December 5, 2024
On mass shootings and the role of imitation
The significance of these killings goes far beyond the statistical likelihood of our being the victim of such a crime, which remains minimal. It is that they reveal to us the dark potential of the human soul.
The significance of these killings goes far beyond the statistical likelihood of our being the victim of such a crime, which remains minimal. It is that they reveal to us the dark potential of the human soul.

Most people, said La Rochefoucauld, would never fall in love if they’d never heard of it. Whether or not it is true of love, it might be true of mass shootings—that is, one mass shooting encourages another, so that they seem to come in clusters, piling horror on horror. Few people will believe that the mass shooting in Dayton, in which nine people so far have lost their lives, is entirely unconnected with the shooting just hours earlier in El Paso, in which 20 people have died.

The role of imitation in the commission of acts of violence by the susceptible has been known since at least the end of the eighteenth century, when romantic young men in Europe committed suicide after the publication of Goethe’s novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, the eponymous hero of which killed himself for unrequited love. Even today, a suicide in a soap opera is sometimes followed by a brief spate of suicides—such that producers are now wary of depicting suicides, for fear of being accused of provoking them.

The violence of suicide, of course, affects principally the person who commits it, but often—especially among the young—it contains a significant element of aggression toward others, wreaking vengeance upon others for injuries done, real or imagined, to the suicidal person’s self-esteem. Mass shooting, which has been interpreted as a form of suicide because so high a proportion of perpetrators end up dead, takes vengeance to a higher level altogether. The suicide’s vengeance is directed against certain people in particular; the mass shooter’s is against people, or society, in general.

[…]

See Also:

(1) What We Can, and Can’t, Glean from the Dayton Shooter’s Online Behavior

(2) The FBI Crushed the Klan, and Should Target Violent White Supremacists Today

(3) Trump to visit El Paso mass shooting site, in spite of Dems’ warning to stay away

(4) There Have Been More Mass Shootings Than Number Of Days In 2019 So Far, Nonprofit Data Finds

(5) Baltimore cops make arrest in connection with brutal beating of civilian police employee

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BTDT
BTDT
August 7, 2019 6:29 pm

Say it ain’t so…

“With leftists seeking to blame the El Paso shooting on President Trump, guns, white people, and whatever other boogieman will help score political points, a simple fact should be understood:

Murder is a Democrat thing.

We can start with the striking statistic that 68 percent of all homicides occur in just certain parts of 5 percent of America’s counties — and all, or virtually all, of these are Democrat areas”.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/08/murder_its_a_democrat_thing.html