> It is worth noting - as I did to colleagues who decided the
> China reference was some sort of counterfactual to the gun
> problem - that the guy in China was far less efficient: he
> didn't end up killing anyone. Lanza on the other hand...
Maybe I picked the wrong headline; there are so many. There's plenty of mass killing with knives. And certainly you can kill an unarmed person with a gun and knife equally if you have the benefit of surprise and a little bit of training.
Talking about "efficiency" in this case would also seem to leave open this:
> "The intense violence lasted about 10 minutes. Lanza fired at
> least three, 30-round magazines with deadly accuracy.
Except "at least (90 rounds)... with deadly accuracy" does not = 26 dead. That sounds rather poor to me, in terms of "killing efficiency" -- what seems clear is that "killing efficiency" wasn't on his TODO list that day, because if it was, he would have made "at least" 30x3 = "at least" 80+ dead.
Anyway, the point is that if the conclusion is "get rid of the guns, then this won't happen!" then you'd better put knives on the list too. Or propane tanks. I mean, the grand-daddy of school killngs was the Bath School attack, where the guy used basically a car bomb after a year of planning.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
> It would seem worth considering this as a continuum, where having
> fewer assault rifles in the hands of people who would use them on
> other people might be a way to limit the carnage.
I'm bumfuzzled by that one. I don't think it's worth considering what kind of firepower would be necessary to stop an attack like this. My position is that basically if someone is determined enough, no amount of arming teachers, locking down schools, etc. is going to stop this kind of thing from happening. It happens. It's incredibly rare. But it happens. It also happens that large areas of urban US are effectively controlled by gangs who are engaged in black market economies that require turf control through the pervasive use of violence, but we're not wasting dozens of lbo-talk posts talking about that tragedy.
> We either have more crazy people, more crazy people with
> guns, or more crazy people pushed over some edge by their
> perceived school or workplace target.
Why are those the only options? Why do we need "deadly accuracy" on this accounting of rare behavior?
> It seems worthwhile to figure out which is which ...
I guess that's my point: I disagree that it's worthwhile to figure out which of those possibilities is correct, given that a) it's incredibly unlikley that we have enough data to make an accurate determination; and b) that it's incredibly unlikely that once we had such a conclusion that we could do anything meaningful about it.
I'd rather think about the "craziness" (cue: Carrol for the misuse of the word) in the US that leads to having a crumbling economy that costs us individual misery among millions of people due to vast inequality and greedy policy decisions.
> It is, after all, a big world, with a lot of other societies not
> plagued by gun violence to the degree the US is. That can't be
> a complete coincidence can it?
*shrug*
You call it a plague; I call it anomolous. There's a big gap there. We've been over this before, but the "plague of gun violence" in the US is completely dominated by suicide; followed by violence commited in the service of another felony -- such as a drug deal gone wrong, or a retribution or turf war killing. When it comes down to it, there's very little worth looking at here that qualifies as being the same as what happened with Adam Lanza.
> I'll close by recommending Adam Kotsko's book, "Why we love
> sociopaths," which is a fairly thorough collection of the recent
> swath of sociopathic characters on TV programs, including Sopranos,
> Breaking Bad, Dexter, Weeds, Mad Men, House, and many more.
> Again, provocative but not foolproof.
Yeah, tens of millions of people watch TV shows, and one or two of them now and again go into a school or a shopping mall and kill a bunch of people as their last desperate action in their life.
I see clearly the connection.
/jordan