On the manifestos killers leave behind | Hacker News Reader

On the manifestos killers leave behind

lrb.co.uk

74 pointsjonathansizz91 comments

I was picked on in school a fair amount. Some of it quite violent, and pervasive. At some point I got really fed up with one particular kid, and got myself a big stick. Luckily for him that stick broke cleanly in two upon first impact, otherwise i'm not sure what would have happened. After that things subsided somewhat. That kid threatened me more, but never did come after me again.

Growing older I realise two things. First, those "jocks" that get all the girls, have (generalizing here) other very serious problems, are often emotionally stunted, angry at their dads, or whatever. So we all get weathered differently by life, and actually it's kind of heartbreaking to see. Second, I just think too much! It drives people crazy when i do that, and instead of that, I just need to turn my attention outwards, and feel what is going on outside of my own head. Then things become relational, and people can also sense that I am here too.

Wish I could tell all of this to my 14-year-old self.

You can't, but you can make a point to tell your children, which is what I've done. You have to stop the cycle early, or it does become pervasive and nobody wins in the end, nobody. Exhibit A is the Columbine massacre. The kids were bullied until they finally snapped and a lot of people lost their lives because everybody around them failed at stopping it.

When my son told me he was being bullied, I showed him a few BJJ moves to help out, then I told him, "If someone wants to throw down, then do it, and always swing first. It doesn't matter if you win or not, you're going to get into trouble regardless. Don't wait for someone to make the first move."

A week later, I got called into the principals office about him fighting. I went in and read the principal the riot act. My son repeatedly told his teachers and other staff about what was going on and they did nothing. He broke the kids nose and then put him in an armbar (ala Rhonda Rousey) until the teacher came and broke it up. I told the principal he defended himself and did nothing wrong and his bully was lucky he didn't hyper-extend his elbow or worse.

He said after that all the bullying stopped and thanked me for giving him the courage to stand up to his bullies. I just endured it when I was his age, but I wanted to make my kids wouldn't have to go through what I did and were able to end the cycle.

Wow, this comment is really shocking to me. Wow, wow, wow. I hope your child turns out okay :/

Errr, one of the points of all this is to stand up to bullies, in this case in the tried and true fashion, and stop them before they push you too the breaking point. Helps that the vast majority of them, including the ones I've dealt with, get deterred real quickly when pain is on the menu, and often become somewhat friendly.

That only works if you go to decent school were people have things to loose. Otherwise someone might very well end up dead or in prison. Adults can't manage violence, don't expect kids to.

Well, adults ultimately manage violence with lethal force, which is essentially what you're saying.

However, I submit to you that all this is a vital and psychologically essential lesson for kids to learn: recognizing standard issue bullies and dealing with them per the above, and, ideally not too young, recognizing those for whom this won't work. Bullying won't stop after e.g. K-12, I myself had to use a credible threat of lethal force to stop an attempt to feloniously bully me in college, and while it ought to move out of the physical realm once you enter the "real world", bullies abound there as well.

Come to think of it, there was a dangerous, held back some so he was bigger than almost all of us, retarded boy who attended my school in 3rd grade plus or minus, who I treated as a potentially lethal threat, and never even thought to applied the treatment for normal bullies. Instead, that provided a lesson in gathering allies and all that.

What's so shocking about it? Have you ever been bullied? Ever had to fight someone?

"First, those "jocks" that get all the girls, have (generalizing here) other very serious problems, are often emotionally stunted, angry at their dads, or whatever."

I highly doubt that this is true.

Yeah, smells like an adolescent rationalization.

Anecdotal, but I would say in my experience its true. The jocks who got the gals in my teen youth have grown up to be quite the social misfits - jail time, drug abuse, kicked out of homes. This is a total generalization but its been a long-standing one: "nice guys finish last" .. etc.

>>> Wish I could tell all of this to my 14-year-old self.

I often think this about any number of things, and then I realize there were probably a lot of people in my life who were telling them to me, and I just didn't want to listen to them. Being 14 is really hard.

I am sure this is way far too late for most people on HN, but there is some useful advice that tends to work.

Usually, the most popular people can pick on a wide range of people and don't focus on any one person. It is the people in the lower middle that have fewer targets below them that get really mean. As strange as this sounds moving slightly up the hierarchy, but not to high is the best way to avoid lots of negative attention from any one person. Granted, this assumes there is nothing specifically unusual about someone.

