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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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is that while statistically white people are very slightly less likely to carry out shootings than their proportion of the population would suggest

This is actually really fucking interesting, because it suggests that whatever makes a mass shooter affects all men in equal measure rather than general criminality. I can't even begin to speculate about why that is, but someone should probably study it.

I think that the statistics here are incredibly noisy and hard to generalise from, but if you can find some more rigorous sourcing that would actually be a really interesting avenue to explore or research.

It doesn't surprise me that mass shooting wouldn't correlate to general criminality, but as for speculation to why beyond brain tumors- I agree, interesting but difficult to study.

It's not even unique to guns; the phrase "running amok" is an old one, and the operative word's from Malaysia (of all places). It's a very old observation that's only really ever been considered "weird destructive malfunction for unknown reasons", and something that complicates my amateur categorization of extensive amok coverage and societal over?reaction as an infohazard (if it was, we'd expect immediate copycats and not pithy "inspired to replicate Columbine for XYZ reason" 30 years after the fact).

We've solved most death problems so these cases stand out a lot more. Probably a more common factor in head-on collisions than anyone is comfortable admitting- "fell asleep at the wheel" isn't exactly provable and probably the easiest way to visit death upon random people- but at least we have airbags for that.

One thing does stick out to me, though: most mass killers of this type explicitly say that what they're about to do is wrong, something that's unusual among normal types of criminality (hero of one's own story and all that).

"The Unbearable Whiteness of Non-Violence: an exploration into the racist origins of mass shootings"

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