Hacker News Reader

Comment by arturadib | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

Right, except for Utoya, Liege, Florence, Alphen aan den Rijn, Bratislava, Cumbria, Sello mall, Winnendon school, Kauhajoki school, Akihabara, Jokela school, Linchang school, Kauhajoki school, Shiguan kindergarten, Rio, Azerbaijan State Oil Academy, Siakago, the Chengdu bus fire, and others.

Yup, entirely an "American phenomenon".

These aren't terror attacks predominantly. These aren't drug crimes predominantly. These are by and large very comparable to the Columbine or Aurora incidents.

The fact is that this is not in any way remotely an "American phenomenon", and the fact that so many people believe that to be the case is an indication of gross ignorance of the existence of these events around the world. I only listed examples of non-US spree or massacre events within the last 5 years, and this isn't even a complete list.

Look at the lists on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spree_shooting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers

Read through the incidents. Even just the ones within the last 10 years. And then tell me with a straight face that this is some sort of especially American event.

Edit: If there's one thing I've realized more than anything from reading up about these types of events it's that following the media is a poor substitute for research. I think most people would assume that if you were an avid consumer of news over the last 5 years you would have heard about, say, every worldwide rampage killing that involved more than 5 fatalities, right? But that is far from the truth. A lot of these events received almost no news coverage. I don't think people realize how incredibly selective and incomplete the view of the world through the lens of the global news media is.

It's not uniquely American, sure. But Europe has 2.5 times the population of the USA, yet has only 12 listings in the last 10 years in your first link, against the USA's 10.

In the second link, the page points to individual pages for rampage killers, which give 19 for the USA in the last 10 years against 13 for Europe.

But really, arguing about spree killers isn't really the way to do it, even though they are symptomatic. Much scarier is the US's overall homicide rate - currently at 4.8/100k. Compared to other anglo countries (1.1-1.8k) or western European countries (0.8-0.9), the US is far in excess of these.

I think a large part of the problem is that in the US, there's much more focus on resolving problems through the use of firearms - it's manly, it's patriotic, it's in all the movies.

Check it out - the highest rate in a western first-world country (= similar culture base) that isn't the US is Israel at 2.1, less than half the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...

One more data source to support your point (the US accounts for 10 of the 20 worst rampages in Western democratic countries):

http://www.statista.com/statistics/1871/number-of-victims-of...

“the highest rate in a western first-world country (= similar culture base) that isn't the US is Israel at 2.1, less than half the US.”

And since Israel is in the middle of a civil war, those numbers can be easily explained. More curious is Finland, a western first-world country, which has the same homicide rate as Israel (per your link.)

Finland has a lot of problems with Seasonal Affective Disorder due to their latitude - they also rate highly when it comes to suicide rates.

“The fact is that this is not in any way remotely an "American phenomenon"”

The list of spree killings you linked to contains 54 incidents. 24 of those happened in the US. Your other link has a section on school massacres. 5 out of those 15 listed happened in the US. Another section, workplace killings: 6 out of 15. ‘Other notable incidents’: 10 out of 34.

Hamburgers may be served all over the world, but they remain a very American foodstuff.

I don't think it is clear at all that "Columbine-like shooting are an American phenomenon". The UK has had several massacres where in each case over a dozen were killed with no apparent motive (Dunblane in 1996, Cumbira in 2010), and there have been several smaller scale incidents along similar lines. The same is true in other countries around the world - I'm just citing those I'm most familiar with.

The US certainly has a higher frequency of apparently motiveless mass murders, but I think it is fairly certain that this is due to easy access to weapons. Someone who is mentally unbalanced is probably going to kill fewer people with a knife before being stopped than with a gun.

In Japan, one mass murderer kills 8 Japanese schoolchildren with a knife. In another incident, a mass murderer kills 3 people with a truck and then killed 4 individuals on foot. They were eventually arrested and sentenced to death.

If somebody was there with a gun, they could have engage the murderer in a firefight instead of defenseless people getting knifed or getting shot.

