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Narcissistic Rage
Alienation
Mental Instability
Rigid or Concrete Black/White Thinking
Easy access to guns
Glorification of violence
Toxic Masculinity

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"The striking thing about many of the shootings from Columbine to the present was that it was white middle-class school shooters who tended to attack their victims indiscriminately, showing that alienation and violence is expanding through all classes, races, and sectors of contemporary U.S. society."

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A conversation on Guns, Masculinities, and School Shootings - Author - Fast Capitalism 4.1

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Katz is the creator of the educational video Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis In Masculinity, and the author of The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help. Douglas Kellner is George F.

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"Americans have become frighteningly disconnected and alone. There are fewer Americans active in any group than there were in bowling leagues alone in 1970. The many millions of loners accumulating in the U.S. since the '70s tend to experience and define their disconnection as personal. Many think it is their fault that they cannot occupy a happy place of connection in the America they imagine is still there. They imagine that other people continue to find ways to connect. They feel adrift. They can come to resent those from whom they are slipping away."

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Economically, he was one of the growing millions without a secure, meaningful, socially approved, well-paid job. He had previously amassed money by buying and selling real estate, but had no ongoing job. He lacked the relationships that flow from working with others to accomplish a shared goal where each person has a part to play. The stability of a daily job and the people to whom that job connects you are bulwarks against loneliness and mental instability.

Stephen Paddock's last family contact was with one of his brothers whom he telephoned three years before the shooting. He had not contacted other family members for 20 years. He and his live-in girlfriend kept their blinds closed. They socialized with no one.

Paddock had been told throughout his life that the U.S. was a special place, an exceptional place. Each generation, if its members studied and worked hard, would live better than the one before. Progress and prosperity awaited him. He would raise a family and provide his wife and children with more than had been provided to him and to his family of origin. Both of his marriages soon ended in divorce.

As millions of secure jobs disappeared, especially after the 1970s, Paddock became unemployed often for long periods. He became a real estate dealer buying and selling buildings for profit. He amassed some wealth, an American dream most men do not achieve, but it did not connect him to other human beings. Paddock had failed to achieve the promised dream of the connections and family that money was supposed to accompany. He lost his moorings.

Even when he managed an activity that brought him money, it tended to be in areas not associated with hard work in connection with others. From making money speculating in real estate he moved on to solitary gambling at casinos. He had no place in the socially approved work and life images he had grown up to value, expect and seek as markers of his success as a human being.

Mental health can be likened to a table resting on four legs. One leg is an intimate relationship with a partner, friend or relative to whom one can intimately connect when the need arises. A second leg is a wider circle of people with whom one shares friendly connections. They may be work colleagues or a circle of casual friends or relatives whose company you enjoy. It may even be close Facebook friends, but you see them less frequently than your intimate connection(s). A third leg is a group to which you connect in a limited but shared activity. That may be a team sport, a volunteer effort, a PTA, or political organization whose members develop the solidarity of working together. A fourth leg is connection to one's nation and the world through political activity, engagement with media covering major current events, and sharing opinions, ideas or petitions online. A table can be sturdy and stable with at least three strong legs, but only two or one does not suffice.

Americans have become frighteningly disconnected and alone. There are fewer Americans active in any group than there were in bowling leagues alone in 1970. The many millions of loners accumulating in the U.S. since the '70s tend to experience and define their disconnection as personal. Many think it is their fault that they cannot occupy a happy place of connection in the America they imagine is still there. They imagine that other people continue to find ways to connect. They feel adrift. They can come to resent those from whom they are slipping away.

American white men once received two wage supplements in what was a sexist and racist labor market. One wage supplement was for whiteness and the other for maleness. With the resulting "family wage" generally paid to white men, they could support a woman working full time at home, providing full maid service, sexual labor, child care, and the emotional labor of making social connections to engage the whole family with friends and relatives. With white men's family wage now largely gone, most women are now employed outside the home. They cannot, in addition, do all the housework, childcare, etc., that they did before. They want their men to share emotional and domestic burdens in the home. Yet many men want extra services at home to compensate them for their lower pay and lower status outside the home. Household tensions rise. Women are abandoning those men who cannot support them yet still demand a range of household services that employed women cannot and do not want to perform. American white men have been disempowered. They are hurting.

The family wage for white men evaporated as modern jet travel and telecommunications enabled U.S. capitalists to relocate production overseas where wages are much lower. Simultaneously, computers enabled an intensification of automation. Capitalists stopped worrying about living, no less family, wages, safety standards, benefits, or ecological safety measures. Where once capitalist profit-seeking produced a family wage, post-1970s profit-seeking took it away.

Gender plays its own role in white men's pain and their coping mechanisms. Men's emotions are constrained. They have to "man up" even in the face of devastating, real losses. Sex remains a key need allowed both for and within a widespread male stereotype. Likewise, anger remains an emotion permitted and often celebrated as manly and powerful.

Many men look to recoup their lost powers. They become especially vulnerable to advertisements for products promoted as conveying power. Nothing illustrates this better than some ads for Bushmaster automatic weapons. They ask, "Does your wife or girlfriend make more money than you? Revoke your man card. Do you prefer tofu to meat? Revoke your man card." After such questions, the Bushmaster automatic rifle is celebrated with the statement " Reinstate your man card." That ad was pulled after many protested and after the Bushmaster was used by Adam Lanza in the Sandy Hook mass shooting that killed 20 elementary school children and six staff members.

In stark gender contrast, women often find primary feminine identity in close friendships with other women or in connection to relatives and children. Their identity allows a wide range of vulnerable needs and emotions. Women are far less frequent gun users. Women also do not appear on the roster of mass shootings.

Often, disempowered people - particularly white men - are tempted to search for and find scapegoats to blame for their disenfranchisement and loneliness. Cues from political leaders seeking votes can point them to certain social groups. For example, Trump and many Republicans make none too subtle negative comments about immigrants, women, minorities and a government they denounce for privileging those groups at the expense of white Americans, etc.

The liberal U.S. media often blame angry, disempowered white men and their spokespersons for being politically incorrect and boorish. Those media rarely if ever analyze the role of capitalism in denying white men their family wages and the American dream. Capitalism - the profit system - is thereby rendered innocent while angry white workers are deplorably prejudiced. Men versus women, white against non-white, immigrant against native: a divided mass of people (mostly employees) get caught up in conflicts as while capitalists accumulate wealth and capitalism evades criticism.

Americans do not have a mass party or organized voice to help people understand that capitalist profiteering motivated those who took their family wages and jobs. Many are thus left with hatred for other people. That seldom works to overcome or end loneliness.

Americans have found still other ways to cope with their loneliness and disconnection: they medicate themselves against personal pain with alcohol and painkilling drugs. Self-medicating is a now an epidemic. Fully 64,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2016. In this drug refuge, capitalist profit also shows its hand. Most U.S. drug deaths are caused either by opiates (natural substances like heroin) or opioids (synthetic painkillers like Oxycontin, Vicodin, Percocet and Fentanyl). Doctors are paid well to keep prescribing by the supremely profitable pharmaceutical industry. Alcohol is legal and also affords a personal escape from the misery of losing family wages. An estimated 88,000 people ( approximately 62,000 men and 26,000 women) die from alcohol-related causes annually. Food is also a comfort for loneliness. One in three American adults and at least one in ten U.S. children are obese. Loneliness is an epidemic in America.

Work is a central activity for most adults. The more speedup is installed by employers, the more employees are prevented from connecting at work. The less people are employed together, the lonelier they are. As the gig economy and part-time and temp work situations multiply, so does loneliness. Most men's only emotionally close relationships are tied to their work or sex partnerships. With work relationships ever more fragile and temporary, much the same happens to sexual connections. Meanwhile, marriages are being undermined by that same erosion of the family wage. For the first time in U.S. history, a majority of people 35 and under are now unattached.

One out of four Americans has no one to talk to even in the worst emergencies. Most of those people are men. For deeply disconnected and resentful men, social norms can fade; angry shooting at random others becomes possible. This is an especially American phenomenon. In 2017 so far, we have had 152 mass shootings. No other developed nation has had anything remotely like that. Why? One reason is that all other developed nations have gun controls and none have an unchecked gun industry that relentlessly equates guns with manhood. Another reason is that other developed nations have powerful unions and political movements that direct people's anger about the pain in their lives toward its social causes and especially the inequality and instability of capitalist systems. They connect people to change those social and economic conditions together.

For 150 years from 1820 to 1970, every generation of families led by white men did better economically than the generation before them. Even in the Great Depression of the 1930s prices fell faster than wages; employed men even then earned more than their predecessors. That historical process of improvement stopped in the 1970s. The belief in American exceptionalism did not stop with the changed reality. That left American white men with self-blame for their economic difficulties and the resulting psychic pains. Worse still, it left them with the idea that they could individually overcome their intolerable situations.

What we need in order to stop the carnage of mass shootings is a social movement that articulates a social analysis of America's problems and is unafraid to put the capitalist system at the core of those problems. We also need a social movement committed to social changes that include going beyond the capitalist system. If people could join together, face that their lives are plundered in order for capitalists to increase profit, and face that gender stereotypes distort our shared humanity, then together we can change the conditions of despair, rage, and loneliness that generate mass shootings.

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American hyper-capitalism breeds the lonely, alienated men who become mass killers

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Economically, he was one of the growing millions without a secure, meaningful, socially approved, well-paid job. He had previously amassed money by buying and selling real estate, but had no ongoing job. He lacked the relationships that flow from working with others to accomplish a shared goal where each person has a part to play.

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"White domestic terrorists like Timothy McVey and Anders Brevik are “united by a ‘narrative of victimhood and the heroic struggle between the faithful and the unfaithful, the authentic and inauthentic,’” (George Monbiot, Out of the Wrekage). In short, these madmen see themselves as saviors."

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A society whose narrative is built on hyper-individualism and competition disenfranchises quicker than men can cope. And it makes them dangerous.

"Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings," (Ben Okri, A Way of Being Free).

There is a story inoculated into your mind at a very young age in the U.S. The story that competition and individualism are the prerequisites to liberty or freedom.

This is a story told by neoliberalism, the defining political ideology of our time. Neoliberalism's ideology has seeped into our language. Its tendrils so deep that not a single aspect of our lives isn't touched by it.

At its heart is a radical belief in the ultimate personal freedom at the expense of everyone. Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian economist, first created the ideology in the mid-1900s. It was simple. That redistribution of wealth, political freedom, and human equality were harmful. Those ideas restrict the freedom of the rich and powerful. Who, he argued, would drive humanity forward with their opulent spending, their freedom to push the boundaries of human existence.

The first wave came under Thatcher in the UK with Reagan soon following in the US. It's worked startiling well for those it was meant to. The privatization and marketization of public services have made the rich filthy rich. The deregulation of the financial service sector has created an entirely new class of bourgeois that live entirely on financial tools.

It's horrible. It's gut-wrenching. But it's based on something incredibly misanthropic. It's based on the story told by philosopher Thomas Hobbes in 1651. In his famous work Leviathan, he postulated that human relations are based on war and struggle. In essence, everyone is at war with each other at all times. The only thing that stops this boiling kettle from erupting is a strong central figure like a monarch.

Pull back the veneer and you'll see. We are just as sordid, self-serving and maximizing as ever. We have heard this story so often that it's become part of us. And it's changed the way we address problems. We no longer work together to solve issues. Instead, we are individuals striving against each other to overcome our private problems.

It's enough to make you feel alone, abandoned. I'll admit that in moments of weakness, I tend to recoil into a self-survival mode. My first instinct is to protect myself. To withdraw. To disentangle. One of the hardest lessons I've learned early in my career has been to not treat your employer loyally. It's hard not to be self-maximizing when you feel exposed to the pressures of your employer. When you've had to scratch your way out of a sea of equally qualified applicants. You feel the "replaceability" mantra hounding you if you take a day off to be sick. You're stuck in a constant cycle of probation period and contract renewal. You feel alone.

Why not surrender to this narrative then? And forgoe any bonds of fraternal cooperation? Because its consequences have been catastrophic.

The very existential crisis that we face as a race cannot be solved by individuals. As much as we applaud someone like Elon Musk for having the bravitas to launch a sports car into space, his solutions are not social solutions. Silicon Valley is morally bankrupt. They look for tangental technological advancements to circumvent society. Musk's own hyperloop idea is a private solution. Even if it works, it will only be able to hold 16 people at a time. How will this fix the broken metro system in DC?

Moreover, without shared common purpose, we lose our sense of self-worth. And this has hastened the toxification of masculinity over the past decades.

Here are the facts: faith in democratic norms are collapsing. Democracy itself only works when the system works for it. Giving a populace a useless vote every 4 years is not a democracy. Of those born before WW2, 72% in the US believed it was essential to live in a democracy. That figure has dropped to 30% among those born in 1980.

Disenfranchised at work, robbed of their opportunity-men are angry. They're looking for answers elsewhere and finding them in demagoguery: the venom spat up each night on Fox News. They're finding it in extremist, far-right groups' scapegoating. In their tirades against democracy, men have seen vindication in their hatred towards women, migrants, and minorities.

As the resources consolidate and the anger, the alienation builds it will get worse. Alienation is many things. But it is chiefly the loss of control over your work or life and a disconnection between you and your surrounding community or society. These conditions lead to a disconnect between what you do daily, and the lack of purpose you feel internally. In many cases, it can erupt. It certainly has in these mass shooters.

