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Old 12-16-2012, 12:42 AM   #26
Saya
 
Join Date: Oct 2005
Posts: 9,548
[quote=Jonathan;709110]That is a hell of a question, isn't it? We know this kind of thing is not only an American phenomenon - for example the 2011 Norway attacks.[quote]

That was Norway's one and only mass killing spree, since we've been keeping track. Canada has had two school shootings ever where the death toll was over two. ten school shootings in total since 1902. Other than school shootings, we've had four mass shootings in the last century. France has never had a school shooting, and its last mass killing was in 2002. Aside from the Norway shooting, I can find only on other in 2012 in the first world, a shooting in Moscow. The US has had seven this year alone. The long sad list of US school shootings go back to the eighteenth century. The only country comparable (obviously I'm excluding war torn nations, areas of civil unrest, and over-exploited nations, I'm focusing on the first world) is China, which doesn't quite fit into the first world focus and I don't know enough to compare motivations. So among other first world countries, America is far in the lead. Its not totally special to America, but it mostly happens there.

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I do agree that access to health care is not the whole story - people can fall through or slip through the cracks. The best health care in the world is useless if it isn't taken advantage of, but it is extremely difficult to utilize something that isn't widely available.
But it was available to this kid, apparently, and therefore access to healthcare is pretty irrelevant at best and at worst, stigmatizing. Unhealthy and disabled people, physical or mental, are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. We need defense from able bodied and healthy people too. A close friend of mine works with kids in the foster home, and she asked for a permanent placement in a house with a kid with severe autism because she's rather have fun with her than go to a house with a bratty kid who's willing to bite to get her way.

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Exactly - even if we had the most stringent psychological screening it would have been useless in the case of this specific incident. That doesn't necessarily make it a bad idea though. We all know that there is a staggering range of things that fall under the category of "mental health", and it can range widely in terms of how people are able to function. I think we can do a better job of making sure firearms are available to people who will be responsible owners without needlessly alienating people. We already have a very loose kind of psychological screening, http://www.atf.gov/forms/download/atf-f-4473-1.pdf question 11f. Self reporting is a bit of a joke, but I don't think that taking a serious look at possibly expanding on that is a terrible idea to be discarded out of hand.
Yeah, and its still useless, because unless you're going to get Big Brother about it, which gun enthusiasts seem to really not like and defeats the purpose, kids, even mentally unstable ones! Are going to have parents who own arsenals. Its the bed you make when powerful guns are legal to buy and own.

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Exactly. One of the ways that make it "easier" for people that have that natural aversion to killing is to create distance. It could be physical distance, like artillery strikes where you push a button and the blip on a screen goes away, or psychological distance (othering!) ethnic/racial distance, religious or political.....

Of course. There's been a ton of research on how to get the desired results. There's a whole range of what people respond to. There's the deference to authority you mentioned, the group identification, individual conditioning... However to really commit atrocity is a whole other level.
Isn't that distancing and othering? You force the enlisted to do it for you, but you plan it, you allow it, you encourage it. You're pressing a button that drops a bomb without having to face the consequences. Mass **** in war time, for example, doesn't always happen, it happens when leaders typically allow it or encourage it. Milosevic is just as responsible if not more so than the soldiers who carried out his orders.


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Right. In addition to the reluctance to kill another human being, is a built in sense of guilt/shame/horror at the action. That's a big part of the "traumatic" in PTSD. That's how healthy people react to horrible things. The "My god what have I done" factor. When people are able to repeatedly commit atrocities without experiencing that, something is very wrong. Whether it is a permanent or temporary natural state that doesn't allow them to experience it, or it is somehow conditioned out of them, in either case it indicates that there is a breakdown.
I don't have the textbook with me right now, but I can look it up later for the exact amount, but during WWI or WWII they actually figured out what the threshold was before you got the thousand year stare, it was over a hundred consecutive days of combat. Violence changes you, but not everyone gets PTSD and that doesn't make them a monster or wrong. You can feel guilt but not be seriously affected in the long term, and you can have PTSD without feeling remorse at all.

A People's History Of The Vietnam War talks about that perception, though, where Vietnam vets could only get benefits for PTSD treatment if they accepted that they were sadistic and violent and got sexual pleasure from it and stopped blaming the army or the government. Soldiers can be as much victims as the people they kill, and the people who make them do it often don't lose any sleep at night.


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"In Milgram's first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40) of experiment participants administered the experiment's final massive 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment; some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment. Throughout the experiment, subjects displayed varying degrees of tension and stress. Subjects were sweating, trembling, stuttering, biting their lips, groaning, digging their fingernails into their skin, and some were even having nervous laughing fits or seizures."

'Normal' people can be encouraged/pushed to do awful things, but there are definite mental and physiological consequences.
Yes, but how long lasting are the effects? Many reported after that they'd do it again. Even if they all got PTSD or some kind of mental illness as a result, the illness comes after, not before. It doesn't not enable violence, its a reaction to violence.
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