PS: Sorry, if this comes off as victim baiting, but thinking of high school as a pack of chimps works surprisingly well.

I think this is a good read when combined with the Gladwell article from the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-v...).

I'm not against gun control efforts or better mental health efforts (whatever that might mean) but I think that both articles suggest that a lot of progress can be made in figuring out how to arrest this kind of societal disconnect.

In the days after Columbine, there was a huge reaction from people who wanted to paint with a really broad brush, along the lines of random kids being potential suspects just because they liked wearing trench coats. John Katz had a project called "Voices From The Hellmouth" over at Slashdot, that invited people that had similar difficulties to write in and share their thoughts and experiences of being bullied or ostracized. I'm convinced that efforts like that can save lives.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/99/04/25/1438249/voices-from-...

I haven't thought about "Voices From The Hellmouth" in a really long time. I remember reading Slashdot a ton in high school and college (maybe 97 or 98 through 02?). Then, not so much. FWIW, HN, esp when I first found it a few years ago, reminded me a lot of what I loved about the discussion on Slashdot back in the day.

Anyway, the actual point of this comment: much of what's described in "Voices From The Hellmouth" would now fit comfortably under the currently fashionable term "microagression." I'd bet that many posters on HN and elsewhere who think that microaggressions aren't a thing worth real concern, are also the sorts of people who were/are picked on in the way that "Hellmouth" catalogs so vividly.

And for the record, I'm not saying that the prevailing view on HN is that microaggressions aren't real, or that most people who deny them were bullied geeks. Just that there are probably a lot of bullied or formerly bullied geeks who deny the significance of such social ostracism, even though they experienced it themselves.

Ironic, but not unexpected: people without power often end up at odds with one another when they should be looking for common ground and empathizing with one another. Still, sad. I always find it really painful to watch minorities be racist, to watch geeks pick on other geeks for lacking social graces, to watch women be unfeminist, etc. Well, sometimes it's darkly hilarious. But still painful.

>Ironic, but not unexpected: people without power often end up at odds with one another when they should be looking for common ground and empathizing with one another

From a certain altitude this is true, but what usually happens is the top plays the bottom off against the middle. From the perspective of the middle, both are enemies.

Hacker News discussion on the Gladwell article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10380513

That Gladwell article is a good read, it offers a perspective I hadn't come across before. Not that it really "solves" the problem at all, just casts a different light on it.

I am convinced that the people who do these shootings do so because they have an ego that cannot cope with their societal impotence.

That is, they think they should be more liked, more powerful, be able to get girls, be in charge of things, free from criticism, unable to be bullied (which is reasonable) etc... but aren't for any given reason.

So their recourse is to prove to everyone how powerful they are by shooting them up. The worst part is, it is pretty powerful and it destroys communities, which is what they want. They want to be able to say they destroyed a community because that's how they are proving their power.

I don't see any solution to this. Preventing them from getting access to the tools that could empower that could help but is really hard to do, especially in the US, because banning guns or whatever likely wouldn't work 100% of the time. If they are smart and dedicated enough they will find a way to get/make bombs and guns.

So I see no real solution here.

The falacy here is the classic "perfect is the enemy of good."

Banning assault rifles and handguns could go a long way to reducing availability. And if that decreases the number of these events by as much as people think it could, it's probably worthwhile.

Just because somebody who's super dedicated to the cause and works day in and day out to get the equipment to carry out a shooting could probably make it happen doesn't mean limiting access won't greatly reduce the number.

This is a good point, but I think underestimates the pathos around American gun ownership.

That is to say, I don't think that banning those things would result in a reduction in availability.

With Facebook and other social media suspected of distorting people's perspective of their peer's social achievements... I wonder if a link can be drawn to recent mass shootings.

This is the first time I've read excerpts from these "manifestos" and it's hard to know how to react. It all reads like a kind of mental illness and it's chilling to see the similarities (although this article may only make them look similar). Intellectually I feel like there should be room for sympathy of some kind, but to be honest, I feel nothing of the kind; just angry. The authors strike me as small, pathetic, misguided and (for me, worst of all) demanding and entitled.

In terms of constructive moves to try and deal with this issue, it's hard to think of anything substantive. For sure, less guns means these individuals would have taken fewer lives. Perhaps a better attitude toward mental illness and easier to access treatment options might help. On the other hand, it doesn't sound like these people though they were mentally ill. On the contrary, they felt the opposite.