This brings us back to the topic of hyper-individualism and toxic masculinity. From a very early age, men are conditioned to believe that what makes them a man is their strength, their ability to lead. This is compounded by other sexist ideas, like that men are responsible for providing for a family. When it comes to it, however, the vast majority of men lack the resources to even acquire the skills they would need to do so. As George Bernard Shaw famously remarked, "all professions are conspiracies against the laity."

This completely ignores the coming tide of automation (with its first ripples arriving on the shore). It will only get worse. Despite this, many men continue to rail against the virtues of education, trapping themselves in a cycle of resentment and alienation. "Many people sense, often with justification, that their lives are being stitched up by managers, lawyers, journalists, bankers, and a permanent governing class," (George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage).

On the factory floor, if we are to find work there at all, we are segregated by zero-hour contracts, freelance work, and performance tracking software. Within this hyper-individualized neoliberal reality, we have all become self-optimizing entrepreneurs. This is supposed to free us. But what you don't hear about are the actual figures. The salary for independent contractors in the UK, for example, is now less than what it was in 1995.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han states that under neoliberalism, "Every individual is master and slave in one. This also means that class struggle has become an internal struggle with oneself. Today, anyone who fails to succeed blames themselves and feels ashamed."

This is where gun violence comes from. It starts with the violent rearing of men-taught to be self-sufficient-followed by a stripping of their livelihood. Surround them with demagogues who will appeal to their base (worst) instincts and it gets ugly. What we are witnessing is the psychic rupture of an entire population group of the United States losing their self-purpose. They have lost the narrative that has defined them.

Within this narrative, strong individuals succeed. What they are failing to notice is the structural violence perpetrated against them to ensure they don't. Once this tension finally snaps in their brain, they do what they have been trained to do: the ultimate act of individual violence. To lash out at the real problem: people, themselves, the otherwhere.

What is most horrifying about this, is that these men often have nowhere to go. Atomization is often seen as the precondition for an entrepreneurial society-one where traditional social relations of commonality collapse. There is an extensive literature emerging on the deadly loneliness of men. Where once a family or community group may have picked them up or supported them, they fall deeper into their "failure," placing it entirely on their shoulders. And that in itself makes it easy to sacrifice everything (when you have nothing to lose).

White domestic terrorists like Timothy McVey and Anders Brevik are "united by a 'narrative of victimhood and the heroic struggle between the faithful and the unfaithful, the authentic and inauthentic,'" (George Monbiot, Out of the Wrekage). In short, these madmen see themselves as saviors.

Gun reform will help. But America is rotten to its core. And it requires a radical reformation of society and its communal politics.

But it's possible. The wonderful thing about neoliberalism is it's all bullshit.

We've broken our social bonds and abandoned our sense of commonality based on a lie. We as human beings possess an unmatched amount of compassion. This is something almost unknown in the animal world. At the age of 14 months, we will begin to help each other. As a species, we survived because we worked together. Not because we were stronger or faster than the other animals.

Moreover, we are hardwired to be social beings. The pain caused by social isolation can be worse than physical pain. Self-harmers know this all too well, as they seek the physical release to the social agony they feel. The opioid crisis itself stems from social isolation, as the painkillers relieve both its physical and psychological side effects.

The quick start here is to find a common cause. That cause for me is the social control and re-humanizing of the economy. Everyone does have and must have a stake in that. Use your strength to be a voice for others who have none-to shield those who cannot protect themselves.

As Thomas Paine wrote, "The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilized community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together."

Until this chain is forged, we will never see a society free of violence, destruction, and hate.

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You won't say it, so I will: capitalism is the underlying cause of mass shootings in the US

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A society whose narrative is built on hyper-individualism and competition disenfranchises quicker than men can cope. And it makes them dangerous. "Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies.

# data[].attributes.body
"The philosopher Byung-Chul Han states that under neoliberalism, “Every individual is master and slave in one. This also means that class struggle has become an internal struggle with oneself. Today, anyone who fails to succeed blames themselves and feels ashamed.”"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A society whose narrative is built on hyper-individualism and competition disenfranchises quicker than men can cope. And it makes them dangerous.

"Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings," (Ben Okri, A Way of Being Free).

There is a story inoculated into your mind at a very young age in the U.S. The story that competition and individualism are the prerequisites to liberty or freedom.

This is a story told by neoliberalism, the defining political ideology of our time. Neoliberalism's ideology has seeped into our language. Its tendrils so deep that not a single aspect of our lives isn't touched by it.

At its heart is a radical belief in the ultimate personal freedom at the expense of everyone. Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian economist, first created the ideology in the mid-1900s. It was simple. That redistribution of wealth, political freedom, and human equality were harmful. Those ideas restrict the freedom of the rich and powerful. Who, he argued, would drive humanity forward with their opulent spending, their freedom to push the boundaries of human existence.

The first wave came under Thatcher in the UK with Reagan soon following in the US. It's worked startiling well for those it was meant to. The privatization and marketization of public services have made the rich filthy rich. The deregulation of the financial service sector has created an entirely new class of bourgeois that live entirely on financial tools.

It's horrible. It's gut-wrenching. But it's based on something incredibly misanthropic. It's based on the story told by philosopher Thomas Hobbes in 1651. In his famous work Leviathan, he postulated that human relations are based on war and struggle. In essence, everyone is at war with each other at all times. The only thing that stops this boiling kettle from erupting is a strong central figure like a monarch.

Pull back the veneer and you'll see. We are just as sordid, self-serving and maximizing as ever. We have heard this story so often that it's become part of us. And it's changed the way we address problems. We no longer work together to solve issues. Instead, we are individuals striving against each other to overcome our private problems.

It's enough to make you feel alone, abandoned. I'll admit that in moments of weakness, I tend to recoil into a self-survival mode. My first instinct is to protect myself. To withdraw. To disentangle. One of the hardest lessons I've learned early in my career has been to not treat your employer loyally. It's hard not to be self-maximizing when you feel exposed to the pressures of your employer. When you've had to scratch your way out of a sea of equally qualified applicants. You feel the "replaceability" mantra hounding you if you take a day off to be sick. You're stuck in a constant cycle of probation period and contract renewal. You feel alone.

Why not surrender to this narrative then? And forgoe any bonds of fraternal cooperation? Because its consequences have been catastrophic.

The very existential crisis that we face as a race cannot be solved by individuals. As much as we applaud someone like Elon Musk for having the bravitas to launch a sports car into space, his solutions are not social solutions. Silicon Valley is morally bankrupt. They look for tangental technological advancements to circumvent society. Musk's own hyperloop idea is a private solution. Even if it works, it will only be able to hold 16 people at a time. How will this fix the broken metro system in DC?

Moreover, without shared common purpose, we lose our sense of self-worth. And this has hastened the toxification of masculinity over the past decades.

Here are the facts: faith in democratic norms are collapsing. Democracy itself only works when the system works for it. Giving a populace a useless vote every 4 years is not a democracy. Of those born before WW2, 72% in the US believed it was essential to live in a democracy. That figure has dropped to 30% among those born in 1980.

Disenfranchised at work, robbed of their opportunity-men are angry. They're looking for answers elsewhere and finding them in demagoguery: the venom spat up each night on Fox News. They're finding it in extremist, far-right groups' scapegoating. In their tirades against democracy, men have seen vindication in their hatred towards women, migrants, and minorities.

As the resources consolidate and the anger, the alienation builds it will get worse. Alienation is many things. But it is chiefly the loss of control over your work or life and a disconnection between you and your surrounding community or society. These conditions lead to a disconnect between what you do daily, and the lack of purpose you feel internally. In many cases, it can erupt. It certainly has in these mass shooters.

This brings us back to the topic of hyper-individualism and toxic masculinity. From a very early age, men are conditioned to believe that what makes them a man is their strength, their ability to lead. This is compounded by other sexist ideas, like that men are responsible for providing for a family. When it comes to it, however, the vast majority of men lack the resources to even acquire the skills they would need to do so. As George Bernard Shaw famously remarked, "all professions are conspiracies against the laity."

This completely ignores the coming tide of automation (with its first ripples arriving on the shore). It will only get worse. Despite this, many men continue to rail against the virtues of education, trapping themselves in a cycle of resentment and alienation. "Many people sense, often with justification, that their lives are being stitched up by managers, lawyers, journalists, bankers, and a permanent governing class," (George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage).

On the factory floor, if we are to find work there at all, we are segregated by zero-hour contracts, freelance work, and performance tracking software. Within this hyper-individualized neoliberal reality, we have all become self-optimizing entrepreneurs. This is supposed to free us. But what you don't hear about are the actual figures. The salary for independent contractors in the UK, for example, is now less than what it was in 1995.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han states that under neoliberalism, "Every individual is master and slave in one. This also means that class struggle has become an internal struggle with oneself. Today, anyone who fails to succeed blames themselves and feels ashamed."

This is where gun violence comes from. It starts with the violent rearing of men-taught to be self-sufficient-followed by a stripping of their livelihood. Surround them with demagogues who will appeal to their base (worst) instincts and it gets ugly. What we are witnessing is the psychic rupture of an entire population group of the United States losing their self-purpose. They have lost the narrative that has defined them.

Within this narrative, strong individuals succeed. What they are failing to notice is the structural violence perpetrated against them to ensure they don't. Once this tension finally snaps in their brain, they do what they have been trained to do: the ultimate act of individual violence. To lash out at the real problem: people, themselves, the otherwhere.

What is most horrifying about this, is that these men often have nowhere to go. Atomization is often seen as the precondition for an entrepreneurial society-one where traditional social relations of commonality collapse. There is an extensive literature emerging on the deadly loneliness of men. Where once a family or community group may have picked them up or supported them, they fall deeper into their "failure," placing it entirely on their shoulders. And that in itself makes it easy to sacrifice everything (when you have nothing to lose).

White domestic terrorists like Timothy McVey and Anders Brevik are "united by a 'narrative of victimhood and the heroic struggle between the faithful and the unfaithful, the authentic and inauthentic,'" (George Monbiot, Out of the Wrekage). In short, these madmen see themselves as saviors.

Gun reform will help. But America is rotten to its core. And it requires a radical reformation of society and its communal politics.

But it's possible. The wonderful thing about neoliberalism is it's all bullshit.

We've broken our social bonds and abandoned our sense of commonality based on a lie. We as human beings possess an unmatched amount of compassion. This is something almost unknown in the animal world. At the age of 14 months, we will begin to help each other. As a species, we survived because we worked together. Not because we were stronger or faster than the other animals.

Moreover, we are hardwired to be social beings. The pain caused by social isolation can be worse than physical pain. Self-harmers know this all too well, as they seek the physical release to the social agony they feel. The opioid crisis itself stems from social isolation, as the painkillers relieve both its physical and psychological side effects.

The quick start here is to find a common cause. That cause for me is the social control and re-humanizing of the economy. Everyone does have and must have a stake in that. Use your strength to be a voice for others who have none-to shield those who cannot protect themselves.

As Thomas Paine wrote, "The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilized community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together."

Until this chain is forged, we will never see a society free of violence, destruction, and hate.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
You won't say it, so I will: capitalism is the underlying cause of mass shootings in the US

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A society whose narrative is built on hyper-individualism and competition disenfranchises quicker than men can cope. And it makes them dangerous. "Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies.

# data[].attributes.body
"Disenfranchised at work, robbed of their opportunity—men are angry. They’re looking for answers elsewhere and finding them in demagoguery: the venom spat up each night on Fox News. They’re finding it in extremist, far-right groups’ scapegoating. In their tirades against democracy, men have seen vindication in their hatred towards women, migrants, and minorities."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A society whose narrative is built on hyper-individualism and competition disenfranchises quicker than men can cope. And it makes them dangerous.

"Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings," (Ben Okri, A Way of Being Free).

There is a story inoculated into your mind at a very young age in the U.S. The story that competition and individualism are the prerequisites to liberty or freedom.

This is a story told by neoliberalism, the defining political ideology of our time. Neoliberalism's ideology has seeped into our language. Its tendrils so deep that not a single aspect of our lives isn't touched by it.

At its heart is a radical belief in the ultimate personal freedom at the expense of everyone. Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian economist, first created the ideology in the mid-1900s. It was simple. That redistribution of wealth, political freedom, and human equality were harmful. Those ideas restrict the freedom of the rich and powerful. Who, he argued, would drive humanity forward with their opulent spending, their freedom to push the boundaries of human existence.

The first wave came under Thatcher in the UK with Reagan soon following in the US. It's worked startiling well for those it was meant to. The privatization and marketization of public services have made the rich filthy rich. The deregulation of the financial service sector has created an entirely new class of bourgeois that live entirely on financial tools.

It's horrible. It's gut-wrenching. But it's based on something incredibly misanthropic. It's based on the story told by philosopher Thomas Hobbes in 1651. In his famous work Leviathan, he postulated that human relations are based on war and struggle. In essence, everyone is at war with each other at all times. The only thing that stops this boiling kettle from erupting is a strong central figure like a monarch.

Pull back the veneer and you'll see. We are just as sordid, self-serving and maximizing as ever. We have heard this story so often that it's become part of us. And it's changed the way we address problems. We no longer work together to solve issues. Instead, we are individuals striving against each other to overcome our private problems.