The amount of determination required to do that much killing with a knife would have had its effects amplified by the ready availability of a gun.

You think some person with a handgun would stand much of a chance against someone in body armor with an assault rifle?

You think some person with a handgun would stand much of a chance against someone in body armor with an assault rifle?

It would not be certainty a fair fight. Even so, a murderer is forced to engage civilians who are shooting at them rather than civilians who are simply defenseless. The only thing a person with handgun can do is buy time for a SWAT team to arrive and the slower the SWAT are, the more likely for death. (See the North Hollywood shootout as an example of this)

Nonetheless, I consider the defenders having guns to be an equalizer. In the Virginia Tech massacre incident, the murderer have only two handguns, but he was able to kill 32 individuals.

Unless those civilians have been trained under live-fire circumstances, there is a far greater probability that they would add to the toll of bystander injuries than that they would quickly stop the original threat. It's not life on the target range; flinching, adrenalin tremors and tunnel vision are real, and a miss (or a through-and-through) doesn't always go safely into a sand berm. And what about the other armed individuals whose situational awareness is formed when they see two or three shooters rather than the original one?

> You think some person with a handgun would stand much of a chance against someone in body armor with an assault rifle?

Considering he was stopped simply by 2 people tackling him I would say: quite possibly.

Am I the only one who thinks it's humorous how many people think that body armor means bullets just ricochet to the ground harmlessly?

Vests are simply for preventing shots from penetrating vital organs, not turning the wearer into Iron Man. Best case scenario, it'll feel like you just got hit with a golf drive. If your ribs aren't broken, they'll be badly bruised. The weapon is negligible since it's not a firefight, if anything, armed people in the theater would have the upper hand because these killers are never expecting people to shoot back at them. Really, anybody who's ever shot a gun could have likely killed him, if not debilitated him enough such that people could escape.

There are strong arguments to both sides of gun control but alluding that handguns are insufficient protection is not one of them, that's just ignorance.

If a psychopath wants an assault rifle, they will go to any means to obtain one, regardless of it is legal to own one wherever they live. Meanwhile, if you have unarmed police and no armed civilians, you are likely to have killers go on even more unstoppable rampages.

Additionally, killers who can't get guns will just resort to other methods of mass destruction, like our little theater shooter who had bombs and gas grenades as well. You can build a pipe bomb in your own basement with commodity supplies. Tools of destruction are cheap and always readily available.

Real policy is a numbers game.

Anyone who is sufficiently determined to do anything doable will probably end up approximately doing it.

The issue is: how much, how often, how many people will be affected, etc.

> The UK has had several massacres where in each case over a dozen were killed with no apparent motive (Dunblane in 1996, Cumbira in 2010), and there have been several smaller scale incidents along similar lines.

This is disingenuous. There have not been 'several cases where over a dozen were killed, and several smaller scale incidents'. There have been exactly three in recent UK history: Dunblane (16 schoolchildren killed, and has to be the worst criminal act in modern UK history), Cumbria (12 adults in a lone gunman killing spree), and the Hungerford Massacre in 1987 (16 murdered by lone gunman).

Going further back, there is the Shepherd's Bush murders in 1966 (3 policemen and 2 members of the public shot dead) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepherd%27s_Bush_murders as a possible example of 'several smaller scale incidents along similar lines.' But this is hardly how you phrased it.

Now look at the United States list as a comparison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_the_United...

> Now look at the United States list as a comparison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_the_United....

You realize this list contains everything from wars, to 9/11, to drug gang battles, etc, etc. It is not even remotely comparable to a list of actions with "no apparent motive".

Yes of course I realize this. There is no list of 'no apparent motive recent shootings' on wikipedia i'm afraid, so you will have to do a little leg-work yourself.

Feel free to scan through the US list and pick out the many dozens that fit. Just reading down the top of the list, in the last decade or two I see Tuscon 2011, Geneva County massacre 2009, Cupertino quarry shooting 2009, Oikos University shooting 2012, Seal Beach shooting 2011, Aurora shooting 2012, Columbine 1999, Brown's Chicken massacre 1993, Northern Illinois University shooting 2008. That's from the first 4 or 5 states in that list.