I found the bits about how special they think they are to be particularly striking. I certainly feel that my daughter is special, but I understand that what makes her most special is that she is my daughter. The idea that everyone should be, in some way, globally special seems somewhat misguided.

The tough part is knowing that for every one of those that shoots up a bunch of people, there's an untold number of people that might feel similar feelings of alienation and agitation, but don't end up taking those final planning and action steps. In other words, before the killers took those final steps towards becoming a monster, there's not a really good way to differentiate them from someone else who never becomes a monster.

This is where I think the whole discussion goes off the rails - the emphasis is in figuring out how to identify these "potential monsters", or in preventing these "potential monsters" from having the means to accomplish their ends.

But if it's impossible to define a test/indicator such that, if it's true then they'll probably shoot up a school down the line, and if it's false then they probably won't, then where does that leave us?

I think it leaves us in a place of not treating these people as potential monsters, but instead as normal kids struggling with feelings of alienation and lack of purpose, and giving them love and support. Not looking for signs of "potential school shooters" and seeking to prevent it, but looking for signs of loneliness and alienation, and seeking to give support. I just think that for a lot of us, we've probably had times in our past where we had a lot in common with the people that had not yet shot up a bunch of people. So when we think of what might have made our lives better at those times, maybe it would have helped some of them too. There the emphasis is more on just helping alienated kids feel less alone, knowing that for a very small percentage of them, it very well could prevent some real tragedies later on.

I think you have hit on the one key similarity, at least in the examples cited. They all seem to feel they 'deserve' something, that the world owes them a relationship, sex, power, money etc.

When they don't get it they get frustrated and angry, and eventually violent because they feel they are being 'cheated', 'oppressed'. I've read that that Elliot guy also harboured a racist belief that he was better than african-americans, and thought it a huge injustice that he couldn't get a girlfriend but saw african-americans who could.

Elliot Rodger's manifesto: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/05/25/us/shooting-do...

Rodger thought it was a huge injustice that anyone else could have a girlfriend -- or anything else -- when he couldn't. Though he never seems to have actually summoned the courage to ask a girl out.

I link to this far too often, but it's relevant to so many discussions had on this site.

    The Great On-Line Equalizer
    Date: 21 Mar 1996
    https://subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/articles2/X0095_The_Great_On-Line_Eq.html

    Relevant quote:
    """
    All the people who are invisible in the normal world (the world
    run by the rich and powerful), all those people you can dismiss
    on the street as powerless and harmless -- ALL THOSE PEOPLE are
    now in your face.
  
    You can feel their hot breath on the Internet.
    """

It seems the more we become intertwined with the Internet, the more we start feeling their hot breath in real life. Or at least, the more we notice it.

This quote has a lot of truth to it. I think the issue we now face is that it gives EVERYBODY power. Even people that shouldn't ever have it in the first place.

Many of these hashtag protests are purely based on emotion and in some instances, don't even have enough information to make a claim either way (or are based on rumor/false information). This is why our court systems were invented in the first place: to prevent mobs of people from attacking innocent individuals and calling it 'justice'.

I'm not sure how much that applies here. Killers with manifestos have always existed, it has little to do with the internet. They were always in people's faces because, well, they killed people and left manifestos.

Where the internet does come into its own is allowing these disturbed people to find other like-minded (like-disturbed?) people, and feed off each other's misery, perhaps making them more likely to kill.

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2010/02/the_rage_of_the_avera...

I went to school with the author. If you like his writing style, I highly recommend his (long but fascinating) account of trying to ghost write Julian Assange's autobiography. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n05/andrew-ohagan/ghosting

Thanks for mentioning - really enjoyed the linked piece (previously on HN at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9395156 though it didn't generate discussion).

Interesting topic, but the article does nothing more than recycle points taken from the most quotidian of newspaper editorials.

From your first paragraph:

>‘I have noticed,’ it says, ‘that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. A man who was known by no one is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight.’

So, PLEAE can you stop fucking mentioning these assholes names? For the the love of God you are perpetuating the problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herostratus

Now that was a law that backfired... 23.5 centuries later, can the average person think of anyone else who lived in Ephesus back then?

I have no idea why this is controversial. The previous day's Gladwell article even comes to the same conclusion as most that notoriety and coverage are major factor in these types of attacks.