It's enough to make you feel alone, abandoned. I'll admit that in moments of weakness, I tend to recoil into a self-survival mode. My first instinct is to protect myself. To withdraw. To disentangle. One of the hardest lessons I've learned early in my career has been to not treat your employer loyally. It's hard not to be self-maximizing when you feel exposed to the pressures of your employer. When you've had to scratch your way out of a sea of equally qualified applicants. You feel the "replaceability" mantra hounding you if you take a day off to be sick. You're stuck in a constant cycle of probation period and contract renewal. You feel alone.

Why not surrender to this narrative then? And forgoe any bonds of fraternal cooperation? Because its consequences have been catastrophic.

The very existential crisis that we face as a race cannot be solved by individuals. As much as we applaud someone like Elon Musk for having the bravitas to launch a sports car into space, his solutions are not social solutions. Silicon Valley is morally bankrupt. They look for tangental technological advancements to circumvent society. Musk's own hyperloop idea is a private solution. Even if it works, it will only be able to hold 16 people at a time. How will this fix the broken metro system in DC?

Moreover, without shared common purpose, we lose our sense of self-worth. And this has hastened the toxification of masculinity over the past decades.

Here are the facts: faith in democratic norms are collapsing. Democracy itself only works when the system works for it. Giving a populace a useless vote every 4 years is not a democracy. Of those born before WW2, 72% in the US believed it was essential to live in a democracy. That figure has dropped to 30% among those born in 1980.

Disenfranchised at work, robbed of their opportunity-men are angry. They're looking for answers elsewhere and finding them in demagoguery: the venom spat up each night on Fox News. They're finding it in extremist, far-right groups' scapegoating. In their tirades against democracy, men have seen vindication in their hatred towards women, migrants, and minorities.

As the resources consolidate and the anger, the alienation builds it will get worse. Alienation is many things. But it is chiefly the loss of control over your work or life and a disconnection between you and your surrounding community or society. These conditions lead to a disconnect between what you do daily, and the lack of purpose you feel internally. In many cases, it can erupt. It certainly has in these mass shooters.

This brings us back to the topic of hyper-individualism and toxic masculinity. From a very early age, men are conditioned to believe that what makes them a man is their strength, their ability to lead. This is compounded by other sexist ideas, like that men are responsible for providing for a family. When it comes to it, however, the vast majority of men lack the resources to even acquire the skills they would need to do so. As George Bernard Shaw famously remarked, "all professions are conspiracies against the laity."

This completely ignores the coming tide of automation (with its first ripples arriving on the shore). It will only get worse. Despite this, many men continue to rail against the virtues of education, trapping themselves in a cycle of resentment and alienation. "Many people sense, often with justification, that their lives are being stitched up by managers, lawyers, journalists, bankers, and a permanent governing class," (George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage).

On the factory floor, if we are to find work there at all, we are segregated by zero-hour contracts, freelance work, and performance tracking software. Within this hyper-individualized neoliberal reality, we have all become self-optimizing entrepreneurs. This is supposed to free us. But what you don't hear about are the actual figures. The salary for independent contractors in the UK, for example, is now less than what it was in 1995.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han states that under neoliberalism, "Every individual is master and slave in one. This also means that class struggle has become an internal struggle with oneself. Today, anyone who fails to succeed blames themselves and feels ashamed."

This is where gun violence comes from. It starts with the violent rearing of men-taught to be self-sufficient-followed by a stripping of their livelihood. Surround them with demagogues who will appeal to their base (worst) instincts and it gets ugly. What we are witnessing is the psychic rupture of an entire population group of the United States losing their self-purpose. They have lost the narrative that has defined them.

Within this narrative, strong individuals succeed. What they are failing to notice is the structural violence perpetrated against them to ensure they don't. Once this tension finally snaps in their brain, they do what they have been trained to do: the ultimate act of individual violence. To lash out at the real problem: people, themselves, the otherwhere.

What is most horrifying about this, is that these men often have nowhere to go. Atomization is often seen as the precondition for an entrepreneurial society-one where traditional social relations of commonality collapse. There is an extensive literature emerging on the deadly loneliness of men. Where once a family or community group may have picked them up or supported them, they fall deeper into their "failure," placing it entirely on their shoulders. And that in itself makes it easy to sacrifice everything (when you have nothing to lose).

White domestic terrorists like Timothy McVey and Anders Brevik are "united by a 'narrative of victimhood and the heroic struggle between the faithful and the unfaithful, the authentic and inauthentic,'" (George Monbiot, Out of the Wrekage). In short, these madmen see themselves as saviors.

Gun reform will help. But America is rotten to its core. And it requires a radical reformation of society and its communal politics.

But it's possible. The wonderful thing about neoliberalism is it's all bullshit.

We've broken our social bonds and abandoned our sense of commonality based on a lie. We as human beings possess an unmatched amount of compassion. This is something almost unknown in the animal world. At the age of 14 months, we will begin to help each other. As a species, we survived because we worked together. Not because we were stronger or faster than the other animals.

Moreover, we are hardwired to be social beings. The pain caused by social isolation can be worse than physical pain. Self-harmers know this all too well, as they seek the physical release to the social agony they feel. The opioid crisis itself stems from social isolation, as the painkillers relieve both its physical and psychological side effects.

The quick start here is to find a common cause. That cause for me is the social control and re-humanizing of the economy. Everyone does have and must have a stake in that. Use your strength to be a voice for others who have none-to shield those who cannot protect themselves.

As Thomas Paine wrote, "The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilized community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together."

Until this chain is forged, we will never see a society free of violence, destruction, and hate.

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You won't say it, so I will: capitalism is the underlying cause of mass shootings in the US

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A society whose narrative is built on hyper-individualism and competition disenfranchises quicker than men can cope. And it makes them dangerous. "Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies.

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(second source)

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They’re just normal people- but who are involved in an online community, usually of white supremacists. People who already felt like the world was against them based off of societal, (embarrassment, rejection, trauma,) environmental, (who they’re raised by, where they’re raised, whether or not their parents get divorced,) and sometimes genetic factors, now empowered by an echo-chamber of racist gamers wallowing in their own thoughts and self-pity. Their community encourages their behavior and validates their ideas- sometimes going so far as to tell them how to execute their plan.

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Most Mass Shooters Are Not Mentally Ill | Carmela Epright | TEDxGreenville

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Mental health doesn't cause school shootings but it is a risk factor. Mental health problems tend to make it harder to cope with stress. People with mental health issues turn to violence and suicide when they feel that they are alone and no one is there to help them when they need support.

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It's hard to empathize with someone who carries out a school shooting. The brutality of their crimes is unspeakable. Whether the shootings were in Uvalde, Columbine, or Parkland, they have traumatized students and communities across the U.S.

Psychologist John Van Dreal understands that. "Someone went out of their way to target and kill children who look like our children, teachers who look like our teachers - and did it for no other reason than to hurt them," says Van Dreal. "And that's very personal."

Van Dreal is the director of safety and risk management at Salem-Keizer Public Schools in Oregon, a state that has had its share of school shootings. In 2014, about 60 miles from Salem, where Van Dreal is based, a 15-year-old boy shot one student and a teacher at his high school before killing himself.

But even though it's hard, psychologists like Van Dreal and law enforcement agents as well spend a lot of time thinking about what it's like to be one of these school shooters. Understanding who the shooters are,they say, is key to prevention.
How many school shootings?
To gain insights, the interested parties look to the past.

Tallying up all shootings and instances of school violence is difficult, researchers say; there's no official count, and various organizations differ in their definitions of school shootings.

For example, an open source database put together by Mother Jones suggests there have been 12 mass shootings (where four or more people died) in schools since the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado in 1999, and 134 children and adults died in those attacks.

Psychologists and law enforcement agencies have been analyzing how these sorts of multivictim attacks came to be, because of what they tell us about many other people who are at risk of becoming violent in schools and the ways we might intervene early, before anger becomes violence.

In the two decades since the Columbine High School shooting, researchers have learned a lot about school shooters. For one thing, many are themselves students, or former students, at the schools they attack. A significant majority tend to be teenagers or young adults.

"There's no one thing, [but] maybe a couple of dozen different things that come together to put someone on the path to committing an act of mass violence," says Peter Langman, a clinical psychologist in Allentown, Pa., and the author of two books and several studies about school shootings.

Multiple factors contribute in each case

Most shooters in these cases had led difficult lives, the studies find.

"Adolescent school shooters, there's no question that they're struggling and there have been multiple failures in their lives," says Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist who has consulted with the FBI.

Manystruggle with psychological problems, Meloy says.

"We know that mental health issues are very much in the mix," he says. "The child might be just, you know, very depressed. We also found in one of our early studies that you've got this curious combination of both depression and paranoia."

Studies by the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service have also found that many of the shooterswere feeling desperate before the event.

"Whether or not they've been diagnosed, or whether or not they're severely mentally ill, something is going on that could [have been] addressed through some kind of treatment," says Langman.

But most never got that treatment.

The role of mental health problems

Mental health issues don't cause school shootings, Van Dreal emphasizes. After all, only a tiny, tiny percentage of kids with psychological issuesgo on to become school shooters.

But mental health problems are a risk factor, he says, because they can decrease one's ability to cope with other stresses. And studies have shown that most school shooters have led particularlystressful lives.

Many, though not all, of the perpetrators have experienced childhood traumas such as physical or emotional abuse,and unstable families, with violent, absent or alcoholic parents or siblings, for example. And most have experienced significant losses.

For example, the defendant in the case of the Parkland, Fla., shooting in 2018 had lost his adoptive mother to complications from the flu just a couple of months before the school attack. His adoptive father had died when he was a little boy.

Feeling like an outcast at school may also play a role. Initial media reports suggest that the perpetrator in Uvalde had been bullied and harassed at school for years for a speech impediment.

"A lot of these people have felt excluded, socially left out or rejected," says Van Dreal. Studies show that social rejection at school is associated with higher levels of anxiety, depression, aggression and antisocial behavior in children.

A 2004 study by the U.S. Secret Service and U.S. Department of Education found that nearly three-quarters of school shooters had been bullied or harassed at school.

Marginalized kids don't have anchors at school, says Van Dreal. "They don't have any adult connection - no one watching out for them. Or no one knows who they are anymore."

And the absence of social support at the school, Meloy says, is a big risk factor.

"People who do these kinds of targeted attacks don't feel very good about themselves or where they're headed in their lives," says Van Dreal. "They may wish someone would kill them. Or they may wish they could kill themselves."

For example, Dylan Klebold, one of the perpetrators of the Columbine shooting, had been depressed and suicidal two years prior.

"About half of the school shooters I've studied have died by suicide in their attack," says Langman. "It's often a mix of severe depression and anguish and desperation driving them to end their own lives."

Of course, most people who feel suicidal don't kill others.

So what makes a small minority of kids who have mental health issues and thoughts of suicide turn to violence and homicide?

Meloy and Van Dreal think it's because these individuals had been struggling alone - either because they were unable to ask for help or their cries went unheard when the adults in their lives didn't realize the child needed support.

When despair turns to anger and a desire for revenge

When someone has been struggling alone for a while and failing, their despair can turn into anger, the researchers say.

"There's loss. There's humiliation. There's anger. There's blame," says Meloy.

That sort of anger can lead to homicidal thoughts, Van Dreal says.

They start out fantasizing about revenge, says Meloy.

"So the fantasy is one where the teenager starts to identify with other individuals who have become school shooters and have used violence," he says.

These days, Meloy adds, it's easy for a troubled kid to go online and research how previous shooters planned and executed their attacks.

Easy access to guns - one of the biggest risk factors - then turns these fantasies into reality.

Psychologists say these attacks can be prevented - they are often weeks or months in the planning.

The keys to prevention are to spot the earliest behavioral signs that a student is struggling, Langman says, and also to watch for signs that someone may be veering toward violence.

Some signs can seem obvious in hindsight."So, I've stopped being the kid who went to Boy Scouts, and church and loved his grandmother," Van Dreal says, "and now I want to be that kid with camouflage who's isolated and attacks people and hurts them."

But sometimes, even professionals who see the signs miss their significance.

About a year and a half before he attacked students at Columbine High School, Dylan Klebold, who was a gifted student, started to get into trouble.

He and some friends hacked into his school's computer system. Then, a couple of months later, he and his friend Eric Harris broke into a van and stole some equipment. They were arrested at that point and sent to a diversion program - an alternative to jail for first-time juvenile offenders - that offered counseling and required community service.

Sue Klebold, Dylan's mother and subsequent author of the book A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy, told NPR she was upset and concerned to see the sudden change in her son's behavior. She says she asked the diversion counselor if his behavior meant something and whether he needed a therapist. The counselor asked Dylan if he wanted therapyand Dylan said no.

Sue Klebold says she never realized how deep the problem was.

"The piece that I think I failed [in] is, we tend to underestimate the level of pain that someone may be in," Klebold told NPR. "We all have a responsibility to stop and think - someone we love may be suffering, may be in a crisis."

Beware pitfalls in the search for a solution

The solution, according to psychologists who study kids who become violent, isn't to expel or suspend a student like Dylan - though that is what happened to him in the fall of 1997 after he hacked into his school's computer system.

A student like that who's expelled "can now be bored, can be isolated at home, can be living in a dysfunctional family and can be ruminating and thinking all the time about how he's going to avenge what has happened to him," says Meloy.

