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take a step back and consider: size of population and history. Norway has had 0 mass murders since ww2. Yet 18 months ago Norway faced one of the worst mass mu

by eitland 14y ago

take a step back and consider: size of population and history. Norway has had 0 mass murders since ww2. Yet 18 months ago Norway faced one of the worst mass murdrs in peacetime. Maybe the percentage of people wanting to do such stupid things are the same in Norway as in US, only the population is so small it takes years between everytime there is someone with high enough iq to plan this kind of cruelty and low enough respect of life to actually do it. Also take a look at Japan. Few shootings but at least during the nineties a couple of attempted mass murders using poisenous gas.

jacquesm 14y ago
Insanity is distributed fairly evenly across mankind. Access to weapons is not.
- protomyth 14y ago
  weapons are pretty well distributed too. Witness pipe bombs, IEDs, and suicide bombers in very poor / resource poor areas.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    Except those areas are also fairly well armed with guns. It just turns out IEDs and suicide bombers are more effective in kill rate than guns in certain situations.
  - dredmorbius 14y ago
    An awful lot of those weapons are provided to those places by outside interests for proxy wars and similar circumstances, at east for more advanced types of weapons. Yes, you can improvise killing tools from a great many things, but the more effective methods tend to be at least somewhat advanced.
DanBC 14y ago
Organised terrorism is very different to a lone gunman. Aum Shinrikyo were a remarkable terrorist cult who achieved pretty scarry things. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo)
gwern 14y ago
It's worth noting that the population of Norway is tiny, around 5 million, while the USA has ~310m. At 2 shootings a year for 310m Americans, that suggests something like 1 shooting per 155m; 155m is 31x Norway's 5m, suggesting 1 shooting every >30 years. Assume a lower base rate, and you make just 1 mass murder in the 67 years since WWII a fairly plausible outcome. I'd note that before Breivik, the previous record-setting mass murder was a South Korean policeman, also a small country not known for violence or crime.

by eitland 14y ago

jacquesm 14y ago

Insanity is distributed fairly evenly across mankind. Access to weapons is not.

protomyth 14y ago
weapons are pretty well distributed too. Witness pipe bombs, IEDs, and suicide bombers in very poor / resource poor areas.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  Except those areas are also fairly well armed with guns. It just turns out IEDs and suicide bombers are more effective in kill rate than guns in certain situations.
- dredmorbius 14y ago
  An awful lot of those weapons are provided to those places by outside interests for proxy wars and similar circumstances, at east for more advanced types of weapons. Yes, you can improvise killing tools from a great many things, but the more effective methods tend to be at least somewhat advanced.

DanBC 14y ago

Organised terrorism is very different to a lone gunman. Aum Shinrikyo were a remarkable terrorist cult who achieved pretty scarry things. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo)

gwern 14y ago

It's worth noting that the population of Norway is tiny, around 5 million, while the USA has ~310m. At 2 shootings a year for 310m Americans, that suggests something like 1 shooting per 155m; 155m is 31x Norway's 5m, suggesting 1 shooting every >30 years. Assume a lower base rate, and you make just 1 mass murder in the 67 years since WWII a fairly plausible outcome. I'd note that before Breivik, the previous record-setting mass murder was a South Korean policeman, also a small country not known for violence or crime.