I think the reason its controversial is that, with such a law enacted, oppressive governments can keep the revolutionaries in their boxes. Sometimes, you need to know the name of the revolutionaries. For example, with this "memory hole" policy, would we have ever known who these folks were, and what they were fighting for?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:American_revolutionar...

Or is violent revolution simply not ever going to be acceptable any more because the fact of the application of violent force aspect has been usurped by the mentally insane? Are all violent revolutionaries insane, then? (Hint: no, of course not... unless you're the state they're attempting to violently overthrow, in which case you've got your "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, State-Sponsored Edition" at hand, ready for just such a circumstance ..)

(Note: I am not saying we should worship these insane gun-toting school shooters as revolutionaries - but I am saying that we are on a very slippery slope if we're going to whiteout violent revolutionaries from history, future and past. Revolutions don't happen if you don't have a figurehead to get them started.)

No kidding. Leave them as forgotten as they thought they were in life.

At what point does the constant retread of mass murders' ideals become fetishization? Does anyone really think we'll prevent more of these attacks by deep analysis of their writings or are we just obsessed with the possibility of understanding horrible tragedies?

I'm tired of reading these monsters' names and quotes. They all thought they were the smartest people on the planet and everyone should read their words.

I'm going to stick with remembering the amazing people taken from us instead. I think about people like Liviu Librescu and Alex Teves a lot as a reminder of the requirement for good people to stand up to evil. http://nonotoriety.com/

Is pervasive PUA language in articles now so commonplace that nobody even comments on it?

Is it a thing now to identify people with serious mental health problems with "betas", as if that was in any way a valid or helpful analysis?

There should be a Mad Max reference in the article with Immortal Joe shouting "mediocre", because even in their blaze of glory moment for these troubled individuals, there is no glory and barely any blaze. And I think that the reason they leave this manifestos is because they feel they cannot do anything right and put it as insurance.

"Immortan Joe"

...what about the Unabomber?

He doesnt have much in common with the people mentioned in this article, except Breivik maybe, though i might be completely wrong since i havent read up on the Unabomber.

He's a total outlier since he had two very well documented issues that occurred in his life that affected him profoundly - and I can't blame him for feeling the way he did after either.

The first was at 9 months after bieng born, he got a bad case of the hives and was isolated from his family, with no visitors. This time is the most important time for newborns to bond with their parents and he was deprived of this. His treatments lasted over 8 months which affected him profoundly:

"His mother wrote in March 1943, "Baby home from hospital and is healthy but quite unresponsive after his experience"

The other was a psychology experiment he participated in while at Harvard which people believe fueled his anti-science views:

During Kaczynski’s sophomore year at Harvard, in 1959, he was recruited for a psychological experiment that, unbeknownst to him, would last three years. The experiment involved psychological torment and humiliation, a story I include in my book Mind Wars: Brain Research and the Military in the 21st Century.

The Harvard study aimed at psychic deconstruction by humiliating undergraduates and thereby causing them to experience severe stress

source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/impromptu-man/201205/ha...

The Atlantic had a good story on the experiment as well: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/06/harvard-...

Both those articles were frustrating - the PT one is just promoting a book and the Atlantic one provides only one example. A little more information (based on the latter article's author's book) is available here: http://humaneeducation.org/blog/2010/07/19/imagine-a-differe...

Notwithstanding his murderous behavior, Kaczynski's manifesto is absolutely worth reading. Though uneven, it contains some profound insights, many of which will resonate with anyone interested in social theory.

Yeah, as I understand it the Unabomber was politically motivated terrorism. He also had the distinction of being a pretty smart guy, which is unusual for the demographic that gets into mass murder.

> He also had the distinction of being a pretty smart guy, which is unusual for the demographic that gets into mass murder.

I actually thought it was fairly common for mass killers (other than those whose mass killing is confined to a single mass casualty attack / killing spree), if for no other reason than not being smart makes it more likely that you get caught before your killing reaches the level of "mass".

Ted Bundy [0] Andrew Cunanan [1] Jeffrey Dahmer -

I wouldn't say it's "unusual" [2]

[0] http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Psyc%20405/serial%20killers/B...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Cunanan#Early_life

[2] http://www.examiner.com/article/22-serial-killers-with-high-...

You listed two serial killers with a high IQ; however, the merits of IQ can be debated, but more importantly Kaczynsky stands out because he holds a PhD and was a Berkeley professor.

People alone with their thoughts. Early, frequent and long-term intervention can ease the suffering of mentally troubled individuals. Instead we build prisons, invest in security and hire more police.