Eric Harris, who was Dylan Klebold's friend and fellow killer that day at Columbine, didn't seem depressed. But he was self-absorbed, lacked empathy and was prone to angry outbursts, according to those who analyzed his journals and earlier behavior.

While Klebold's journals were "full of loneliness and depression," Langman says, the writings of Harris were "full of narcissism and rage and rants against people - a lot of contempt."

Harris' contempt extended to himself. Significant surgeries during his early teen years to correct a birth condition contributed to self-loathing, Langman's study of Harris' journal suggests.

"I have always hated how I looked," Harris wrote in his journal. "That's where a lot of my hate grows from." In his last journal entry, Harris refers to himself as "the weird looking Eric KID."

"Anyone contemplating getting a gun and killing people needs to be seen as a person in crisis," says Langman.

Time and time again, psychologists and educators have found that surrounding a young person with the right kind of support and supervisionearly on can turn most away from violence.

Connecting with these students, listening to them and supporting them, getting them the help they need, these researchers say, can help prevent future attacks and make schools a safer place for all children.

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School Shooters: Understanding their path to violence is key to prevention

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Psychologists and the FBI say they are getting a better understanding of the mix of factors that lead some kids to open fire on a classroom. The shooting can be an act of desperation fueled by anger.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZtM21iqTos  colin

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https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/why-conspiracy-theories-are-so-popular-and-how-our-suspicious-minds-look-for-big-causes-for-big-a6738316.html

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https://science.sciencemag.org/content/322/5898/115

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the “truth” about the terror attacks in Paris was already taking shape online. Just hours after the last shots, one YouTube user explained what had happened in a video that has since been viewed more than 110,000 times. Colin

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When people are in no control, they go to theories

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When people are in no control, they go to theories

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We present six experiments that tested whether lacking control increases illusory pattern perception, which we define as the identification of a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli. Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions. Additionally, we demonstrated that increased pattern perception has a motivational basis by measuring the need for structure directly and showing that the causal link between lack of control and illusory pattern perception is reduced by affirming the self. Although these many disparate forms of pattern perception are typically discussed as separate phenomena, the current results suggest that there is a common motive underlying them. Colin

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Colin

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Are Shootings More Likely to Occur in Public Schools? (Heather)

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Are Shootings More Likely to Occur in Public Schools? (Heather)

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Short answer: absolutely. The percent of shootings by school sector is broken into 94% public schools and only 6% private schools. It's also a factor that there are many more public schools than private, but the percentage is still scary.

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The Parkland shooting, even almost two months later, remains a very painful topic, and there seem to have been many very important factors at play. One that hasn't been discussed very much, but probably needs to be examined, is whether the kind of schools students attend makes a difference. At least one author, Stella Morabito at The Federalist, has discussed this, and has identified many problems that she thinks are associated with public schools ranging from their large sizes to their seeming hostility to Christianity.

All of the problems she discusses may be factors-school size has been suspect for a long time -but as a starting point we ought to look at the numbers.

Hyewon Kim-a Cato Center for Educational Freedom Intern-compiled information on school shootings in the United States from 2000 to 2018 using the Tribune-Review database. The database is limited to legitimate school shootings; that is, shootings that occurred on or near a K-12 school campus while classes were in session or when students were present. The list also excluded suicide-only incidents.

Hyewon found 134 school shootings from 2000 to 2018. Only eight of these occurred in private schools while 122 occurred in public schools. The type of school could not be definitively classified for 4 of the shootings. As shown in the figure below, about 94 percent of the shootings that could be classified occurred in public schools while only about 6 percent occurred in private schools.

Since there are many more public schools than private schools, we must consider that difference. The most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that around 25 percent of U.S. K-12 schools are private, while about 10 percent of schooled children attend private schools. In other words, the data suggest that children that go to private schools are disproportionately less likely to experience a school shooting than children in public schools.

Of course, considering the difference in the number of students across the two sectors does not account for differences in the types of students. After all, at least some of the divergence in school shootings found are likely due to other factors such as household income and parent education levels.

However, a recent study by Danish Shakeel and me, presented at the International School Choice and Reform Conference, finds that private schools experience better school culture than public schools even after controlling for several characteristics such as school size, location, racial composition of students and teachers, and the percent of students from low-income families. We find that private schools are significantly less likely than public schools to experience problems such as student fighting, bullying, and, perhaps most importantly, weapon possession.

Anytime you write about a tragedy and point to your favorite policy reform as the solution, it can seem opportunistic and, frankly, a little callous. But it is not groundless to think that school type could matter, and nothing should be off-limits for discussion to end these sorts of tragedies.

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Are Shootings More Likely to Occur in Public Schools?

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The Parkland shooting, even almost two months later, remains a very painful topic, and there seem to have been many very important factors at play. One that hasn't been discussed very much, but probably needs to be examined, is whether the kind of schools students attend makes a difference.

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Reasons why People think shootings happen (Melissa)

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Reasons why People think shootings happen (Melissa)

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Students say revenge is clearly the major reason for school shootings.

For all groups of students, getting back at those who hurt them; having other kids pick on them, make fun or them or bully them; not valuing life; and being a victim of abuse were consistently among the top five reasons, regardless of what variables were used to analyze the data. Consistently ranked at the bottom among the reasons were being bored; being afraid for their own safety; and being encouraged by others to shoot.

If we look at the means of responses students offered for each of 16 reasons, we get a similar picture. The top four reasons were:

1. Other kids pick on them, make fun of them or bully them.

2. They want to get back at people who have hurt them.

3. They don't value life.

4. They have been a victim pf physical abuse at home.

There were some variations in ranking based on gender. The top five reasons endorsed by boys were: getting back at those who hurt them; other kids pick on them, make fun of them or bully them; they don't value life; they have mental problems; and they have been a victim of physical abuse at home. For girls, the top reasons were: other kids pick on them, make fun of them or bully them; they want to get back at those who have hurt them; they have been a victim of physical abuse at home; they don't value life; and they have witnessed physical abuse at home.
More than any other variables, however, media usage and race were correlated with how students perceived the causes of lethal violence. Differences in how high, medium, and low media users perceive reasons for school shootings
High media users were less likely than low media users to endorse the lack of friends; ease in getting a gun; not getting along with their parents; other kids' encouragement; violence in their neighborhoods; being victims of physical abuse themselves or witnessing physical abuse; and alcohol and drugs as reasons for violence in the schools. On each of those, the high media users were at least six percentage points, and sometimes as much as 10, below the low media users.
Differences in how students perceive reasons for school shootings by race/ethnic background

African-Americans were less likely to say that getting back at others was a reason for violence.

African-Americans also did not perceive bullying to be as great a problem as whites did.

African-Americans were far less likely to say that the lack of good friends was a cause than were Hispanics.

African-Americans were less likely to say that the lack of friends could be blamed for school violence, but more likely to agree that other kids' encouragement was a factor.

Hispanics were less likely to blame violence in their neighborhoods as a reason for violence, and were far less likely than African-Americans to say that fear for their own safety prompts school shootings.

To a slightly lesser degree, alienation correlated with what students perceive as the causes of school violence. Differences in how students perceive reasons for school shootings according to degree of alienation

Highly alienated students were just as likely as those with low alienation indices to blame other kids' picking on them, making fun of them or bullying them as a reason for school violence, but they were far more likely to say that getting back at someone who hurt them was a cause.

91 percent of those with high alienation indices said getting back at others was a reason, compared to 81 percent of those with low alienation indices.

Highly alienated students were also less likely to say that being a victim of physical abuse; witnessing physical abuse in the home; or not getting along with parents were causes.

Overall, violence on TV, in movies, in videos and in computer and video games ranked 11th as a cause of lethal violence. However, there were two notable exceptions to the ranking.

Younger students' responses placed it eighth in the list of 16 reasons.

Those whose grades were mostly D's and F 's ranked it ninth.

Across every variable except race, however, there were wide differences in students' ideas about media violence as a reason for school shootings. Some of the variations are:

41 percent of girls said it was a cause, compared to 33 percent of boys.

Students whose grades were mostly D's and F 's were far more likely to see it as a problem than those who received mostly B's and C 's (49 percent cf. 34 percent).

Respondents with a low quality of life index perceived it as less of a problem than those with a high quality of life index (32 percent cf. 43 percent).

46 percent of low media users endorsed violence in the media as a cause for school shootings, compared to only 28 percent of those who are high media users.

Highly alienated respondents were considerably less likely to see it as a problem than those with low alienation indices (31 percent cf. 42 percent).

Those from neighborhoods with no crime were more likely to say violence in the media is a problem than those who come from neighborhoods were there is a lot of or some crime.

40 percent of the respondents who said they don't feel safe in school blamed violence in the media, compared to 37 percent of those who said their schools are extremely safe or very safe, and 34 percent of those who said their schools are safe.

40 percent of rural residents and 39 percent of urban students agreed it is a problem, compared to 34 percent of suburban residents.

Those who live in the Midwest and South were more likely to view media violence as a cause than those who live in the East or West.

Respondents whose mothers had a high school education or less were more likely to blame violence in the media than those whose mothers have a college degree.

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lethal violence  schools  why do shootings occur

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Why Do Shootings Occur? | Alfred University

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Respondents were asked to rate 16 possible reasons for school shootings on a 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree) scale. Their answers are as follows.

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The photo and name of the culprit is often shared for days and weeks after the shooting. Showing the face and name of the killer, and following their story as it unfolds gives the media lots of attention and ends up making them lots of money. "Copy cats" see this coverage and fame, and being social outcasts they desire that attention. Often times they will try to get a higher kill count than the last shooter covered by the media.

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Alex Pew, Lauren Goldbeck, and Caroline Halsted, National Center for Health Research

Violent events are often covered by news outlets in great detail and spread immediately through mass media and social media. Experts believe that this media coverage can inspire others to copy these actions or commit similar crimes.[1] This is called the media contagion effect, and it happens with suicide, terrorist attacks, and mass shootings.

Shooters get enormous attention: their name, photo, motivations, and story are often shared for days following the event. The American Psychological Association points out that this "fame" is something that most mass shooters desire.[2] This sometime inspires a copycat shooting, where the potential shooter typically tries to kill more people than their predecessor.

The number of mass shootings in the U.S. has increased exponentially since the early 2000s.[3] On average, a mass shooting now occurs every 12.5 days. Before 2000, there were about three mass shootings per year. While the exact definition of a "mass shooting" is debated, a 2015 Congressional Research Service report defined a mass shooting as 4 or more killings in a single incident (not including the shooter).[4]

School shootings tend to get the most attention, and since 2000 on average there has been one school shooting every 31.6 days. In 2018, however, there has been an average of one school shooting (accidental or intentional) every week.[5] Each of these incidents spread through mass media and social media, which focus on the shooter and the shooter's motivations.

One of the first widely reported mass shootings was at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado in 1999. Two students killed 12 students and one teacher, and 23 others were injured. In the month that followed, 400 related incidents were reported across the country. Students called in bomb threats and praised the shooters' actions. Some schools feared additional shootings and shut down temporarily.

In 2007, a Virginia Tech student killed 32 students and faculty at the university. Prior to the shooting, he expressed a desire in writing to repeat the shooting at Columbine. Since then, many shooters have cited the Virginia Tech gunman as an inspiration and others have threatened to kill more than the 32 victims killed.[6]

Studies indicate that the more media attention a shooter gets, the more likely the event will inspire a future mass shooter. For example, a 2015 study found that after a mass shooting, there was an increased chance of another one occurring in the next 13 days.[7] A 2017 study found that media coverage of a mass shooting may increase the frequency and lethality of future shootings, but the contagion period might not be within the first two weeks, but instead might inspire the frequency of mass shootings in the future.[8]

Social media spreads the news even faster. At the mass shootings at Pulse Nightclub, Las Vegas, and Parkland, survivors and witnesses sent videos and news of the events on Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and text message.

Two weeks after the Parkland school shooting on Valentine's Day in 2018, 638 copycat threats targeted schools nationwide.[9] These threats are often jokes or hoaxes that spread through social media, but they can still be harmful.

As long as the media continue to focus their news stories on the attacker, it is likely that the contagion will continue.[10] The American Psychological Association recommends that mass media deny shooters the fame they desire by not sharing so many details about them and instead direct their attention to the victims and their stories. Campaigns like Don't Name Them (a campaign of Texas State University) and No Notoriety (created by a couple in honor of their son who died in the Colorado movie theater shooting) urge the media to cover tragic incidents without naming the shooters. Decreasing media contagion could reduce the number of mass shootings, but other public health steps are also needed, such as making it more difficult to obtain guns, and especially assault weapons.
All articles are reviewed and approved by Dr. Diana Zuckerman and other senior staff.
References:

1. Thompson, D. (2017). Mass Shootings in America Are Spreading Like a Disease. The Atlantic. Retrieved March 14, 2018 from https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/11/americas-mass-shooting-epidemic-contagious/545078/.

2. American Psychological Association. (2016). "Media Contagion" Is Factor in Mass Shootings, Study Says. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2016/08/media-contagion.aspx. Accessed on March 12, 2018

3. Duwe, Grant. (2017). "Mass Shootings Are Getting Deadlier, Not More Frequent." Politico Magazine. Retrieved March 13, 2018 from www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/04/mass-shootings-more-deadly-frequent-research-215678.

