Mass Killings: Semantics and Future Trends

This is post is about the surge of mass killings in the USA ( lone gunmen shooting random strangers in a public place for the sole purpose of killing, rather than for money or political terrorism ). I am going to be highly parasitic, pointing the reader to authoritative writers blogging on the phenomenon, lifting quotes from them, then making a few quips of my own. Here are the list of blogs with significant, mature things to say on the mass killing issue:

• On Superempowerment and 5th Generation Warfare
• Mass Murder and the Decline of the State
• War or Not War

great quotes from the above links:

It is only when (leadership) allows ignorance about the evolution of weaknesses and imbalances into crises to exist that crisis conducive environments can grow and intensify. The more established the dysfunctions and weaknesses the thicker the veil of ignorance. The vulnerability of an organization does not so much reside in its actual weaknesses as in the ignorance of these weaknesses, an ignorance that is activated by defense mechanisms that regulate the managers’ threatened self-esteem and leads them unconsciously to favor laissez-faire over correction. The more entrenched the imperfection, the more likely it is to lead to a disruption and the more prohibitive the psychological and sometimes economic cost of a correction. — “Is Crisis Management (Only) a Management of Exceptions,” Christophe Roux-Dufort, Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, June 2007

Do we man the equipment or equip the man? (this is a deeply penetrating phrase that points toward human's integration of technology into social judgement and solutions. )

(Retro-Romanticism and Jingoism?): We must learn, unlearn relearn and become once again the resilient communities of our frontier history.

For my part in the above ideas for solutions to thwart the further rise of mass killings, I offer: little. At least little for the societies who congregate in these public places. My solutions for this issue:

• Live in apartments or condos above the 1st floor.
• Shop online.
• if attending a church, attend one that has armed guards^{like this}.
• Live in the inner-city, as suburban and rural people are more likely to be mass killers.

Of course the above are cases of abandonment and lily-pad hopping, which is exactly what I intentionally have done. If I was to support measures to suppress the rise of mass killings, it would fit something antithetical to "systems intervention" at the personal level. I don't believe a professional class of psychiatrists or theologians should be imposing even a benevolent or healing mechanism in the mass killers head, nor do I want the local community to impose its normalization. Above all no one should ask about another persons character, unless entering into a business or marital contract. These "rules" I have against intervention or character evaluation (even with intent to improve) leave only an impersonal , mechanistic or intelligent-technology solution.

The foundation of this stance is that society has become too large and complex for humans to effectively intervene and manage. A set of good do's and don'ts, or mantra such as "anything goes except violence"; do not map well onto the world. Most writers make a career out of claiming the world is the thing in error and needs simplifying. Those writers are wrong. The things which do not map, even benevolent thought-controllers, are the error. Ten Commandments, Bodhisattva Vow, a rap song that preaches pacifism -these all fail to change the world because they were not made with a knowledge of its whole. Only something non-human can gain that knowledge.