Are you advocating more spending on mental healthcare and less spending on prisons? If so I agree, but that isn't explicit in your comment.

These people committing these acts don't usually end up in prison, anyway.

According to this ridiculous article I was "a natural step" from being a school shooter in my teenager years, and so are million others. The juvenile grouping of "jocks and nerds" is not enough for the author, who makes no effort in trying to understand the killera, instead he dwells into generalizations and sheer prejudice. If the title didn't hint you into what sort of article it would be.

I realize this is the actual title of the piece, but it's going to get much fewer views/reads because of it.

For the sake of HN readers, it might be worth editorializing this title to add some kind of context.

This is a common misunderstanding, but in fact the HN guidelines ask you not to use the original title when it is linkbait.

We changed the linkbait title to the subtitle. Once you get past that, this is a substantive piece.

Perhaps adding a note to that effect on the submissions page would help.

Thanks. I flagged the link because of the previous title without even reading the story behind it. I'll unflag it now.

It's little more than a rehash of facts with little exploration beyond that. I expected more from such a read.

It's a very strange time, when anyone can reach anyone else (or any knowledge) instantly, but many use this as an opportunity to isolate themselves even further. It seems to happen a lot when the exceptionalism common to young white men runs straight into the reality that they are in fact unexceptional and what power they have is not just unearned but waning. The cognitive dissonance that results is, as we see over and over, lethal to themselves and others.

> what power they have is not just unearned but waning

That's the interesting thing, though, isn't it? Leaving aside questions of "earned," is their power waning? Does it console Veronika Weiss or Katherine Cooper that we might have a woman as POTUS? I know no one is crusading for it but I will: when will we see equality in mass shootings? To put it in less obviously straw-man terms: why should women have to live in fear when men don't?

My point is: the exceptionalism is apparently justified, because when it couldn't be, they went out and justified it. Got any breathless expose's about your troubled writings?

why should women have to live in fear when men don't?

They don't?

It was definitely a straw man. I'm a dude and I don't live in fear of a shooter, and I don't get the impression many women do either.

My point is: We're quick to claim victory as society grows more tolerant and race/sex matter less, but I think we claim it too soon. That young white men feel entitled to shoot people when their lives don't work out (and apparently others don't) is as real an imbalance as wage gaps, etc.

Very well written and interesting. While some people put the blame on firearms (lets not turn this into a debate on gun control) i believe that its the media attention that is the biggest culprit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4

"Let's not turn this into a debate on BLANK, instead let's talk about my pet theory BLANK".

Seems like that's the only constant after any sort of horrific tragedy. It becomes grist in the mill for people to push their pre-existing agendas.

For some it has been a push for greater gun control. For others it has been a push for greater funding and understanding of mental health. For others, you blame media attention.

Personally, I view these events as "side-effects" of our society. And we're basically loathe to examine it too deeply as it can call into question some deeply held parts of American culture.

"Reduce media attention to criminals" seems like an odd pre-existing personal agenda. What ulterior motive could that possibly correspond to?

Blaming media has gotten increasingly popular for a variety of societal ills. It's just a favorite boogeyman to go after. Much like people who blame violent video games or 4chan.

The ulterior motive is to use the situation to disparage something they already don't like.

Yes, I'm sure people blame the media because they perceive it as popular and not because killers leave manifestos saying they do it because of the attention it will bring them.

-TFA

It's not the media that causes the individual to crave the media attention or infamy.

Does our media contribute? Absolutely. But they are the way they are because of the way we are. Or at least the way the consumers of media are.

As the linked article covers this is not exclusive to America, that's probably one correlation we can genuinely throw out.

To be fair, it does happen more often in America, which may provide some information to see the underlying conditions that lead to the kind of desperate isolation seen in these manifestos.

Media attention may well be the biggest motivator for such actions, but once someone gives in to their murderous impulses guns make it very easy to kill a lot of people, simply by being highly optimized. You can quickly kill more people with a bomb, but they're relatively hard to manufacture and deploy; you can very easily kill someone with a knife or any number of other close-quarters weapons, but it's not reliable or efficient to do so. Thus, while soldiers deployed in combat usually have a knife and may well have hand grenades or other explosives, firearms are the primary weapons by a mile.