4. Federal Bureau of Investigations. (n.d.). "Active Shooter Resources." Retrieved March 13, 2018, from https://www.fbi.gov/about/partnerships/office-of-partner-engagement/active-shooter-resources.

5. There has been, on average, 1 school shooting every week this year. (2018, March 08). Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/02/us/school-shootings-2018-list-trnd/index.html

6. Flynn, C., & Heitzmann D. (2008). Tragedy at Virginia Tech: Trauma and Its Aftermath. The Counseling Psychologist. 20 (10): 1-11

7. Towers, S., Gomez-Lievano, A. Khan, M., et al. (2015). Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings. PLOS One. 10(7): e0117259. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0117259

8. Lankford, A and Tomek, S. (2017). Mass Killings in the United States from 2006 to 2013: Social Contagion or Random Clusters. The American Association of Suicidology. doi: 10.1111/sltb.12366

9. Hayes, C. (2018). After Florida shooting, more than 600 copycat threats have targeted schools. USA Today.

10. Kelly, E. (2017). The Wellesley News. Retrieved March 13, 2018, from https://thewellesleynews.com/2017/10/19/media-contagion-inspires-mass-shootings-in-the-united-states

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Does Media Coverage Inspire Copy Cat Mass Shootings? | National Center for Health Research

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Alex Pew, Lauren Goldbeck, and Caroline Halsted, National Center for Health Research Violent events are often covered by news outlets in great detail and spread immediately through mass media and social media. Experts believe that this media coverage can inspire others to copy these actions or commit similar crimes.[1] This is called the media contagion effect, and it happens with suicide, terrorist attacks, and mass shootings.

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Conspiracy theories and the lack of Veracity

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Conspiracy theories and the lack of Veracity

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Colin

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In the US 2000-2017 9 out of 250 mass shooting incidents were done by females. This article argues that the majority of school shootings are done by men like the majority of homicides because evolution wise females are more likely to emphasize with people than men are.

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Data from an FBI study and other reports suggest that active shooter incidents involving female shooters are rare.

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One commonality among many school shooters is that they advertised their intentions beforehand, whether in journals or even on social media. As they write about what they want to do, they make it more real to themselves, perhaps psyching themselves up to do the deed. These signs can be seen and action can be taken beforehand to prevent more shootings.

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An assault weapons ban, universal background checks, single-point-of-entry schools, metal detectors, an armed law enforcement officer in every school ... all of these, regardless of what you think of their efficacy, are aimed at stopping school shootings after the shooter has already made the decision to commit the act.

Direct research on those who commit large-scale school shootings is fairly sparse - most of the time, the shooters die in the attack. But psychologists have put together case studies after the fact. In his book "Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters," psychologist Peter Langman found three types of school shooters - the traumatized, the psychopathic and the psychotic.

He found that violent video games or films likely only played a role on the margins.

After the school shooting, Oliver North blamed the problem on "a culture of violence" in which many young boys have "been on Ritalin" since early childhood.

But many of our readers agreed with North, believing violent media and a culture of permissiveness play a role. Although, readers disagreed on what made up a "culture of violence," with some pointing to violent video games.

And others find fault with the country from its founding forward.

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That is, to pay attention and see the signs of troubled youth who are on their way to committing a horrible act.

Nikolas Cruz, accused of shooting 17 students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, showed many warning signs that he could be violent.

And that seems to be expert consensus. The fancier term for it is threat assessment. Langman wrote that schools do a great deal to harden infrastructure after school shootings, but that's meant to minimize casualties. To prevent them in the first place, schools need to have multi-agency threat assessment teams, he said.

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"Between the Department of Children and Families, the Department of Juvenile Justice, local law enforcement and the school district, there should be a threat assessment team and robust sharing of information," Petty said.

One commonality among many school shooters is that they advertised their intentions beforehand, whether in journals or even on social media. As they write about what they want to do, they make it more real to themselves, perhaps psyching themselves up to do the deed.

But if people are listening, they're also giving others a way to stop them before they kill.

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Most Read * Sound Off South Florida

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Getting at the root causes of school shootings: Experts and readers weigh in

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An assault weapons ban, universal background checks, single-point-of-entry schools, metal detectors, an armed law enforcement officer in every school ... all of these, regardless of what you think of their efficacy, are aimed at stopping school shootings after the shooter has already made the decision to commit the act.

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Fragile and Distorted Masculinity (Ori) 

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Fragile and Distorted Masculinity (Ori) 

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Men have this distorted view of what it means to be a man. This is stemmed from our capitalist society and need to be individual. Men are loosing their self purpose and this is leading to the primal nature to become violent.

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A society whose narrative is built on hyper-individualism and competition disenfranchises quicker than men can cope. And it makes them dangerous.

"Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings," (Ben Okri, A Way of Being Free).

There is a story inoculated into your mind at a very young age in the U.S. The story that competition and individualism are the prerequisites to liberty or freedom.

This is a story told by neoliberalism, the defining political ideology of our time. Neoliberalism's ideology has seeped into our language. Its tendrils so deep that not a single aspect of our lives isn't touched by it.

At its heart is a radical belief in the ultimate personal freedom at the expense of everyone. Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian economist, first created the ideology in the mid-1900s. It was simple. That redistribution of wealth, political freedom, and human equality were harmful. Those ideas restrict the freedom of the rich and powerful. Who, he argued, would drive humanity forward with their opulent spending, their freedom to push the boundaries of human existence.

The first wave came under Thatcher in the UK with Reagan soon following in the US. It's worked startiling well for those it was meant to. The privatization and marketization of public services have made the rich filthy rich. The deregulation of the financial service sector has created an entirely new class of bourgeois that live entirely on financial tools.

It's horrible. It's gut-wrenching. But it's based on something incredibly misanthropic. It's based on the story told by philosopher Thomas Hobbes in 1651. In his famous work Leviathan, he postulated that human relations are based on war and struggle. In essence, everyone is at war with each other at all times. The only thing that stops this boiling kettle from erupting is a strong central figure like a monarch.

Pull back the veneer and you'll see. We are just as sordid, self-serving and maximizing as ever. We have heard this story so often that it's become part of us. And it's changed the way we address problems. We no longer work together to solve issues. Instead, we are individuals striving against each other to overcome our private problems.

It's enough to make you feel alone, abandoned. I'll admit that in moments of weakness, I tend to recoil into a self-survival mode. My first instinct is to protect myself. To withdraw. To disentangle. One of the hardest lessons I've learned early in my career has been to not treat your employer loyally. It's hard not to be self-maximizing when you feel exposed to the pressures of your employer. When you've had to scratch your way out of a sea of equally qualified applicants. You feel the "replaceability" mantra hounding you if you take a day off to be sick. You're stuck in a constant cycle of probation period and contract renewal. You feel alone.

Why not surrender to this narrative then? And forgoe any bonds of fraternal cooperation? Because its consequences have been catastrophic.

The very existential crisis that we face as a race cannot be solved by individuals. As much as we applaud someone like Elon Musk for having the bravitas to launch a sports car into space, his solutions are not social solutions. Silicon Valley is morally bankrupt. They look for tangental technological advancements to circumvent society. Musk's own hyperloop idea is a private solution. Even if it works, it will only be able to hold 16 people at a time. How will this fix the broken metro system in DC?

Moreover, without shared common purpose, we lose our sense of self-worth. And this has hastened the toxification of masculinity over the past decades.

Here are the facts: faith in democratic norms are collapsing. Democracy itself only works when the system works for it. Giving a populace a useless vote every 4 years is not a democracy. Of those born before WW2, 72% in the US believed it was essential to live in a democracy. That figure has dropped to 30% among those born in 1980.

Disenfranchised at work, robbed of their opportunity-men are angry. They're looking for answers elsewhere and finding them in demagoguery: the venom spat up each night on Fox News. They're finding it in extremist, far-right groups' scapegoating. In their tirades against democracy, men have seen vindication in their hatred towards women, migrants, and minorities.

As the resources consolidate and the anger, the alienation builds it will get worse. Alienation is many things. But it is chiefly the loss of control over your work or life and a disconnection between you and your surrounding community or society. These conditions lead to a disconnect between what you do daily, and the lack of purpose you feel internally. In many cases, it can erupt. It certainly has in these mass shooters.

This brings us back to the topic of hyper-individualism and toxic masculinity. From a very early age, men are conditioned to believe that what makes them a man is their strength, their ability to lead. This is compounded by other sexist ideas, like that men are responsible for providing for a family. When it comes to it, however, the vast majority of men lack the resources to even acquire the skills they would need to do so. As George Bernard Shaw famously remarked, "all professions are conspiracies against the laity."

This completely ignores the coming tide of automation (with its first ripples arriving on the shore). It will only get worse. Despite this, many men continue to rail against the virtues of education, trapping themselves in a cycle of resentment and alienation. "Many people sense, often with justification, that their lives are being stitched up by managers, lawyers, journalists, bankers, and a permanent governing class," (George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage).

On the factory floor, if we are to find work there at all, we are segregated by zero-hour contracts, freelance work, and performance tracking software. Within this hyper-individualized neoliberal reality, we have all become self-optimizing entrepreneurs. This is supposed to free us. But what you don't hear about are the actual figures. The salary for independent contractors in the UK, for example, is now less than what it was in 1995.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han states that under neoliberalism, "Every individual is master and slave in one. This also means that class struggle has become an internal struggle with oneself. Today, anyone who fails to succeed blames themselves and feels ashamed."

This is where gun violence comes from. It starts with the violent rearing of men-taught to be self-sufficient-followed by a stripping of their livelihood. Surround them with demagogues who will appeal to their base (worst) instincts and it gets ugly. What we are witnessing is the psychic rupture of an entire population group of the United States losing their self-purpose. They have lost the narrative that has defined them.

Within this narrative, strong individuals succeed. What they are failing to notice is the structural violence perpetrated against them to ensure they don't. Once this tension finally snaps in their brain, they do what they have been trained to do: the ultimate act of individual violence. To lash out at the real problem: people, themselves, the otherwhere.

What is most horrifying about this, is that these men often have nowhere to go. Atomization is often seen as the precondition for an entrepreneurial society-one where traditional social relations of commonality collapse. There is an extensive literature emerging on the deadly loneliness of men. Where once a family or community group may have picked them up or supported them, they fall deeper into their "failure," placing it entirely on their shoulders. And that in itself makes it easy to sacrifice everything (when you have nothing to lose).

White domestic terrorists like Timothy McVey and Anders Brevik are "united by a 'narrative of victimhood and the heroic struggle between the faithful and the unfaithful, the authentic and inauthentic,'" (George Monbiot, Out of the Wrekage). In short, these madmen see themselves as saviors.

Gun reform will help. But America is rotten to its core. And it requires a radical reformation of society and its communal politics.

But it's possible. The wonderful thing about neoliberalism is it's all bullshit.

We've broken our social bonds and abandoned our sense of commonality based on a lie. We as human beings possess an unmatched amount of compassion. This is something almost unknown in the animal world. At the age of 14 months, we will begin to help each other. As a species, we survived because we worked together. Not because we were stronger or faster than the other animals.

Moreover, we are hardwired to be social beings. The pain caused by social isolation can be worse than physical pain. Self-harmers know this all too well, as they seek the physical release to the social agony they feel. The opioid crisis itself stems from social isolation, as the painkillers relieve both its physical and psychological side effects.

The quick start here is to find a common cause. That cause for me is the social control and re-humanizing of the economy. Everyone does have and must have a stake in that. Use your strength to be a voice for others who have none-to shield those who cannot protect themselves.

As Thomas Paine wrote, "The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilized community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together."

Until this chain is forged, we will never see a society free of violence, destruction, and hate.

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You won't say it, so I will: capitalism is the underlying cause of mass shootings in the US

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A society whose narrative is built on hyper-individualism and competition disenfranchises quicker than men can cope. And it makes them dangerous. "Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies.

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In 2014 the total value of small arms imported to the U.S. was around 2.2 billion which is 1.7 billion more than the next highest country. There is a massive market for small arms especially in the U.S.

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Ciara Mead
The majority of shootings are done by white males. Which begs the question why? A lot of attention has also been placed upon mental health in the US, and our laws around gun control.

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The "American Dream" is a big factor in the typical violence of young to middle aged white men. They've been told that if they put in the work and pay their dues to society, society will repay them. But this often doesn't happen; economically or otherwise these men feel like society is betraying them, so they lash out against the masses.

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Joe Stack had simply had enough. Every time this fifty-three-year-old independent engineer and software consultant from Austin, Texas, had set aside any money at all for retirement, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) seemed to change the tax laws or whittled away at his earnings with new restrictions. A change in the income-tax regulations in 1986 had removed an exemption for software consultants and engineers, effectively consigning them, in his eyes, to low-income wage work. He just couldn't catch a break. He'd moved from Los Angeles to Austin, remarried, hoping to get better contract consulting work, but the wages in Texas were paltry compared with Southern California. Increasingly despairing that he would never get back on his feet, he began to see the IRS as an agent of discrimination against honest working people, while corporate fat cats got bailed out. Adding insult to injury, they'd recently initiated yet another audit against him.

