Each of the boys struggled to socialize and find girlfriends. Each of the boys played violent video games. Each of the boys were raised in middle to upper-class homes. Yes, they were all on a spectrum of mental instability - some more than others, such as Adam Lanza, the shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary - but there were no signs strong enough to call for involuntary intervention and all are obvious only in hindsight.
What is most notable about Rodger’s autobiography, and about all of the murderers’ life stories, is how utterly usual they are. It ends with an intimate description of his motivation: “Women are like a plague. Today, anyone can access the entire 141-page life story/“manifesto” and multiple YouTube videos posted by Santa Barbara murderer Elliot Rodger because more information is available - for better or worse. In them, he described his intentions - in past tense - called on his “children” to follow his path, and mentioned “martyrs like Eric and Dylan,” in reference to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the perpetrators of the shooting at Columbine High School in 1999.Īt that time, NBC had the privilege to edit and carefully decide which images and footage they were going to publish out of concern for public safety and copycat offenders. And of those high-profile shootings on the tip of the layman’s tongue: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Sandy Hook- all were perpetrated by white men, all with a similar story of emotional disturbance, a sense of vengeance, and access to legal firearms.īefore Seung Hui-Cho went on a shooting spree killing 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, he mailed hours of photos, videos and letters to NBC. Another study by The Encyclopedia of Murder and Violent Crime found white men responsible for 75 percent of all mass killings on record. Mother Jones magazine found 44 of 62 mass public shootings in the last 30 years have been at the hands of white men- about 70 percent. According to USA Today, 94 percent of all mass killings are committed by men. have been perpetrated by men, and the majority of those men have been white. While statistics are difficult to officiate because of a lack of federal regulation and state oversight, it is a fact that the great majority of mass shootings in the U.S. And since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary last year, after which gun control support was at an ultimate high, every single piece of Congressional legislation to tighten gun laws has been denied and in the majority of states, gun restrictions have been loosened instead of tightened.
Firearm sales have set records every single year since President Obama has been in office there have been four times as many firearms purchased as babies have been born in the U.S. Since 2006, there has been one mass killing nearly every two weeks in the United States, with 75 percent being committed by the use of a firearm. The recent shooting in Santa Barbara is a red flag in a sea of red flags: gun violence is America’s version of the African tragedy. The worst kind of tragedy is the African one, where inhumanity is so frequent it is legitimized as “culture” and largely ignored by the domestic and international community on a regular basis.
0 kommentar(er)