I'm not in favor of gun confiscation (and don't plan on getting into any arguments on gun policy today) but it would be absurd to ignore the technological-economic impact of guns on the production of murder. Suggesting that media eschew reporting the news, even to the point of sensationalizing it, is irrational given both what we know about human behavior and the constitutional safeguards against censorship in the US. To be honest, I think people who blame the media are simply demonstrating their own strong preference for social proof and then projecting that motivation onto murderous individuals. It is very likely a significant factor but I don't think we have anywhere near enough data to conclude that it is a primary motivator.

Although it's worth pointing out that some of the worst US mass murders were arsons, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dupont_Plaza_Hotel_arson and there's one I'm having difficultly finding that was almost as bad set in the entrance of a NYC nightclub.

That people in the US choose guns vs. fire is I'm sure cultural, including fire safety being part of our culture, i.e. the "payoff" will seldom be great.

I was expecting a Natural Born Killers scene here.

> According to the FBI, there have been close to two hundred such incidents in the last 15 years, resulting in the murder of 486 people and the wounding of 557 as of September last year

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualt... , in the 8-year Iraq War (2003–2011), there were 3,527 U.S. combat deaths and 32,222 wounded. Could save far more American lives, not to mention others, by keeping sociopaths out of the Presidency rather than profiling and surveilling loners.

Who cares honestly? It's the same rehashed garbage. First world problems galore. Not getting enough sex, not having enough money, not making enough friends but not being willing to do anything about those things but sit in their basement of choice and whine.

Clarifying: The first world problem I'm talking about are the things the shooters cite as reasons for their actions, not the shootings themselves.

Mass shootings are overwhelmingly a US problem, not rest of the first world problem. (There are a few exceptions).

> but not being willing to do anything about those things but sit in their basement of choice and whine.

Or go out and kill a bunch of people.

Not even close; here's an accounting I did covering just Western Europe just for this century as of a little over 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4970408 and the same with some discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5070201

Add e.g. Canada and "[it's] overwhelmingly a US problem" is even less true.

That's 20, for all of Europe, since 2000.

The US has had over 30 mass killings this year. And that's only the events where four or more people were killed. It doesn't include events like Sept 28th 2015 Miami Florida where 15 people were shot but no-one died.

Sept 28th 2015 Miami Florida - I need to include all that information because there were also shootings on that day in Indianapolis, IN; Walterboro, SC; and Philadelphia, PA, and there were shootings (often different events on the same day) on September 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 6th, 11th, 14th, 15th, 18th, 19th 20th, 21st, 29th, and 30th September.

> Not even close

Really?

http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-leads-world-in-mass-shooting...

> The U.S. represents less than 5% of the 7.3 billion global population but accounted for 31% of global mass shooters during the period from 1966 to 2012, more than any other country, Mr. Lankford said, adding that he defines a mass shooter as one who killed at least four victims. The 90 killers who carried out mass shootings in the U.S. amounted to five times as many as the next highest country, the Philippines, according to his research.

Those are different classes of "mass killings", Wikipedians aren't going to collect all the cases of where 4 or more people were killed, and my postings were not intended to discuss scale, just to refute the lie that this is a uniquely American phenomenon with 2000-~2012 examples.

Which is not quite what you claimed, you said "overwhelmingly", and that's sufficiently vague I suspect it's a debatable point. Paywall stops me from the WSJ article, but I know that people who study this sort of thing that I trust have said at minimum the FBI's recent study was bunk, and that's enough for me on this topic.

You tell me what you're counting as a mass killing, and then I can show you how that event is overwhelmingly something that happens in the US. You've pointed to less than two events per year for Europe for this century.

How about six people killed? There have been 13 events in the US where six people were shot and killed since Jan 1 2013.

You're wrong anyway. From your own post:

> De Gelder, Kim, 20, Jan. 16/23,, 2009, Belgium, 4, 12

> Bosse, Bastian, 18, Nov. 20, 2006, Germany, 0, 22

> Radmacher, Sabine, 41, Sep. 19, 2010, Germany, 3, 18 (arson was also used)

> Sacco, Angelo Secondo, 54, June 28, 2005, Italy, 3, 9

Numbers killed: 4, zero, 3, and 3.

Wikipedians are going to list every event that happens in Europe, because these events are so rare. They are by definition news worthy, which provides a lot of reliable sources. But US mass shootings are so common that they hardly make the news.

The fact that you dismiss an event where 15 people were shot but not killed as not being relevant, or you dismiss events where 4 people or more are killed as not being mass killings is a sign that this conversation is pointless: you're blind to the facts.