On the morning of February 18, 2010, he snapped. Perhaps snap is the wrong word; it's too sudden, too precipitous. From Joe's perspective, he'd already bent far past the breaking point. He just couldn't bend anymore, couldn't accommodate all that weight. That Thursday morning, he set fire to his small house in North Austin. He then drove to a hangar that he rented at the Georgetown Municipal Airport and cleared his single-engine Piper airplane for takeoff. "Thanks for your help," he told the control tower as he left the airfield at 9:45. "Have a great day!"

Ten minutes later, he flew the plane directly into Echelon I, the building in a near-downtown Austin office complex that housed the IRS. The fully fueled plane exploded into a fireball, killing the pilot and also IRS manager Vernon Hunter, a sixty-three-year-old father of six. Thirteen others were injured, two seriously.

In the immediate media flurry, Stack was portrayed as a deranged individual, which, no doubt, he was. But he had hardly acted spontaneously. Indeed, as with so many of these deranged lone wolves who seem to explode one day out of the blue, Stack's explosion had been brewing for some time. Later that day, investigators found a lengthy suicide note, which Stack had written and revised over the previous three days. In this rambling diatribe against the forces that he believed had led him to this murderously suicidal rampage, Stack just couldn't get past the injustice of it all, the fact that there seemed to be two sets of rules-which further widened following the economic meltdown of 2008-one for the rich and powerful and one for the rest of us.

"Why is it," he asks rhetorically, "that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM [General Motors] executives, for scores of years) and when it's time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours?"

He described an eighty-year-old neighbor, a widow of a steelworker who worked in the mills in central Pennsylvania all his life, believing the promises from the mill owners and the unions that he would have a pension and medical care for a secure retirement. "Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement," Stack wrote. "All she had was Social Security to live on." She survives, he said, on cat food.

Like many other guys these days, Stack was mad as hell. Yes, he flipped out, and yes, he was probably clinically insane. But such arm-chair diagnoses miss the method in his madness, the logic of his psychotic break with reality. Stack considered himself a victim of the impersonal forces that wreak havoc with the lives and the futures of America's middle and working classes-the labyrinthine impersonal governmental bureaucracies and the impenetrable corporations whose CEOs and shareholders were lavishly compensated. Joe Stack was Joe Sixpack, Joe Lunchbucket, Joe the Plumber. He was a New Economy Everyman. Everything piled up on him, and he just lost it.

So Joe Stack "went postal," as that new phrase coined during the Reagan era put it, named after that spate of rampage murders in which US Postal Service (USPS) workers shot and killed managers, supervisors, and fellow workers. Between 1986 and 1997, forty people were murdered in at least twenty incidents involving postal workers. Before 1986-nary a one. What happened?

Reaganomics happened. Under a Reagan-era policy, the USPS stopped receiving federal tax moneys starting in the early 1980s and was pushed to streamline its operations to maximize efficiency, including cutting wages, firing staff, and slashing benefits. The workers who went postal were all post-office workers who had been laid off or downsized or had their benefits slashed.

One such worker was Patrick Sherrill, the postal worker who started the "trend" and launched that tragic neologism. On August 20, 1986, Sherrill walked through the post office in Edmond, Oklahoma, where he worked, targeting his supervisors and several coworkers. By the time he was done, fifteen postal employees lay dead, and another six were injured-at the time, the third-largest massacre in American history. The last bullet he reserved for himself. As the police arrived on the scene, they heard only one shot.

Yes, Stack and Sherrill were insane, but they were also familiar. They didn't start out mad. No, they were driven crazy by the sense that the world had spun so far off its axis that there was no hope of righting it. Underneath that sense of victimhood, that sense that the corporations and the government were coconspirators in perpetrating the great fleecing of the American common man, lay a defining despair in making things right. And under that despair lay their tragic flaw, a deep and abiding faith in America, in its institutions and its ideals. Like Willy Loman, perhaps the quintessential true believer in the ideology of self-made American masculinity, they believed that if they worked hard and lived right, they, too, could share in the American Dream. When it is revealed that no matter what you do, no matter how hard you work, that dreams are for Disneyland, then they morph into a tragic American Everymen, defeated by circumstances instead of rising above them.

Stack and Sherrill believed in that America. They believed that there was a contract between themselves, and guys like them, and the government "of the people" that is supposed to represent us. They believed in the corporations that they worked for, confident in the knowledge that they could support a family, enjoy a secure retirement, and provide for their families. That contract was the stable foundation for several generations of America's working men-an implied but inviolable understanding between businesses and workers, between government and employers. They had kept the faith, fulfilled their part of the bargain. And somehow their share had been snatched away by faceless, feckless hands. They had played by all the rules, only to find the game was rigged from the start.

It feels like even the unions have betrayed them. At their origin, the union movement established the baseline that enabled working- and middle-class American men to plant a stake in the American Dream. The relentless recent attacks on unions, both in the public sector and in private companies, and the self-serving corruption in many unions that legitimized those attacks have hit lower-middle-class and working-class men the hardest-the same group that is now most ardently antiunion. It's a tragic irony of the American worker-they've been persuaded to put their trust in the very companies that betray them and shun the organizations that once protected them.

Generations of men had staked their claim for manhood on being good family providers, reliable breadwinners. It has been the defining feature of American manhood since the early nineteenth century. With neither a feudal aristocracy nor clerical indulgence, American manhood was defined in opposition to the European version, where rank and birth and blood determined your fate. Here, in the American Eden, all was new and naked, and a man could rise as high as his talents and aspirations and hard work could take him.

He could do that because he assumed the playing field was level. But all that has changed in America. The playing field is no longer level. Of course, it never was; it had always tilted decidedly in favor of middle-class white men. But what has changed is the angle of that tilt. On the one hand, it's not quite so lopsided, as more of "them" seem to be catching up with "us." On the other hand, it's more dramatically lopsided than it has been since the Gilded Age-and perhaps even more than that. The gap between the middle class and the rich has never been as large as it now is in the United States. Today, the United States is coming to resemble prerevolutionary France, with teeming masses who have less and less and a noble few who tweet about twenty-five-dollar cupcakes. Although a higher percentage of white people now believe that they are the victims of discrimination than do black people, they fail to see the very rich white people who are doing massively better.

But these middle-class white men are right in one sense: the social contract that enabled self-made men to feel that they could make it, even if they somehow failed to realize their dreams, has, indeed, been shredded, abandoned for lavish profiteering by the rich, enabled by a government composed of foxes who have long ago abandoned their posts at the henhouse. That safety net, always thin, has been undone by decades of neglect since the establishment of the Great Society in 1960s. There's a painful sense of betrayal from their government, from the companies to whom we give our lives, from the unions. There was a moral contract, that if we fulfill our duty to society, society will fulfill its duty to us in our retirement, taking care of those who served so loyally.

Although the contract may have been shredded by greedy companies driven by greedier financiers, the sense of entitlement on the part of white men remains intact. Many white men feel they have played by the rules and expected to reap the rewards of that obedient responsibility. It's pretty infuriating not to get what you feel you deserve. That's the aggrieved entitlement that lies underneath the anger of American white men.

They had played the game like real men-honorably, honestly. And if they were going to go down, they were going to go down like real men-making somebody pay. Even if they had to die trying.
MAD MEN
For decades, every single morning, guys like Joe Stack-middle-class corporate guys, office workers, salesmen, and independent professionals- have lined up to take the 7:23 from Anywhere, USA, to the big city. Every night they've returned, briefcase and hat in hand, to their suburban castles. Like characters on Mad Men, they assumed their place in the long line of American breadwinners, of family men. They worked in the city, but were successful enough to escape to the suburbs, where life was greener and safer, where the schools were better for their chilldren. They and their families shopped in malls, mowed their grass, and watched their children ride their bikes.

On the other side of the tracks, working-class guys like Patrick Sherrill have driven their pickup trucks to work in America's factories, producing the cars we crave, the clothes we wear, the stuff we use. They have delivered America's packages, paved America's roads and built her bridges, and erected the skyscrapers in which corporate moguls reap their fortunes.

But all is not well. There's a mounting anger underneath those perfectly manicured lawns, and it erupts like small volcanoes in our homes, in our corporate offices, and on those peaceful suburban streets themselves. Jim Anderson (of Father Knows Best) has been supplanted by Homer Simpson, the bumptious blowhard who's neither a stable family man nor a reliable employee. In the near-ghost towns of America's factory cities, white workers seethe into their beers, wondering where it all went wrong-and how it all went to hell so fast. Perhaps more menacingly, some of these obedient men have now been replaced by violent men, who lash out at their spouses, while their sons learn their lessons well, as they drive through suburban neighborhoods looking for immigrants to beat up, and even to kill.

Despite these enormous class differences, these different groups of white men are angry-angry at a system that has so let them down. The most passionate believers in the American Dream, "the Promised Land" Bruce Springsteen sings about, they've seen it gradually erode into a postindustrial nightmare, a world of corroding Rust Belt infrastructure and faceless cubicles that dull the senses and numb the soul. The white working class and the white middle class have rarely been so close emotionally as they are today; together they have drifted away from unions, from big government, from the Democratic Party, into the further reaches of the right wing. Together they listen to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. And together they watched Brad Pitt initiate Ed Norton into "Fight Club," searching for something- anything-that would feel authentic, that would feel real. Middle-and working-class white men-well, they just are beginning to actually understand each other.

Some non-post-office rampage murders were regular working guys who simply snapped. Take, for example, Joseph Wesbecker, who worked at the Standard Gravure plant in Louisville, Kentucky, a printing plant that exclusively printed the local newspaper, the Louisville Courier-Journal. For months, even years, managers had refused to listen to Wesbecker's complaints that operating the folder press was too hard for him, that his workplace-induced stress made it hard for him to perform all the operations of heavy equipment. On September 14, 1989, Wesbecker roamed through the factory floor, purposefully toward the supervisors' office, opening fire at anyone who had ever crossed him. By the time he put the gun to his own head, seven coworkers lay dead, and another twenty had been wounded.

Others were more corporate, like Gian Luigi Ferri, a chubby fifty-five-year-old businessman who, in 1993, slaughtered seven people and injured six others at the tony, white-shoe downtown San Francisco law firm that had represented him. As the police entered the building, he killed himself.

Some were more in between the have-mores and the have-nots. Matthew Beck was a socially awkward yet conscientious accountant at the Connecticut State Lottery, who had worked diligently for eight years, until, in the summer of 1997, he was unceremoniously passed over for promotion (despite flawless work). He became bitter, angry, and withdrawn, and he began to fall apart. After Beck returned from a two-month medical leave, one of his supervisors added to his workload a particularly demeaning task for a trained accountant, monitoring the use of state cars given to those who had been promoted-that is, those who received perks to which Beck thought he was entitled. He snapped. On March 6, 1998, Beck came to work on a "casual Friday" and stabbed his former supervisor (who was the first to deny his grievance over his nonpromotion), then walked to a staff meeting of several senior staff, and shot the company chief financial officer, his senior supervisor who had also turned down his promotion. He lowered his gun and walked out of the meeting room and through the executive suite where the vice president of operations poked his head out of his office and asked, "Is everything okay?" This VP had also rejected Beck's promotion, and Beck shot and killed him.

Finally, he confronted the lottery president himself, Otho Brown, in the parking lot of the building. Brown had been the final top authority who had signed off on the rejection of Beck's promotion. While most of the lottery employees huddled at the edge of the parking lot, in the apparent safety of a grove of trees, Brown stood alone in the lot. Beck's fellow employees begged him to stop. He calmly shot Brown three times. As the police pulled up, Beck put the pistol to his own head and shot himself. "They were the people who had the power in the Lottery," said one of the supervisors who was in that meeting room but was spared by Beck. "They were the ones who had turned down his promotion."

It's not just white guys, either. On August 2, 2010, Omar Thornton, a thirty-four-year-old black truck driver for a major Connecticut beer distributor, walked into the main office in Hartford and opened fire, killing eight people before turning the gun on himself. According to his girlfriend's mother, Thornton was a "mellow" guy who had complained for a long time about racial harassment. He claimed to have pictures on his cell phone that he had taken at the distributor-pictures of the N word and hangman's nooses graffitied on the bathroom walls. No one listened. So he began to take his revenge against a company that he felt was indifferent to his plight; he started stealing cases of beer. Caught on a company video, he was brought in for a disciplinary hearing with his union on that fateful day and offered the choice of being fired or quitting. He chose a horrifying, fatal, third path.

"It's got nothing to do with race," commented Teamster official Christopher Roos to a television journalist. "This is a disgruntled employee who shot a bunch of people." He almost made it sound tame. But in one sense, Roos is right. Thornton may have complained about racial harassment and may have thought there was some racial bias at the distributor. But his actions that fateful day were those of a working man who had snapped. Not a black working man, but a working man.

He was not a working woman. In my research, I could find no cases of working women coming into their workplaces, packing assault weapons, and opening fire, seemingly indiscriminately. It's not that they don't get depressed and enraged when they get downsized, laid off, or mistreated, their wages cut, their pensions slashed, or their benefits reduced. Some had brought a handgun and often carried over a domestic-violence dispute into the workplace. They just don't go postal.

Let's be clear: just as we cannot understand rampage school shootings by focusing on the fact that they are always committed by boys, neither can we understand these cases simply by recognizing that they're all men. Surely, too, recognizing that they're all men doesn't mean that all men are likely to become deranged mass murderers. Neither, however, can we explain it simply by the easy American access to guns or chalk it up to yet another deranged killer, the standard fare on CSI-like television.

