US culture of mass killings

[Undertoad]

I examined the question of whether this is specific to the US, and in the process found some interesting things.

• If you expand out from "school shootings" to "whatever's called a massacre", it turns out that wacko groups and governments around the world are much more effective at killing than loners. This doesn't change the problem, except to maybe put it in some interesting perspective.

• If you only look at the US, in modern times, in the list of "whatever's called a massacre", the US government is the winner at 76 deaths (Waco) and killed more than Columbine (15), VA Tech (33), and Sandy Hook (25) combined. (However, it failed to commit suicide during the process.)

• If you look at the list of notable school shootings in the US you find that the great majority of events involves only 1 or 2 deaths, and one of them is usually the suicide of the shooter. Only 5 events go into the double digits, and the largest of these was in 1927, a suicide bombing killing 45. Three events happened since 1990, suggesting that this is a modern problem.

• Also, the number of listed events is greater in modern times, but one wonders how much news reporting comes into this; a death of 1 or even 2 was not major national news during times when wars were taking out tens or hundreds of thousands of people.

[IamSam]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

(However, it [the US] failed to commit suicide during the process.)

Nah, the US prefers to kill itself by inches through legislation like the Patriot Act and jumping off fiscal cliff's.

My thoughts fwiw:

Back in the day, the US wasn't all that excited about jumping into wars - especially ones in far off places. When WWII broke out, the American people had at least an idea of how awful Hitler was. We knew our British "cousins" were fighting single handed, but we still didn't join Churchill fighting on English beaches. It took the stunning surprise attack on Pearl Harbor to get the US off its butt.

Fast forward to modern times, and the US is now part of the war of the month club. We invade other countries on the smallest pretext, and we don't care that carpet bombing and drones, etc take out the innocent along with the guilty. Kill 'em all, and we'll sort it out afterwards. And we all get to watch on CNN every day.

How can we possibly think we're still the "good guys" when we employ torture and use drones that kill children? Our "culture of violence" starts at the top and far from trickling, it roars down from there.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

• If you only look at the US, in modern times, in the list of "whatever's called a massacre", the US government is the winner at 76 deaths (Waco) and killed more than Columbine (15), VA Tech (33), and Sandy Hook (25) combined. (However, it failed to commit suicide during the process.)

It also failed to be trying to kill lots of people.
Government agents didn't shoot 76 people. They attacked an armed compound, and most of the casualties in a two-way gun battle died due to a fire.

If you expand "massacre" to include situations where a bad call results in deaths, rather than just attempts to kill as many people as possible, then Firestone Tires (at least 200 deaths) killed more than Columbine, VA Tech, Sandy Hook, and Waco combined.