Location : Cleveland, OH
Shortly, I will return to normal blogging about IBM Lotus Software, book reviews, and such. Please bear with me as I divert to the shootings in Tuscon, Arizona.
The comment I made on Lunch.com concerning the shootings:
Driving in to work yesterday, listening to NPR, as I normally do, comes this report.
Stricter gun laws? Better mental health? "Blood libel?" According to the NPR report, none of those have anything to do with the tragedy in Tuscon. The first two may have helped, however it's very unlikely. The NPR report may not answer the "why?" question, but it seems to me a much more reasoned answer, without all of the political/social crap I have been hearing in the past few weeks. Which lead to knee-jerk reactions with no long term changes.
Link: NPR: Fame Through Assassination: A Secret Service Study
Link: Columbine by Dave Cullen
The comment I made on Lunch.com concerning the shootings:
I have hesitated to weigh in on this topic publically. However, I suppose now is as good a time as any.
Remember Columbine? Remember the "Trench Coat Mafia?" How about bullying? Violent video games? If you take the time to read the book, Columbine, you will discover that all of those were lies/half-truths in an effort to find easy answers. Sociopathic/psychopathic teenagers is not an answer anyone wants to hear, especially the parents.
I see the exact same thing happening here. The easy answers are everywhere. Until the news wagons pick up and leave to head out to the Next Big Story. I hate to say it, there are no easy answers coming out of this tragedy. Oh, you can point to "guns,"mental health," "civil discourse," whatever. Our attention span is so short, we'll accept those, but not wait around long enough to discover the real issues. Nothing will actually change, no one will stay with this long enough to educate us or provide answers to the tough questions. Because that takes hard work and dedication. It takes an attention span longer than a sound bite.
Yes, I am rather cynical. However, I think that we all have seen this before: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood. I believe we are still waiting for the real "why?" answers to the last two. But we've moved on to Arizona. Probably another example of easy answers, a lot of rash judgements, a bunch of political/social/legal sound bites, and no real closure.
Driving in to work yesterday, listening to NPR, as I normally do, comes this report.
The insights of this study are interesting to review in light of the Arizona shooting, though obviously we still don't know that much about Jared Loughner, the suspect in the attack, or his motives. Perhaps the most interesting finding is that according to Fein and Vossekuil, assassinations of political figures were almost never for political reasons.
"It was very, very rare for the primary motive to be political, though there were a number of attackers who appeared to clothe their motives with some political rhetoric," Fein says.
What emerges from the study is that rather than being politically motivated, many of the assassins and would-be assassins simply felt invisible. In the year before their attacks, most struggled with acute reversals and disappointment in their lives, which, the paper argues, was the true motive. They didn't want to see themselves as nonentities.
Stricter gun laws? Better mental health? "Blood libel?" According to the NPR report, none of those have anything to do with the tragedy in Tuscon. The first two may have helped, however it's very unlikely. The NPR report may not answer the "why?" question, but it seems to me a much more reasoned answer, without all of the political/social crap I have been hearing in the past few weeks. Which lead to knee-jerk reactions with no long term changes.
Link: NPR: Fame Through Assassination: A Secret Service Study
Link: Columbine by Dave Cullen
Comment posted by Craig Wiseman01/15/2011 12:53:49 PM
Homepage: http://www.Wiseman.La/cpw
+1
Comment posted by John Stockbridge01/16/2011 07:31:00 AM
Homepage: http://Www.Brookstone.com.au
The difference in Australia where there are very strict gun control laws would be that a mentally challenged or depressed person would find it very difficult to get hold of a weapon.
Certainly not impossible, but difficult enough to make people think twice about doing anything rash.
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