Whenever a mass killing occurs, such as the recent tragedies at the movie theater in Colorado or the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, we get reams of speculation about why the killer did it. Many of the explanations, as I've written...
Category: mass shootings
Whenever a mass killing occurs, such as the recent tragedies at the movie theater in Colorado or the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, we get reams of speculation about why the killer did it. Many of the explanations, as I've written here before, consist of amateur or long-distance psychiatric diagnosis, in which people who should know better attempt to diagnose people they have never met.
Only occasionally do we see something as insightful and thought-provoking as a short post in Britain's The Independent, written by Alex Bryan, a freelance writer and student at the University of York. Bryan argues that we can get some insight into these horrific acts by looking a little further back--to Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's ...
14Aug 2012
Two interesting items from Nature this week:
Guns
Much of the reporting I read on the mass shooting in the Colorado theater or the Sikh killings failed to mention the two most recent U.S. government studies of gun deaths. One found that people living in homes...
Two interesting items from Nature this week:
Guns
Much of the reporting I read on the mass shooting in the Colorado theater or the Sikh killings failed to mention the two most recent U.S. government studies of gun deaths. One found that people living in homes with guns faced "a 2.7-fold greater risk of homicide" and a "4.8-fold greater risk of suicide," compared to those in homes without guns. The studies were reported in an editorial in the Aug. 9 issue of Nature.
You might be wondering why these studies were not referred to more widely, and the reason is that the studies--the newest major U.S. government research on the subject--were published in 1993 ad 1992, respectively.
"Ever since, Congress has included in annual spending laws the stipulation that none of the CDC's injury-prevention funds 'may...
Here's a little appetizer that suggests an opportunity for a far more comprehensive story: Morgen Peck at Scientific American asks whether criminal trials provide any sense of relief or resolution for survivors of mass shootings. She talks to several authorities who...
Here's a little appetizer that suggests an opportunity for a far more comprehensive story: Morgen Peck at Scientific American asks whether criminal trials provide any sense of relief or resolution for survivors of mass shootings. She talks to several authorities who say, yes, sometimes the legal process helps.
Peck also reports that "there are many reasons to think that survivors whose assailant dies on the scene will recover faster from the psychological wounds." In other words, immediate, street justice might be better for survivors than a protracted trial.
As I say, there is much more to be explored here. But Peck has given us an interesting first taste.
-Paul Raeburn
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