>Doug 'How can you separate them like this?'
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>How can you not separate them? Is everything one, to you? Is society, like Buddha, a shoreless sea? Social science tells us about society. Psychology tells us about individual thought processes. Your social science might be able to come up with some generalisation about the frequency of murder (though even there it would be little more than a statistical measure of events with too many determinants to sort out). What it could not do is predict which individual is going to commit the crime, because social science gives no access, nor pretends to give access to individual thought processes.
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James, I gotta go old school on you: "It's awful that people commit suicide, but it's the result of individual thought processes. Sociology cannot help us understand why people commit suicide." Durkheim quite effectively demolished this argument over 100 years ago. Suicide is not simply the result of individual psychological processes; it is a social fact shaped by social forces such as gender roles, social class, and religious affiliation. --And just so with mass murders. Mass murders are a social fact; they are not the product of autonomous individuals driven solely and completely by psychological or biological factors. It is only via social relations that we create the social contexts in which mass murders can occur: the social organizations (e.g., schools) in which large numbers of people congregate, the complex web of social interactions needed to create and distribute deadly weapons, the paucity of social services that exacerbate individual psychological trauma. I have no compelling explanation for Newtown, but I know sure as hell that arguing "some people are crazy" is an insipid response that will get us no closer to understanding what happened.
Miles