There has been exactly three massacres of this type in recent UK history (~last 50 years). There are dozens in the US just in the last couple of decades. So implying that UK has a similar incidence of random killing spree gun crime as the grandparent did is disingenuous.

> There has been exactly three massacres of this type in recent UK history (~last 50 years). There are dozens in the US just in the last couple of decades. So implying that UK has a similar incidence of random killing spree gun crime as the grandparent did is disingenuous.

I am no expert in this field, but the US has approximately five times the population of the UK [1], so wouldn't it be expected the number of random killing sprees be at least five times higher?

[1] US population: 311,591,917

UK population: 62,641,000

(taken from www.google.co.uk/publicdata)

Yes the US population is 5x the size. I posit that there are significantly more than 15 "random" shooting massacres in the last 50 years in the United States. No I haven't counted them, but really i'm surprised this is being disputed. I listed 9 here in just the top 5 states on the list. Eyeballing it there looks like at least 30 that fit the criteria.

I realise this isn't a rigorous study but my original post was not to set out a formal proof here. I was just correcting the original poster implying that there had been "several massacres" where "more than a dozen had been killed" (there have been two in recent UK history, and 1 at 12) and "several on a smaller scale" (there is one, maybe two, given your criteria).

I then just offhandedly linked to a list that shows "dozens", i would guess 30 or more, that have taken place in the United States in recent history. I guess i'm regretting posting a link as it seemed to many it implied i thought the complete 125 or so in that list fit the bill. I was just leaving it as an exercise to glance through and see the many more (certainly more than 15) that have recently occurred in the United States.

> There is no list of 'no apparent motive recent shootings' on wikipedia i'm afraid, so you will have to do a little leg-work yourself.

There is a pretty decent and much more relevant list mentioned in another comment in this thread: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers

It's worth noting that this list has notable omissions like Columbine. I'm not sure about the accuracy of the rest of it, but omitting such recent notables makes me question the utility of the list.

"highschool shootings" and other categories have for some reason been separated out of the regional list and put in to their own categories. So as I say, there doesn't seem to be a decent list already compiled.

Columbine is on there. They break it out into the sections, its under the school massacre section. It's listed by city as Littleton, CO as I don't believe Columbine is actually an incorporated entity, just an area of land.

Some of those American massacres go back to the 14th century. It's quite possible that more have occurred in the USA than the UK, but that's hardly a fair comparison.

I didn't say (or mean to imply) "compare my list of three with this list on wikipedia." I stated the three cases of massacre in recent UK history, which is well below that grandparent was implying.

I then provided a link to a list where you could pick out the dozens of cases of recent massacre in the United States (among a list of around ~125 across history). I haven't compiled an exhaustive list myself, but just from glancing at it you will be left in no doubt as to the scale of the problem in the US and that the UK is not comparable.

Honestly I'm sure you could name off the top of your head over a dozen during your lifetime that occurred in the United States.

> Some of those American massacres go back to the 14th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crow_Creek_massacre is included in the list. It's dated to about 1325.

The population of the USA is about 10x te population of the UK. You'd expect far more killings. The important number is per capita.

Of course, going by what happened to get into a Wikipedia list and what you happen to recall is pretty slim as evidence.

10x... I don't think so. US population is 311m, uk is 63m.

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.

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.

Taking away legal access != eliminating easy access to guns. It still may well be the case that it is easy to buy guns on the black market.

On the other hand, you also disarm the population, making them easier target for mass murderer.

It works so well with drugs. I mean they are illegal and you can't buy them on the street--oh wait.

On the other hand, you also disarm the population, making them easier target for mass murderer.

Has a massacre in the US ever been stopped by someone with a gun, who wasn't a cop?

Possibly the Appalachian School of Law shooting, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appalachian_School_of_Law_sho...

