Serious information about the Sandy Hook shooting
by Ziks511 - 12/17/12 6:38 AM
likely to set the cat among the pigeons here. With few exceptions, (only two I can think of off-hand) Mass Shooting is a crime perpetrated by younger white men.
Two years ago to the month, December, a study was published in the Health Sociology Review of 3 recent mass school shootings beginning with Columbine.
http://logicalliving.blog.com/files/2011/04/Suicide-Ten.pdf
More controversia is the assertion by David Sirota first on MSNBC on Saturday, because it challenges the immunity from serious scrutiny that white males enjoy where he advanced a number of ideas which while provocative, are a derive logically from this kind of act and the similarity of most perpetrators. It seriously challenges the privilege that white males enjoy in the eyes of the Police, and the FBI, and all other organizations
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/17/would_the_u_s_government_profile_white_men/
Law enforcement is quite happy to racially profile and act on racial profiles if the person is Black or a Middle Eastern Muslim. This prejudicial profile is uppermost in the minds of most of us, as was revealed in the response to the George Zimmerman's shooting of Trayvon Martin. Nearly everybody assumes that the shooting was justified primarily based on the colour of the victim, and sees no peculiarity in Zimmerman's following Martin and accosting him as if he was a duly appointed policeman, rather than a private citizen, and making the young man feel threatened. Nor does anyone see the imbalance in weaponry as odd. Martin had a drink tin and a package of some snack, Zimmerman had an Automatic Pistol.
I normally don't like the advancing of "white male privilege" as a concept, I consider it glib and the result of taking "politically correct" thought to an extreme, but in these cases, it begins to look persuasive. Why is it that mass shootings are a white male crime with very very few exceptions? And virtually all of the perpetrators are from suburban or rural homes. The only exceptions that occur to me are the Virginia Tech shooting, and Colin Fergusson and the Long Island Commuter train shooting.
Mass shootings appear to be a way to give the perpetrator's suicide meaning at least to himself, a peculiar psychological effect arising from a sense of persecution where no persecution exists. The Sandy Hook School shooting is perhaps the most extreme example of this. How could the shooter have felt persecuted by those children? His mother I can understand somewhat, but little children he'd never met? unless he felt his mother cared more about them than about him. This perception is almost certain to be wrong, but stress can be gravely unbalance the mind. And a feeling of persecution is a common a reaction to that stress.
Rob


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