Two Professors Found What Creates a Mass Shooter. Will Politicians Pay Attention?
Melanie Warnerpolitico.com
Saved by Jerod Morris
Two Professors Found What Creates a Mass Shooter. Will Politicians Pay Attention?
In the aftermath of any terrorist act, our instinct is to try to make sense of the brutality by assigning a person’s or a group’s violent radicalization to one or two probable causes: religious extremism and economic disparity, for example.
Jessica C. Flack • Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019 (Compass)
One of the most robust findings in criminology is that increasing the severity of punishment has little deterrent effect. People simply aren’t as sensitive to the potential costs of crime as the rational-choice model predicts they should be, and so efforts to reduce it by cracking down have failed to justify the immense fiscal and social costs of m
... See moreVitor added
That growing alienation is a key point. This is not just about “bad” people. It is about how the death of truth, and, therefore trust, has caused so many “normal” people to be derailed into acting badly by predators or by people who have themselves been deluded. And it’s about the new tools that technology has given them to spread distrust.
Steven Brill • The Death of Truth
These trends are dangerous, because when opponents become enemies, people can justify almost anything in responding to them. After all, how can you expect to reason with idiots and maniacs?
Keith Payne • The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Changes the Way We Think, Live and Die
Lessons from a mass shooter's mother
motherjones.com
Lisa Samatovicz added
The idea that someone’s personal proclivities attached to a particular stage in life can shape an entire ecology of investments, philanthropy, and research funding is alarming.
Who Gets to Live Forever? A Conversation about Biotechno-solutionism with Tamara Kneese and Santiago Sanchez
Although they are rare in the population as a whole, malevolent, sadistic, or psychopathic actors may be disproportionately likely to gain political power.