most dear — themselves." This is the most important part of the article. All of us to some degree have wrestled with negative self-talk in our lives; a feeling of not liking yourself or just not being “good enough.” For some, it can be a steady, continuous feedback loop that’s difficult to break. I’ve wrestled with it myself. For me, it takes the form of the “imposter phenomenon” and it becomes more pronounced when I’m in groups of smarter people or when I perceive there to be particularly more at stake than normal situations. “What are you doing here, you’re not smart enough, how did you get this job, you’re not good enough to run a successful startup etc.” In the past, it’s caused me to freeze up, have trouble articulating what I want to get across or (worst of all) escape the situation entirely. As I’ve gotten closer & closer to where I want to be as it relates to the startup ecosystem and my place in it, that inner voice has gotten louder. So I can certainly relate to that aspect of it. It’s a battle that’s fought anew every day. And sometimes it does manifest itself in a more social context, e.g. “nobody cares about me, etc.” which can also be difficult to quell, particularly for someone who’s more of an introvert at heart. Left unchecked, I can clearly see how that can get the better of someone and send them down a destructive path, although I still think to take that anger and push it back out to society in such a violent way requires a synapse somewhere else misfiring. It's a good reminder that external stimuli alone aren't usually to blame for negative, depressing feelings.

grandalf 14y ago

It's just a complete waste of time to think about these kinds of things. Some humans malfunction and do this kind of thing. It happens quite rarely, and there is nothing that can be done to stop it. One's probability of being harmed by the occasional insane murderer (or terrorism for that matter) is microscopic compared to so many other things that we can actually do something about.

drx 14y ago
No it isn't. If a remediable cause can be found (for example, depression and society's attitude towards it), the problem can go away. And the problem is far from microscopic; not all murder-suicides are flashy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder%E2%80%93suicide http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder%E2%80%93suicide
- grandalf 14y ago
  I don't disagree that society's attitude toward depression and mental illness in general is far from enlightened. However when you consider how unexpectedly schizophrenia can creep up on people, or how unexpectedly PTSD symptoms can go from mild to severe (just two examples) even with significantly improved treatment we'd still have it happening now and then. And even if it happened only 10% as often, it would still represent a minuscule risk for most people, perhaps slightly closer to lethal asteroid impact than to lethal food poisoning from Sushi on the risk scale.
jberryman 14y ago
I understand what you're saying, but really "there is nothi that can be done to stop it"? What about outlawing firearms for civilian use, or even just not letting the assault weapons ban lapse? And don't tell me every angry/depressed yuppie kid who was going to go on a rampage when guns were easier to get than a drivers license is going to negotiate some black market underworld he knows nothing about to get his guns.
- grandalf 14y ago
  Guns aren't necessary to wreak havoc. He could have brought in explosives, poison gas, knives, etc.

nikic 14y ago

Only tangentially related, but I'd like to know: The Wikipedia article on the incident says "The first phone calls to emergency services via 9-1-1 were made at 12:39 a.m. The police arrived within 90 seconds and apprehended the suspect." I'm wondering, can this be true? Are they really that fast? If so, impressive.

refurb 14y ago
There were policemen on patrol near the theater at the time. Otherwise that response time would have been more like 5-10 min (at the least).
briannewman 14y ago
According to the police chief, they had a lot of extra officers out on the streets as part of a summer initiative. Aurora is a typical strip mall suburb so it is feasible that a unit even a mile or two away could get there in 90 seconds, especially at that time of night with no traffic.

tlrobinson 14y ago

"Instead, buy my book!"

jorahmormont 14y ago

Slightly offtopic, I read a comment somewhere that asked what would have happened if the killer had been an Arab. It is interesting. When the killer is one of our own, we are able to quickly switch off group-think and acknowledge that the killer was insane. In contrast, when the killer is of an outgroup, we instantly assign group blame and then exact group retribution.

bootload 14y ago

"... The Secret Service’s landmark study of school shooters in 2002 determined that 78 percent of those shooters had experienced suicidal thoughts or attempts before mass murder. ..." With respect to Columbine, the same study noted this observation about targeted violence in schools. '... Many attackers felt bullied, persecuted, or injured by others prior to the attack ...' [0] The relationship between bullying and targeted violence appeared to be a serious enough problem for the Secret Service to consider and investigate. [0] Fein, R.A. Ph.D., Vossekuil, B., Pollack, W.S. Ph.D., Borum, R. Psy.D., Modzeleski W., Reddy M., Ph.D., "Threat Assessment in Schools: A guide to managing threatening situations and to create safe school climates", Chapter III, P17, United States Secret Service & United States Department of Education, Washington, D.C., 2002. (pdf, 754Kb) ~ http://www.secretservice.gov/ntac/ssi_guide.pdf http://www.secretservice.gov/ntac/ssi_guide.pdf