I am posting more on the phenomenon of mass shootings stemming from mass shootings recently. Please also visit my previous posts on Guns and Their Triggers as well as Guns, Shootings and Shooters for more on this topic. I have predicted that they will keep on occurring and sadly I have been proven to be correct. Sadly I predict more will happen. An Associated Press / USA Today database on mass killings in the US shows that 2022 was one of the nation’s Worst Years with 42 such attacks, the second highest number since the creation of the tracker in 2006.[1] The database defines a mass killing as four people killed not including the perpetrator.
This seems to have been a copy cat situation. The debate on gun control usually recurs and nothing is resolved, and the issue becomes dormant until the next killing. But there are so many now, that the mood of society must be affected, because emotional contagion carries the depression, anger, anxiety, morbidity, fear and suspicion around society. Many of these emotions are contagious and the spread occurs. We need to STOP THE SPREAD OF NEGATIVE EMOTIONAL CONTAGION, as my book Emotions Don’t Think: Emotional Contagion in a Time of Turmoil says. Then susceptible people (those who are susceptible to picking up the contagious negative emotions) won’t pick up as many strong negative emotions like suspicion, hate, fear, anger, depression and cynicism when the contagious negative emotions spread around society,.
No one in U.S. society seems to know what to do to prevent these mass shootings. They think they know what to do after the shooting occurs, catch the person and lock them up, or kill them on sight. The police, lawyers, D.A.’s, judges at various levels in society, and others in the legal system get involved and the media asks them for input. They rarely have little to say other than what happened, and may give the background of the killer or the statistics of crime. The police look for motives, and the media looks for a motive, because people want to know why did it happen? But this is the wrong question to ask. This isn’t a case of a criminal holding a hostage to get some money. The true motive is because they want to kill someone for the experience of killing and to feel important and powerful even in a notorious way.
This is more than crime. Although it is technically a crime, focussing on it as a crime misses the point. This is a sickness in society that no one in the U.S. is doing anything about. It gets stalled at the political level and the value of life seems to go down. There seems to be no one in any government, British, Canadian or American, local, provincial, state or nationally who are responsible for the overall psychological health of society and as a result the value of life goes down.
Let’s look at this some more to help U.S. society work on preventing these occurrences. The shooters do not care about life. Many of them have extreme hate for all people. The only criteria many of them seem to have about whether to shoot and kill or not is that the target has to be a living human being because you cannot kill a rock. That may sound preposterous but I say it for effect. They look to kill because their emotions get very high. Punishment or deterrence or threat of being captured does not work to deter these people, because they do not value life, not even their own. If they do not value life, they do not value others lives. If they hate people, they want to kill them. If they do not value life, they do not care if they are alive or not. They do not care if the are punished or captured. What seems proper to the average person or politician really has little effect for most of these killers.
As I mentioned in previous posts, there are many factors that cause these shootings. It is not only a gun control issue, but it is a gun control issue, as shown by the statistics that the U.S. is far ahead of all other civilized countries in mass shootings.
[1] Dalton, A. and Hong, J. California mass shooting suspect dead after 10 killed at dance studio. Globe and Mail January 23rd 2023.
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