For shame

We just enjoyed our 800,000th cyberspace visitor this afternoon. By chance, it came via Michelle Malkin's site from someone in Richmond, Virginia. Only 200,000 more visits till we reach the million mark! Our ranking as a Large Mammal in the Ecosystem is either #188 or #192, depending upon your search route. As far as Technorati, we have two rankings, #4773 for http://sisu.typepad.com and #19,838 for http://sisu.typad.com/sisu, which represent a nesting of our blog within a larger entity, reflecting Typepad's blogging architecture. From time to time we've informed Technorati that those two URLs represent the same blog, but nobody's listening. Whine, whine, whine.

The three best things out there today on the psychology of the Virginia Tech "gunman" -- do you despise that term as much as we do? A psychopathic thug is a psychopathic thug -- reinforce our gut feeling that it's all about our own ur blog theme, "The importance of being noticed." The honor-shame continuum and all that. The fact that the VT shooter sent a package of photos, videos and writings -- called by John Gibson and other media types a "manifesto" and now being shamelessly peddled for ratings -- to NBC timestamped during that two-hour lacuna between the two shootings only lends further support to what Dr. Helen and Shrinkwrapped and Mark Steyn wrote earlier today [be sure to read 'em all, start to finish]:

1. Dr. Helen:

The violence-prone individual is more likely to have enduring personality pathology, such as a paranoid, schizoid, narcissistic, or antisocial personality, and a long history of difficult interpersonal relationships. He may ruminate about perceived slights or injustices for months or even years. Because he is often a loner, he has no circle of friends to correct his misinterpretations of other people’s intentions and behaviors . . .

What I am amazed by is that in many school shootings, especially in universities, school authorities and others were told that there were problems or in some cases, the eventual killer had already made threats but no one did anything. The schools deny any responsibility at all in most of these cases although, sometimes they end up being sued for it. But what is money when people's lives are at stake? It's often the case that when the killer finally lashes out, the people who knew him aren't surprised -- they'd been predicting something like this for weeks or months, but no action was taken.

2. ShrinkWrapped:

The expression "to run amok" derives from the Amok Syndrome associated with Malaysian men among whom it was common in the 1800s and into the 1900s.  Amok was a sudden eruption of homicidal violence during which the perpetrator, armed with a Kris (later with guns), would race through the streets in a frenzy, killing any person or animal he came upon.  When the attack burned out and ended, the attacker would commonly be in a state of exhaustion and often amnestic for the attack; not infrequently the attacks would end with the attacker's suicide.

Typically the attack was found to have been preceded by a period of pre-occupation, brooding and depression. Further, there was often an incident that evoked extreme shame in the person preceding the attack. In the Malay Honor-Shame culture, intense shame was incompatible with continued involvement in the community.

In our own experience of such murderous attacks, as in Columbine, or the kinds of workplace incidents that have become all too common, there is almost always an aspect of shame-evoked rage associated with the acts. The two young men who murdered their classmates in Columbine were quite clearly acting out a desire for revenge on their classmates who they felt had belittled and slighted them.

As we said to our imail correspondent earlier this evening, too bad the attacks don't START with the attacker's suicide, but, of course, that would defeat the purpose. It's always all about them. Others are mere props in their monomaniacal fantasies.

3. Mark  Steyn, who brings up the rear with politically-correct academia's facilitation of monomaniacs:

Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

"Tom cats perceive inviolable barriers -- invisible to us -- surrounding each other's personal space" we noted in the caption to the above photo illustrating our blogpost "Shedding shame and capturing honor" two years back.

Shame vs honor is only a matter of degree, as we wrote in our blogpost "The real issue is, whom do we select as our peers":

The importance of being noticed makes the world go 'round, from al-Queda types who intimidate through cold-blooded murder of innocents to impress their "brothers," to internet hackers who wreak havoc amongst online innocents to impress their own fellow travelers. On the good side, each one of us seeks, through our accomplishments, to earn a place of honor among our peers. The real issue is, whom do we select as our peers.

If not as our peers, we choose the Founding Fathers to give the last word, as cited by David B. Kopel in today's WSJ:

The founder of the University of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, understood the harms resulting from the type of policy created at Virginia Tech. In his "Commonplace Book," Jefferson copied a passage from Cesare Beccaria, the founder of criminology, which was as true on Monday as it always has been:

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms . . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes . . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."

Like our fellow citizens who insist on building their homes on flood plains, only to see them swept away during periodic torrential rains like we had here in New England earlier this week, those who blame arms and not human nature for what happened at Blacksburg are deaf and dumb to the lessons of history and natural history.

Comments

[goomp]

It couldn't have been explained simpler and clearer than you have done. People kill, not guns. I had three for sixty-seven years and they have failed to kill man nor beast. However don't break into my house because they might take it upon themselves to kill.

[hnav]

so happpy to see you have such fine traffic.

congrats on your 800,000 th and hoping for many more.

cause it brings hope for folks like myself, that there are so many reading SISU.

[Teresa]

Woot! Congrats on the 800K mark!

Part of the problem I see, with all this hindsight, is that America is still (yes, even now) "land of the free". It's also a country where most people don't live around immediate family and friends who have known them for years.

This means that we are reluctant to interfere in the lives of people like the VT killer. Even teachers don't know their pupils well enough to feel that they can press the university to take action when all you have is the feeling that this person scares you.

After all, if you step aside from all the hysteria, the last time we had a campus shooting of any magnitude was in 1966... 41 years ago! That's a very very long time. So, unless it becomes the rage among college students - should we change how students are dealt with because of one person who was clearly insane? Because you know what will happen... people who are simply deemed "not sociable enough" will be looked upon with suspicion and have to jump through hoops to prove that they aren't going to go out and kill off their classmates.

I guess people are okay with that... until it happens to them. Then they won't like it. Or, what if a teacher takes a dislike to a student (not an unknown occurrence - consider the Duke rape case...) how much easier would it be for that teacher to completely ruin a student's reputation for the rest of his life.

The problem is we are dealing with widely varied personalities. We will never ever be able to out think the next homicidal maniac. It just won't happen. Therefore, we'd be far better off training people on how to deal with emergencies. Letting teachers do concealed carry if they qualify - students too (not everyone qualifies of course). But if you have even 1% of the teacher-student population - ready to react to a bad situation - the loss of life decreases tremendously.