
Nearly All Mass Shooters Since 1966 Have Had Things in Common - agarden
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/a35mya/nearly-all-mass-shooters-since-1966-have-had-four-things-in-common
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sarcasmatwork
No mention of psychiatric drugs... THAT is a common factor this writer leaves
out and so do many others in MSM. Why?

The access to firearms argument is not accurate. There are more and more guns
now... More guns != more crime or death.

CA has very struict gun laws, but shootings still happen. Dont blame the
object. How about lack of parenting, social media and the abundance of
psychiatric drugs these kids are taking.

Mental illness is a problem.. No one wants to deal with it. Your mental if you
want to kill children or mass amounts of people.

This writer did not do their research and seems rather uneducated about guns,
their history and the laws.

Example, they mention the Assault rifles ban in 1994 during the Clinton
Administration, but dont go into those details how IT MADE NO DIFFERENCE, then
tries to push gun control points by saying: "gun manufacturers pounced on the
opportunity to re-market military-style firearms to civilians."

A quick google search and I found this.

[https://www.naturalnews.com/039752_mass_shootings_psychiatri...](https://www.naturalnews.com/039752_mass_shootings_psychiatric_drugs_antidepressants.html)

[https://www.ammoland.com/2013/04/every-mass-shooting-in-
the-...](https://www.ammoland.com/2013/04/every-mass-shooting-in-the-
last-20-years-shares-psychotropic-drugs/)

Now, how many are democrats would be an interesting read. None are NRA
members.

~~~
7952
I just don't see this article as putting forward an argument one way or the
other. It just talks about the statistics of mass shooters from several
different angles. It is focused on the individual circumstances of the
shooters rather than policy or wider culture. It is left to the reader to draw
conclusions if they want.

~~~
captainredbeard
Excluding what amounts to "exculpatory evidence facts" shapes the impression
readers receive.

~~~
7952
It's like a form of political correctness. Writers using weasel words so no
one thinks they may be hinting at something controversial that may offend
people. Perhaps they should put a disclaimer at the start reminding us that
guns are not at fault.

It is just an unreasonable burden to expect articles about mass killings in
America to completely ignore guns.

Maybe mass shootings follow the Swiss cheese model [0]. Several sets of
circumstances align and you get a terrible outcome. Mental health, family,
drugs, propaganda whatever. But guns are also a big hole in the cheese. It
shouldn't be contraversial to point that out.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model)

~~~
beatgammit
Sure, but it's also not particularly useful. Obviously you need access to guns
to use them, so it just serves to distract from the other issues. If guns
weren't available but everything else lined up, would bombs be used instead?
That would require a couple of other things to line up, but it doesn't prevent
the problem.

I want to know why these mental issues arise and how we might go about
preventing them. I imagine there are more similarities between suicides and
mass shootings than the media admits, yet the former gets mentioned with
mental health while the latter focuses on access to guns.

We need to figure out how these mental health issues develop and find ways to
solve them before they become a public problem. Maybe that means controlled,
legal access to psychedelics, idk, but we need more than a copout of "gun
control will solve everything". Maybe gun control is part of the solution, but
it's certainly not the only part.

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randyrand
Having access to a firearm is pretty tautological for mass _shootings_ , no?
Seems not even worth mentioning.

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Communitivity
AI researcher here. Please do not read this headline and think, 'Ooh, I could
create AI software to find potential mass shooters!' First, watch Minority
Report and realize all the problems with 'pre-crime'. Second, current AI
technology often does not do well with social behavior prediction, sometimes
even performing worse than linear regression. Also, 100 different features is
a small set, which is problematic in itself.

Now, an idea for AI application might be to analyze the environments the mass
shootings occurred in to help create environments that minimize the casualty
potential while retaining as mush aesthetics as possible. I could see a
Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) setup applying here, it's an interesting
idea. Sadly, I do not have the bandwidth to tackle it.

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sharemywin
The problem with stereotyping. How many millions of people have those four
specific traits and don't commit a mass shooting?

~~~
bmer
Its not stereotyping, but coming up with Bayesian estimates of conditional
probabilities.

According to the data they collected, P(person is female | person is a
shooter) is just very low. Similarly, P( person is a college student AND
person is of color | person is a shooter) > P(person is a college student AND
person is not of color | person is a shooter).

Note that "white males" did not always appear. In one case race wasn't a
distinguishing factor (workplace violence), in another color was a
distinguishing factor (college violence), and in the rest, being white was a
distinguishing factor.

This is pretty balanced overall. The data needs to speak for itself. It's okay
to notice that in some cases, white males are more likely to commit mass
shootings. As okay as noticing that in other cases, non-white males are more
likely to commit mass shootings. This means that we can be zoom in better on
the issues that lead to such crimes being committed, and get people the help
they need, before they irreversibly hurt themselves and others.

They aren't talking about P(person is a shooter | person is a white male).
That would be stereotyping, but also easily dismissed, because as you noted,
P(person is a shooter | person is a white male) is also very low.

~~~
belorn
> This means that we can be zoom in better on the issues that lead to such
> crimes being committed

The problem of stereotyping is that people take a complex problem and attempts
to reduce it by measuring people based on one or a few bits of information.

Crime is a bit like rain. The more one attempt to zoom closer to the atom the
less we understand it and the poorer the prediction becomes. It get even worse
when attempting to zoom in order to understand rare events.

If we look at the specific crime of rape in Sweden we see that P(person is
Muslim | person is a rapist) > P(Person is a Christian | person is a rapist),
by around 300%. The political reaction to people noticing the data is a bit
volatile to say the least.

It is possible to still use the data, but its best to zoom out rather than in.
A common one for crime is the acknowledgement that high risk groups tend share
a trait of low social economic status. Thus a popular general prediction
method is to measure social economic status when determining risk. What we
then get is a more general P(person is socially isolated AND low income AND
low education | person commit a crime) that we can compare to other prediction
models. People then take each of those classifications and zooms out even
further by addressing them independently and outside of crime prevention as
improving them has value in itself.

~~~
beatgammit
And since there isn't a ton of data here, it's quite likely that some of the
factors are heavily skewed by outliers.

For example, skin color may not be the determining factor in college violence,
but social ostracism, so it would only become relevant in specific cases where
that caused social tension. The larger problem, however, may be completely
unrelated to skin color if most colleges don't have a problem with ostracising
people with a particular skin color.

So yes, I completely agree that we need to take a step back and look at
multiple explanations for the evidence we have and see if they explain future
events.

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bch132
They also all had a fifth thing in common - trigger fingers!