But we can't ignore it, either. There is no one single explanation. What is required is that we look inside the economic and social shifts inside America's workplaces and the broader patterns of class in America. Just as we needed to profile the school shooters and their schools, we also need to profile these guys gone postal and the places where they made their living. We need to ask some questions about the changing conditions of work in America, the political economy in which these men became deranged enough to go postal.
THE RATIONALITY OF THE MAD GUNMAN
Most disgruntled male workers don't go postal, of course. Indeed, it's pretty obvious that well over 99 percent of us don't bring assault weapons to work, ready to open fire on our coworkers or supervisors. It is telling, though, to listen to how regular folks respond when someone does embark on such a murderous spree. How different are the comments from those of neighbors of, say, serial killers or other mass murderers. When the media or police interview neighbors of serial killers, like Jeffrey Dahmer, the typical response is a surprised version of "He was very quiet," "He kept to himself," or "We had no idea we were living next door to a monster."

Not so with the guys who go postal. "You could sorta see it coming" is by far the more likely response. Coworkers and workers in other companies mention the erosion of benefits, the capricious cuts in staff, the constant fears of layoffs and downsizing, the seething resentment at the bonuses the managers pay themselves. They can see it coming. Says one survivor, "There are a lot of people who are sort of on your side. There are people . . . who claim 'I'm not going to say that he did the right thing, but I can understand where he came from, and maybe if I had been in his spot, I'd have done it too.'"

Over and over, this is what you hear: "I could see it coming," "If it wasn't him, it would have been someone else," "What did you expect?" "They've been treating us so bad for so long, someone was going to snap." (That the "someone" is always a man seems to escape everyone's notice, as if it's simply the most normal thing in the world for men-and not women-to react this way.)

When the story of Matthew Beck was posted recently to a website, comments were guarded but compassionate. "I can sorta understand why he did it," wrote one. "I don't agree with his actions either," wrote another. "But on some level I understand him." "You can't put people down and expect them to take it with a smile," wrote a third. "I can't help but feel some sympathy for the shooter. His life must have been hell and I can't blame him for hating them."

But let's be clear: these guys committed murder. Joe Stack flew his plane into the IRS building. This wasn't just a minor case of road rage. This was an act of domestic terrorism. He attacked a government office, just as Timothy McVeigh had done. But in the aftermath, there was far more sympathy for him among ordinary Americans than there was for McVeigh in 1995. There are entire websites devoted to calling him "an American hero." Why? For one thing, it wasn't "political"-that is, Joe Stack wasn't trying to start a revolution. He was just at the end of his rope, having been jerked around callously by those in charge.

"Oh, c'mon," says Bill, a patron at a local coffee shop, on the afternoon after Stack's death, as the news feeds come in over the Internet. He's sitting at the table next to me. Bill has his laptop open; his cell phone sits next to it on the table. Both are plugged into the only electric outlets nearby, monopolizing them. "Fuck, no," he says, loud enough for me to hear. I look at him, curious. I hadn't been anticipating an interview just then. He says it again.

"Did you hear about this guy in Texas? Flew his plane into the IRS office. That's not terrorism. Not like 9/11. I mean, the guy'd just had it. He was fed up, fucked. Probably thought he had no way out."

"But why do you think he just snapped that way?" I ask.

"Look at what's happening," Bill says. "Everywhere you look, it's downsizing, outsourcing, laying off. No more pension funds, no more health benefits, no more retirement. He was cornered, and he came out swinging."

"But he flew his airplane into a building, killing an innocent man and injuring many others. He killed a guy who was probably as trapped as he was. How can you justify that?"

Bill sits for a moment. "I'm not justifying it. I'm not excusing it. But I'm trying to understand it. I think there are a lot of people who sorta feel like they're at the end of their rope and don't know what to do. They're panicking, freaking out, you know? Back in the day, if you got screwed by your company, you could go to the government, get unemployment, get food stamps, whatever, get some help. Now there's nowhere to go. The government does nothing; the corporations-well, they're the problem. Nowhere to go."

"You know," I say, "you sound like a socialist. The government is in the pockets of the big corporations that are ruled by greed and intent on screwing the workers."

"Hah!" says Bill. "A socialist! I'm as far from that as you could imagine. I'm an American. Heck, I'd even support the Tea Party if they could get the government out of my wallet. I don't want to pay more taxes! And I don't want a bigger government. I want a responsive one. I mean, just look at me, for Christ's sake."

Bill, I soon learn, is looking for work, a euphemism for the newly unemployed in the current "he-cession"-the economic recession that has hit men so hard. More than 80 percent of all the jobs lost between November 2008 and December 2010 had been jobs that had been held by men. Sure, most of those have been in manufacturing and especially construction, as the housing boom went south. But the ripples have been felt in midsize local businesses across the country. (Just as surely, there's been a "he-covery," as the overwhelming number of new jobs created since 2011 have been jobs that have gone to men, while public-sector jobs, like administrators and teachers and public-sector employees, mostly women, have been laid off by the thousands.)

Bill had been in sales. "But who the fuck is buying anything that anyone is selling?" He doesn't wait for an answer. "I'll tell you who. Nobody. That's who. It feels like such a scam, the whole thing, a big Madoff Ponzi scheme where the rich get everything. And this . . . ," he says, pointing to his technological arsenal on the small table, "well, it's not helping. We're all networked up the wazoo, we have every networking device known to man, and yet we can't find a job. And when you do find one, it's never as good as the one you had before. Working conditions, benefits, you name it. Always worse, always worse."

He drifts back to the laptop. If we'd been in a bar, drowning our sorrows, instead of in a coffee shop, trying to stay pumped and focused, this would be the signal to look at his beer and mutter something over and over, under his breath.

Bill expressed so many of the concerns of today's middle-class and working-class men-the constant downward pressure, a sense that they are no longer climbing the ladder of success but rather just trying to fight off being pushed down the ladder. They feel lucky if they are just holding on.

The deteriorating working conditions, the crap people have to put up with in their jobs, lead to some unlikely heroes. Enter Steven Slater, the Jet Blue flight attendant who became an instant celebrity after he exploded in a workplace tirade in early August 2010. Working a routine flight from Pittsburgh to New York City, Slater had, witnesses said, already been yelled at by abusive passengers when he had tried to intervene when two passengers were fighting over the overhead space. One of the passengers' suitcase hit him in the head as it tumbled from the overstuffed overhead bin. As the plane landed and was taxiing to the gate, that same woman stood up and was furious that the gate-checked bag was not immediately available, and she began to curse at him. Slater snapped. He grabbed the intercom, cursed her out right back, grabbed a beer from the stowed service cart, and opened the door of the plane. "That's it, I'm done," he said. He inflated the emergency evacuation slide, slid down to the tarmac, and ran off. He was arrested a few hours later.

Immediately, people rallied to his defense. Although his workplace explosion was utterly unprofessional and was gradually revised by other passengers on the plane in a way that made him look a little less heroic, it was Slater's version of the story that has stuck. He was hailed by Stephen Colbert as the "Alpha Dog of the Week" for his testicular fortitude-he slid down the evacuation slide "using his balls as a sled," Colbert reported. Late-night hosts scrambled to book him, and his newly enlisted agent is fending off offers for books and television rights.

Whether Slater was "justified" is hardly the point. The public reaction to his antics reveals something important about how many people feel about their jobs. Slater's classic "take this job and shove it" attitude expressed what millions of Americans seem to feel about their working conditions. People cheer him as a hero.

In that sense, Slater's actions are understandable, if not justifiable, rational, if not reasonable-not as the flipping out of a madman, but as a desperate effort to draw attention to the miserable conditions that working people endure. More, it's that conditions have become so much worse, that the social contract has been torn apart by corporate greed and government inaction. Instead of armchair psychologizing by a public tut-tutting their way to self-satisfied judgment, commentators reached for the business sections of the newspapers, reporting the gradual erosion of the friendly skies in today's cut-throat business climate. Yes, it's true that passengers have been nickeled and dimed by baggage fees, convenience fees, talk-to-a-real-agent fees, paying for food and beverages and entertainment, and every conceivable additional fee. But the working conditions of the airplane as a workplace have also steadily eroded-and not just because passengers are more irate and more entitled.

Over the past decade, airline passengers have increased from 629 million to 770 million, an 8 percent increase. In 2010 domestic airlines employed about 463,000 full-time workers, compared with 607,307 a decade earlier-a decrease of roughly 8 percent. At the same time, fuel costs have doubled, operating costs have soared, and gate fees and landing fees charged by municipalities to airlines have all risen significantly. That means that profits have to come from the labor side of the economic equation, not the materials side. Sure enough, airline workers have been hit hard by cuts: their salaries have been cut, pensions slashed, health benefits reduced or even eliminated, and various unions abandoned by new airlines and undermined at the old ones.

Airline workers, like their passengers, are being required to do more and more for less and less. And no one, neither the passengers nor those who serve them their drinks, seems to be able to do anything about it. This isn't just about little bags of pretzels. It's about daily erosions of those feelings of pride in your work, the compromising of archaic feelings like honor and integrity, self-respect for a job well done. In that sense, Steven Slater did not show what balls he had, as Colbert reported, but rather illustrated just how impotent American workers really feel.
Excerpted from "Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era" by Michael Kimmel. Published by Nation Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group. Copyright 2013 by Michael Kimmel. All rights reserved.

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Why is it always a white guy: The roots of modern, violent rage

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Joe Stack had simply had enough. Every time this fifty-three-year-old independent engineer and software consultant from Austin, Texas, had set aside any money at all for retirement, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) seemed to change the tax laws or whittled away at his earnings with new restrictions.

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Capitalism is the root of school shootings (Ori) 

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Capitalism is the root of school shootings (Ori) 

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The heart of American culture is freedom and individualism (capitalism). The radical version of this is that the pursuit of freedom can happen at the expense of others. This can lead to unnecessary individualism and lack of working together.  “Moreover, without shared common purpose, we lose our sense of self-worth. And this has hastened the toxification of masculinity over the past decades.”

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A society whose narrative is built on hyper-individualism and competition disenfranchises quicker than men can cope. And it makes them dangerous.

"Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings," (Ben Okri, A Way of Being Free).

There is a story inoculated into your mind at a very young age in the U.S. The story that competition and individualism are the prerequisites to liberty or freedom.

This is a story told by neoliberalism, the defining political ideology of our time. Neoliberalism's ideology has seeped into our language. Its tendrils so deep that not a single aspect of our lives isn't touched by it.

At its heart is a radical belief in the ultimate personal freedom at the expense of everyone. Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian economist, first created the ideology in the mid-1900s. It was simple. That redistribution of wealth, political freedom, and human equality were harmful. Those ideas restrict the freedom of the rich and powerful. Who, he argued, would drive humanity forward with their opulent spending, their freedom to push the boundaries of human existence.

The first wave came under Thatcher in the UK with Reagan soon following in the US. It's worked startiling well for those it was meant to. The privatization and marketization of public services have made the rich filthy rich. The deregulation of the financial service sector has created an entirely new class of bourgeois that live entirely on financial tools.

It's horrible. It's gut-wrenching. But it's based on something incredibly misanthropic. It's based on the story told by philosopher Thomas Hobbes in 1651. In his famous work Leviathan, he postulated that human relations are based on war and struggle. In essence, everyone is at war with each other at all times. The only thing that stops this boiling kettle from erupting is a strong central figure like a monarch.

Pull back the veneer and you'll see. We are just as sordid, self-serving and maximizing as ever. We have heard this story so often that it's become part of us. And it's changed the way we address problems. We no longer work together to solve issues. Instead, we are individuals striving against each other to overcome our private problems.

It's enough to make you feel alone, abandoned. I'll admit that in moments of weakness, I tend to recoil into a self-survival mode. My first instinct is to protect myself. To withdraw. To disentangle. One of the hardest lessons I've learned early in my career has been to not treat your employer loyally. It's hard not to be self-maximizing when you feel exposed to the pressures of your employer. When you've had to scratch your way out of a sea of equally qualified applicants. You feel the "replaceability" mantra hounding you if you take a day off to be sick. You're stuck in a constant cycle of probation period and contract renewal. You feel alone.

Why not surrender to this narrative then? And forgoe any bonds of fraternal cooperation? Because its consequences have been catastrophic.

The very existential crisis that we face as a race cannot be solved by individuals. As much as we applaud someone like Elon Musk for having the bravitas to launch a sports car into space, his solutions are not social solutions. Silicon Valley is morally bankrupt. They look for tangental technological advancements to circumvent society. Musk's own hyperloop idea is a private solution. Even if it works, it will only be able to hold 16 people at a time. How will this fix the broken metro system in DC?

Moreover, without shared common purpose, we lose our sense of self-worth. And this has hastened the toxification of masculinity over the past decades.

Here are the facts: faith in democratic norms are collapsing. Democracy itself only works when the system works for it. Giving a populace a useless vote every 4 years is not a democracy. Of those born before WW2, 72% in the US believed it was essential to live in a democracy. That figure has dropped to 30% among those born in 1980.

Disenfranchised at work, robbed of their opportunity-men are angry. They're looking for answers elsewhere and finding them in demagoguery: the venom spat up each night on Fox News. They're finding it in extremist, far-right groups' scapegoating. In their tirades against democracy, men have seen vindication in their hatred towards women, migrants, and minorities.