> this is a uniquely American

I didn't say uniquely, I said overwhelmingly.

It is overwhelmingly a US problem.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/oct/0...

That article cites 'shootingtracker.com' as a source, which is a known-false propaganda site, as it includes accidents with airsoft guns in their list of "mass shootings".

I have been shot by an airsoft gun. It stung a bit.

Since January 1st, 2013, Wikipedia shows six mass killings in the United States, two in China, and four in continental Europe.

If you show the US data, people could compare the numbers and draw their own conclusion.

If you want to talk about people being shot, instead of just cases where civilians walk into a crowded place just to kill as many people as possible, then I think you need to take Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Palestine, and more into account. And I doubt, once you do that, that the US will still have the most mass shootings or carnage.

We need to define what a mass shooting is. Most people use "4 people or more shot". A mass killing is "4 people or more killed". (A serial killing has cool down time between death).

By these definitions the US has more mass killings than those other countries.

>The U.S. represents less than 5% of the 7.3 billion global population but accounted for 31% of global mass shooters during the period from 1966 to 2012, more than any other country, Mr. Lankford said, adding that he defines a mass shooter as one who killed at least four victims. The 90 killers who carried out mass shootings in the U.S. amounted to five times as many as the next highest country, the Philippines, according to his research.

Adjust it to per capita, and the US still leads the world in mass killings and mass shootings.

The US is worse than the shitholes you list.

I am skeptical. The WSJ article[0] covering Lankford's claims has a graphic that shows none of those countries with even two mass shootings since 2000, including the Philippines. The Mother Jones[1] article says that only four countries broke double digits, and again, none of the countries I listed made the list. Or Mexico, which is widely reported to be rife with gang violence, including mass murders.

It appears that Lankford's paper[2] has not yet been published. When it is, and if it is available for free, we can look at the details of his claims.

[0] http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-leads-world-in-mass-shooting...

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/08/united-states-wo...

[2] http://adamlankford.com/research.htm

Wasn't referring to the mass shootings being a first world problem, referring to the varying "crises" presented as justifications FOR mass murder, which are almost without exception pathetic.

First world problems galore. Not getting enough sex...

You have a different idea of 1WP than I do. I think most humans have some interest in sex, and certainly most young men in both developed and developing nations would like to have a fair amount of it.

Once upon a time, nearly all women from a fairly young age were forced by custom and circumstance into subservient relations with men. We can appreciate that those circumstances have changed in much of the "first world". We'd be foolish not to realize that those changes have led to more men losing access to regular intercourse. The anti-prostitution laws that were in a skewed sense almost "feminist" back when a woman couldn't freely leave a relationship have certainly ceased to be that by now.

I don't claim that widespread legal prostitution would solve the mass-shooting problem. However, this has been identified as a factor in the unhappiness that these men feel, so it's relevant. It's interesting that this relevant factor is rarely mentioned in the numerous popular media discussions of mass shootings.

"You have a different idea of 1WP than I do. I think most humans have some interest in sex, and certainly most young men in both developed and developing nations would like to have a fair amount of it."

But only men in the first world seem to believe they're entitled to it. As outdated and somewhat horrible your other examples were when daughters were essentially sold, at least the men doing the purchasing had attained enough personal wealth to buy the woman in question, meaning they could earn a living and provide for them after the fact. I'm also totally fine with prostitution too, no issues there.

That all being said, the male who feels entitled to sex is a distinct Western phenomenon. They point to tons of personal flaws they don't have, as in they aren't jerks and they don't treat women like shit, and talk about it as if that should be winning them the peace prize. The pretty girls have guys being nice to them a hundred times a day, who gives a shit if you do too?

...the male who feels entitled to sex is a distinct Western phenomenon.

Have you ever traveled outside the West? This statement is just wrong.

Historically, some societies had to break less successful men of this sense of entitlement, for reasons of arithmetic, e.g. societies with polygyny or strict women-marry-up norms. When this breaking was done, it was most often in strict Maslow-hierarchy terms. So poor men were so poor that they were literally starving, or they got Shanghaied onto a ship, etc. You see something similar with "fundamentalist" Mormons in western USA today: daughters are locked in the house, while many sons are abused, underfed, and overworked until they run away.

Sure, it's a first world problem. I guess you can either emphasize "first world", or "problem." As a resident or denizen of the first world, I'm interested in first world problems.

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