A blanket ban will (a) have a miserable compliance rate, (b) dramatically increase the value of firearms, and (c) help ensure that law-abiding citizens are defenseless against criminals (who generally don't care if they're already breaking the law).

In the 1990s, California attempted mandatory registration of "assault rifles." Compliance was about 10 percent, and was officially acknowledged a failure.

I can't imagine what a total ban would look like. House to house patrols? With whom, the army? I'm guessing that nobody would want that job. I conjecture it'd be unconstitutional, or appear that way to enough soldiers and policemen that they wouldn't enforce it.

There are 300+ million guns in private hands in the US, in 50M+ households. This is a "wicked problem" if you're looking at a gun ban as the solution. Estimates I've read put the time to effectively zero guns in private hands in the 200-250 year range. A ban just isn't going to be pleasant; it might result in /worse/ violence, both immediately (in reactions and protest) and over time (through creation of victims) -- of course this is not testable, so it'll have to remain rhetoric.

I'm going to guess that arming lots of citizens isn't the answer, either. States with concealed carry permits /appear/ to be safer than those without, but a rational deterrent is not going to stop someone who's irrational.

In an ideal world we don't need guns, and everybody has a pony. We don't live in an ideal world.

tl;dl; Firearms bans in the US are really really hard.

> It's very hard to kill so many people with a knife.

The Rwandan genocide was largely carried out with machetes.

Probably because US events get a lot more media attention. But no, this is happening all around the world. Just look at this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rampage_killers

I've lived in the US for 10 years, and I follow plenty of world news. It is clear that Columbine-like shootings are (with few exceptions) an American phenomenon. [1]

Um, what? I can cite two mass murder incident in Japan off the top of my head. There is the Osaka school massacre and the Akihabara massacre.

"with few exceptions"

I can't back it up with facts but I do have the impression this sort of thing is significantly more common in the US than in any European, Asian, African or South American country.

I guess you would have to compile statistics for "Mass murderers with no clear motive per capita" and compile all the incidents going back at least 20 years and you might have evidence for or against.

For example, I can imagine this happening in any African countries I am familiar with, so to me it is clear that there is an element of culture involved.

The thing is, a mass murder incident is significantly rare enough to warrant media coverage. The American may simply be unlucky.

I can think of several in Europe as well. Germany alone has suffered two double-digit-victim school shootings in the past decade, despite having a population 1/4 that of the US: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnenden_school_shooting , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfurt_massacre. It's interesting that the German media, at the time of Winnenden, often asked an analogous question to the one being asked here: whether it was becoming a particularly German phenomenon. Population-adjusted, it would be as if the US had had eight mass school shootings since Columbine, which it hadn't had.

The US has a large population and media that tries to scare people. I don't think it's any more common in the US than elsewhere, we just hear about it more from the US since it has a larger population.

Worse, we hear about it 24/7 until the next thing comes along to peak the interest of the media. We don't hear a lot about the 14 things higher on the list of things killing people in the USA (which affects their funding in Congress).

Hell, the rush in the media is so obscene that major news networks make stuff up. ABC seems to be the most guilty party this time, but we have had other incidents.

We have a no attention span media and it does hurt because we cannot get a good idea of what actually went on, and will never no if there is some warning sign that could of tipped people off (like the whole AZ shooting seems to be a collection of not my problems).

I have no idea how we get past this. Concentrating on the object (gun in this case) will not work (check out IED or actual crime rate statistics). Looking at the stats, your safer today then 10 years ago and much safer than the 1970s.

> I have no idea how we get past this.

We won't, as long as "journalism" is a profit driven business, where revenue is based on ad viewership.

The result is more entertainment and editorial than education, where the need to be first, even with inaccurate stories, overrides any sense of integrity.

I personally don't have an opinion on gun control but it is pretty clear to me that easy access to guns is what stands out.

I am not an American and it is clear to me that without essentially unrestricted to guns that crimes like this would be less frequent (and probably just not happen).

Guns kill things, it is their purpose and easy access to guns makes the killing of people more likely.

Meta, but this is a great example of the availability bias.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com