As the resources consolidate and the anger, the alienation builds it will get worse. Alienation is many things. But it is chiefly the loss of control over your work or life and a disconnection between you and your surrounding community or society. These conditions lead to a disconnect between what you do daily, and the lack of purpose you feel internally. In many cases, it can erupt. It certainly has in these mass shooters.

This brings us back to the topic of hyper-individualism and toxic masculinity. From a very early age, men are conditioned to believe that what makes them a man is their strength, their ability to lead. This is compounded by other sexist ideas, like that men are responsible for providing for a family. When it comes to it, however, the vast majority of men lack the resources to even acquire the skills they would need to do so. As George Bernard Shaw famously remarked, "all professions are conspiracies against the laity."

This completely ignores the coming tide of automation (with its first ripples arriving on the shore). It will only get worse. Despite this, many men continue to rail against the virtues of education, trapping themselves in a cycle of resentment and alienation. "Many people sense, often with justification, that their lives are being stitched up by managers, lawyers, journalists, bankers, and a permanent governing class," (George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage).

On the factory floor, if we are to find work there at all, we are segregated by zero-hour contracts, freelance work, and performance tracking software. Within this hyper-individualized neoliberal reality, we have all become self-optimizing entrepreneurs. This is supposed to free us. But what you don't hear about are the actual figures. The salary for independent contractors in the UK, for example, is now less than what it was in 1995.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han states that under neoliberalism, "Every individual is master and slave in one. This also means that class struggle has become an internal struggle with oneself. Today, anyone who fails to succeed blames themselves and feels ashamed."

This is where gun violence comes from. It starts with the violent rearing of men-taught to be self-sufficient-followed by a stripping of their livelihood. Surround them with demagogues who will appeal to their base (worst) instincts and it gets ugly. What we are witnessing is the psychic rupture of an entire population group of the United States losing their self-purpose. They have lost the narrative that has defined them.

Within this narrative, strong individuals succeed. What they are failing to notice is the structural violence perpetrated against them to ensure they don't. Once this tension finally snaps in their brain, they do what they have been trained to do: the ultimate act of individual violence. To lash out at the real problem: people, themselves, the otherwhere.

What is most horrifying about this, is that these men often have nowhere to go. Atomization is often seen as the precondition for an entrepreneurial society-one where traditional social relations of commonality collapse. There is an extensive literature emerging on the deadly loneliness of men. Where once a family or community group may have picked them up or supported them, they fall deeper into their "failure," placing it entirely on their shoulders. And that in itself makes it easy to sacrifice everything (when you have nothing to lose).

White domestic terrorists like Timothy McVey and Anders Brevik are "united by a 'narrative of victimhood and the heroic struggle between the faithful and the unfaithful, the authentic and inauthentic,'" (George Monbiot, Out of the Wrekage). In short, these madmen see themselves as saviors.

Gun reform will help. But America is rotten to its core. And it requires a radical reformation of society and its communal politics.

But it's possible. The wonderful thing about neoliberalism is it's all bullshit.

We've broken our social bonds and abandoned our sense of commonality based on a lie. We as human beings possess an unmatched amount of compassion. This is something almost unknown in the animal world. At the age of 14 months, we will begin to help each other. As a species, we survived because we worked together. Not because we were stronger or faster than the other animals.

Moreover, we are hardwired to be social beings. The pain caused by social isolation can be worse than physical pain. Self-harmers know this all too well, as they seek the physical release to the social agony they feel. The opioid crisis itself stems from social isolation, as the painkillers relieve both its physical and psychological side effects.

The quick start here is to find a common cause. That cause for me is the social control and re-humanizing of the economy. Everyone does have and must have a stake in that. Use your strength to be a voice for others who have none-to shield those who cannot protect themselves.

As Thomas Paine wrote, "The mutual dependence and reciprocal interest which man has upon man, and all the parts of civilized community upon each other, create that great chain of connection which holds it together."

Until this chain is forged, we will never see a society free of violence, destruction, and hate.

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You won't say it, so I will: capitalism is the underlying cause of mass shootings in the US

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A society whose narrative is built on hyper-individualism and competition disenfranchises quicker than men can cope. And it makes them dangerous. "Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies.

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I know this is a Wikipedia sight but it lists all of the school shootings in America starting in the 1850's to the present day. From looking at this never ending list, I noticed all names listed were men. Also more shootings were located in the southern states. Lots of shootings occurred way earlier than I would expect so this idea of shooting in a school isn't new at all.

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Lists of school shootings in the United States - Wikipedia

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Language links are at the top of the page across from the title.

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The United States has more small arms than any other country in the world. The most recent Small Arms survey estimates there are 857 million civilian firearms in the world and 393 million of those are in U.S. civilian hands.

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This is when the three parts of your brain (upper primate, emotional mammalian, and reptilian "fight or flight") become locked together to focus on one thing. This hyper focus means they are mentally unable to focus on anything but that one goal. If the person's mission is to seek revenge or hurt others this can be very dangerous.

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I recently appeared on CNN to explain how and why people who aren't born to kill or commit evil acts turn into ones that do.
Triunal Rigidity and Agility*
My observation is that people who act crazy do so because they are locked in a state of Triunal Rigidity. This notion is adapted from the Triune Brain model first proposed by neuroscientist, Paul MacLean. Triunal Rigidity occurs when someone's thinking upper primate brain, emotional middle mammalian brain and "fight or flight" lower reptilian brain become rigidly locked like Lego blocks to each other and fixated on an external goal or mission that they are mentally unable to divert from.

This means that there actually may be a neuroscientific basis to the often quoted definition of insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

Alternatively, mentally healthy individuals develop Triunal Agility. That means that their three brains can couple together and line up with an external reality and pursue goals effectively. When that reality changes, they have a fluidity in their brains and minds which enables them to decouple their thinking, feelings and actions and have them realign with the new reality. When that occurs they are demonstrating Triunal Agility.
The Rubik's Cube model of how our mind develops
Many years ago and in the heyday of psychoanalysis the term "tabula rasa" was used frequently to describe the human mind as being a clean slate at birth. Following that genetics, internal mental processes, child rearing, social influences and the life cycle itself proceed to write who we become.

I believe a more accurate and contemporary model for this phenomenon is the Rubik's Cube. Imagine that our brains and minds start off in our embryonic state as a pristine Rubik's Cube (picture an eight cell/blastula stage at the beginning of embryogenesis).

Following this, genetics, maternal physiology and intrauterine forces twist it. Then we are born and child rearing twists it again.

For instance, imagine that Rubik's brain and mind feeling disconnected from the support it needs from parents. What if instead of the support that its vulnerable and malleable state requires for optimal development, it is either abused, criticized, ignored and/or coddled (which ill prepares it to deal with the world)?

To further complicate matters add to that a brain with learning or processing challenges (which many of the school shooters were said to have) to affect how that person thinks and feels and then reacts to the world.

Beyond what such a brain and mind experiences at home, picture it being bullied, humiliated and laughed at by peers. Such social trauma is likely to lead to that person feeling disorganized, scattered and possibly even fragmented. Evidence of this state of deterioration is often seen in the rambling writings that are subsequently discovered in shooters' dwellings.

What option is there for a personality marinated in pain, estrangement, perceived or real humiliation, a life that isn't worth living, and a mind that is figuratively and literally becoming "unhinged," "unglued," "deranged," "wigged out," "freaked out," "flipped out" and/or "out of sorts?" It's easy to understand how such a person might develop an obsession to realign his three brains and reorganize his mind towards revenge.

The Oregon shooter showed no mercy in his rampage killings because his three brains became locked and loaded (figuratively and literally) and undeterrable from his mission to exact revenge on a world that he believed had done him wrong.

For a further discussion of how the "bent on revenge" mind develops check out: Psychology Today: Hacking Hatred.
Why target schools and churches?
I don't believe that school or church shootings are selected by these individuals accidentally. All such places have in common people feeling they belong to each other and a group and are together growing towards a better life. Nearly all the rampage shooters felt they belonged nowhere and had no chance of a better life.

We are also told of the appeal of such shooters of the fame they can have by their acts. It's something that I refer to as the revenge of the nobody. Such nobody's who feel put down and pushed away react directly from their mammalian, emotional and reptilian brains by getting in and getting even.

In a subsequent article we will discuss how to defuse an enraged brain before it commits outrageous acts of retribution. In the meantime and for milder situations check out these tips for: How to Get an Irrational Person to Listen to Reason.
ALSO: As mentioned on CNN I am working with an author of a book entitled, "Inside the Mind of a School Shooter." It's the story of how twenty five years ago, the author was all set to go into his high school and kill many people. He even had guns placed to carry out his plan. It's also the story how five days before, he aborted it. The book is the story of how he descended into a state of homicidal rage and then didn't act on it. * Source: Talking to Crazy by Mark Goulston (Amacom Books) Resource: Psychology Today - What Your Teenager Wants You to Know But Won't Tell You

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What may cause a person to become a school shooter is when his mind becomes so disorganized that the three brains that make up his triune brain react by becoming "locked and loaded" and focused on a mission to get in and get even with a world that caused him to feel put down and pushed away.

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Media coverage gives attention to the shooter whether that is intended or not. This can motivate people to do things simply to be known.

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In the aftermath of each school shooting, we grieve for the affected community, pray for the injured, and for the families of lives lost. Yet we also focus our attention on the shooter in an attempt to make sense out of the senseless violence and identify red flags that might help prevent future shootings.

Reading the red flags that precipitated each massacre, we ask what could have been done differently. This conversation always includes an examination of the traits that mass shooters have in common. These often include a quest for fame, perceived rejection, and a sense of injustice.
Seeking Fame and Infamy-a Perceived Distinction Without a Difference
The desire for fame is a longstanding motivation driving human behavior. Too often, bad behavior. The line between fame and infamy becomes blurred as many bad actors do not believe there is any such thing as bad press. Tragically, some of these bad actors are individuals capable of committing mass shootings.

The devastating 1999 Columbine High School shooting is an event that shocked the nation. Yet not everyone was horrified. Some were inspired. Although most people find the counterintuitive phenomenon hard to believe, other school shooters report being captivated and encouraged by the Columbine gunmen. Could it be because of the press coverage they received? Many believe at least in part, the answer is yes.
Media Coverage of School Shooters: News Stories or Sensationalism?
Many people are opposed to the amount of coverage school shooters receive in the media. Some media outlets feel the same way and even refrain from naming a school shooter to avoid contributing to these mass murders becoming a household name.

An article in Vox entitled "The Media Should Stop Making School Shooters Famous" notes that extensive media coverage made Columbine School shooters "not only famous but even, in some quarters, folk heroes of a sort, particularly among deeply alienated students." [i] The article notes that the Columbine shooters even have a cult following known as "The Columbiners." The article outlines efforts to decrease the amount of media coverage devoted to school shooters through campaigns aptly entitled "No Notoriety" and "Don´t Name Them."

Despite counterarguments citing the First Amendment and the public´s right to full coverage of devastating school shootings and similar attacks, which includes personal information about the perpetrators, research supports the concern about the potential danger of over-publicizing school shooters.
Researching Shooter Quest for Fame
Research by Adam Lankford (2016) reveals that rampage shooters in pursuit of fame have become more common in the last few decades and that these shooters are disproportionately found in the United States.[ii] He also points to out that there are significant differences between offenders seeking fame and other offenders. He notes that fame-seeking rampage shooters are usually significantly younger, and kill and injure significantly more victims.

Lankford recognizes that in America, fame is considered to be "the ultimate form of prestige-bearing success." He further notes that the demarcation between fame and infamy appears to be vanishing, leading some mass shooters, overcome by "delusions of grandeur," to kill in pursuit of seeking fame and glory.

Yet there are other reasons troubled youth commit mass murder.
Perceived Rejection, Negativity, and Paranoia
Dutton et al. (2013) note that school shooters are depicted in the relevant literature as either psychopathic or responding with rage to taunting or bullying behavior.[iii] They discovered similarities in an examination of websites and diaries left by a subset of mass shooters (e. g., Eric Harris, Kimveer Gil, Seung-Hui Cho, Anders Breivik). Examining pre-shooting writings provides a glimpse into the thought processes of the shooters.

They found that this group exaggerated the negativity of the way they were treated by others, as reported by peers. The shooters obsessed over being rejected by a perceived "elite in-group" they view as having become successful unfairly. They thus plan to annihilate those who have transgressed against them in an act of vengeance for the way they were treated.

Dutton et al. note that the obsessive and self-exacerbating qualities of the perceptions of the shooters are more consistent paranoia than psychopathy. They also note that shooters who survive are diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic.
Risk Factors Are Red Flags
Knowing some of the shared traits of mass shooters provides guidance to those in a position to spot red flags sooner rather than later. Acknowledging that some young people experience an abnormal, deviant interest in school shooters, viewing their senseless carnage as empowering, rather than repulsive, can prompt us to recognize such interest in a conversation, and search for (and find) indications of such deviant interest both on and offline.

Because knowledge is power, understanding the risk factors will enhance our ability to identify problem behavior and intervene if necessary. Remaining attentive to warning signs will enable us to work together to protect our students and our community.

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In the aftermath of each school shooting, we grieve for the affected community, pray for the injured, and for the families of lives lost. Yet we also focus our attention on the shooter in an attempt to make sense out of the senseless violence and identify red flags that might help prevent future shootings.