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VERY interesting paper on mass killings
Here's a very interesting short paper (small pdf) on mass slayings, with emphasis on the shootings at Port Arthur.
The gist of it is that, before that massacre, a national TV program had laid out a "how to do it" segment, with features that would predictably have appealed to a potential mass murderer, and ended with "We are going to have a massacre in Tasmania like those elsewhere."
He concludes what is needed for such a killer is rewards and guidance, and the media gives both. It rewards them with publicity, turning a bitter loser into a national figure. It gives guidance on how to do it, and once the first case occurs, lays out just how the killer went about his crimes.
I might add that what's needed for murder-suicide mass slayings is a person with a serious case of narcissistic personality disorder. That involves, not just a big ego, but a mass of inner self-hatred, from which the person is shielded by the enormous ego. Thus the murders satisfy the ego -- they feel godlike, able to strike down people on a whim. The suicide satisfies the self-hatred. The prospect of publicity is very appealing to such killers; it stokes the ego. "Celebrity" defines their idea of heaven -- not to be a hero, that requires heroism, but to be a celebrity, celebrated. In an instant, they can be on every new channel, the cover of Time, be talked of overseas, an experience that would otherwise take a lifetime of hard work and luck. Why, Nobel Prize winners don't become celebrities like that, despite decades of hard work and genius!
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Note also that in the segment, one of the activists helping produce it was Rebecca Peters, now a leading light at IANSA.
Of course the social script is laid out under the people's 'right to know'. The cold hard fact is, these liberal gun grabbers consider this loss of life quite an acceptable trade off for confiscating our weapons. After a massacre, they always want to take the guns away from the people that didn't do it.
That's why I say these mass killers (really, all killers) should be referred to by their victim's names instead. Take a bit of the cachet out of it for them.