Murders on Live TV

[dbcooper41]

the white hand holding the gun does seem peculiar.
also if you watch the video with the sound on the female screams don't seem to change as she is being shot at.
seems counterintuitive if she was being hit by bullets. i would expect her voice to be impacted in some way.

[Grizzly]

I'm neutral on whether this is a hoax or not, I just haven't had the time or energy to look into it however, I did run across the following and thought it mildly interesting, but again, not enough to investigate more.



Sounds calloused at first, but stay with it. Be interesting to hear what others think of it.

[82_28]

All I can really say is, Hmmmm. I wondered about his interview. I also wondered about her fiancée not showing much realistic emotion either and was totally available for pretty calm interviews. Dad was definitely doing some fake crying. It didn't seem like husband to be was upset at all.

You know, divide and conquer, you might have something. I really don't care in the sense of what is done is done and still needs to be unpacked. It is peculiar though -- the lack of believable emotion.

[Novem5er]

It's true, the victim's father is a part-time actor, that'd performed in theater and commercials for many years. Internet sleuths discovered this within hours of the crime. which makes it unlikely that it was a hoax.

[Novem5er]

Regarding emotion; we lost somebody very close to us this year, and the emotional output from different people in the family was all across the spectrum. I heard a grown man wail like a child while others wept quietly. Though I was very close to the person, I was the only one calm enough to drive; I was the rock steady one. I was upset and in shock, and I could talk about it without being emotional.

I was in caregiver mode: where I kept busy trying to make sure everyone else was alright. It honestly was weeks later that it really hit me, and months later before the grief, anger, and anxiety took over.

[divideandconquer]

Regarding emotion; we lost somebody very close to us this year, and the emotional output from different people in the family was all across the spectrum. I heard a grown man wail like a child while others wept quietly. Though I was very close to the person, I was the only one calm enough to drive; I was the rock steady one. I was upset and in shock, and I could talk about it without being emotional.

I was in caregiver mode: where I kept busy trying to make sure everyone else was alright. It honestly was weeks later that it really hit me, and months later before the grief, anger, and anxiety took over.

While it's true that everyone reacts differently to loss, grieves differently, it's also true that people normally do not try to fake or force emotion. Robert De Niro once said that the key to acting is holding back emotion, which is what most people naturally do, especially in public. Even people who are comfortable with showing emotion exhibit some degree of restraint, at least until they can't hold back the flood of despair any longer. But the people in these nationalized tragedies, across the board, act as if they're forcing emotion one moment and as if nothing happened the next, enjoying the spotlight. Again, this seems to be true of most of the grievers in every crisis turned into a media circus in recent times. In other words, there seems to be an absence of variance rather than the diversity we see in real life.

Moreover, in real life, I don't think most people who have just learned of losing a loved one in shocking circumstances immediately jump up on their soapbox and clearly articulate their political views, which also seem to conform across the board.

[Novem5er]

Moreover, in real life, I don't think most people who have just learned of losing a loved one in shocking circumstances immediately jump up on their soapbox and clearly articulate their political views, which also seem to conform across the board.

Honestly, when a family member is murdered, a common reaction is anger. Impersonal shootings feel like they are more common these days, and by impersonal, I mean that the murders were committed as an act against society, rather than towards specific individuals. It feels like our society has become a place where mentally unstable people have easy access to firearms, and then use those firearms to hurt strangers (or near strangers).

So if impersonal murders are societal problem. it makes sense that surviving victims would direct their anger at. not just the perpetrator, but at the society that is letting this happen again and again. To change society, they try to raise awareness and prompt a political change. It makes sense that we see this over and over again because the we also see these impersonal murders happen over and over again, with nothing being done to stop them.

I will agree that the liberal parts of our media always bring up Gun Control as an issue immediately following these cases. Liberal politicians voice their desire for more legislation, and any surviving victim willing to lend their emotional story to the cause is always welcomed in front of a TV camera. So I agree there is a very familiar pattern to all of this.

That doesn't mean that it's disingenuous, though. It just means that people are sick and angry that there is a pattern to begin with.

[Sounder]

That doesn't mean that it's disingenuous, though.

Ah yes, but what does make it disingenuous is being quick to blame the guns while never addressing the empathy killing effects of Prosac and other drugs of that ilk.

But hey, who on TV is going to upset the main advertisers?

[Novem5er]

I just spent the last 20 minutes looking into it and I don't find it a credible cause and effect story. Over and over again alternative news sites make this claim, but they do so only on anecdotal evidence of the crimes themselves.

What is well documented is that people suffering from severe mental disorders, including schizophrenia but NOT including depression, are more likely to commit violence than the general population. It is also well documented that most of this violence occurs at the onset of the illness and that violence occurs less in people actively being treated. Again, this is for major mental illnesses where people literally suffer from periods of psychosis.

It's also documented that these people only account for a small percentage of the total number of violent crimes.

So here's the causality argument: because people took SSRIs they became violent on a massive scale. However, it could also be said that these very same people were suffering from sever mental illness and, among other anti-psychotic drugs, had been prescribed an SSRI, which was not enough to cure the psychosis.

All these articles point out that there have been upwards of 30 mass murders linked to SSRIs. Let's do some math. There are more than 30 million Americans on SSRIs right now. Of those 30 million, only 30 have committed mass murders. Which means if sudden violence towards groups of people was a side effect, it would only affect 0.00001% of all users.

Even if this were true at that very tiny percentage, it would also still be true that fewer people would die if the killers were using baseball bats and hunting knives. Their easy access to lethal firearms certainly has increased the number of fatalities for every incident.

[tapitsbo]

how would politics be different in the USA if the guns were taken away?

[Wombaticus Rex]

how would politics be different in the USA if the guns were taken away?

Millions of people would be dead in the process, so yeah, I can see politics changing a bit if that decision got made.

Good (acid rant) primer here: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/4 ... ent-repeal

I don't think the author even begins to do the scale of it justice, though. Entire states will refuse, and that is when things get truly ugly.

Then again -- so what, right? We're in an environment right now where LEO's are claiming multiple fatalities per day, innocent people getting their dogs shot or worse every day in SWAT raid SNAFUs, and an entire network of for-profit prisons monetizing criminal sentencing. It's been "truly ugly" for decades now. We're fine with it.

[Joao]

Our expectation of how people should react to crises is just not a valid benchmark. End of story.

Who knows what coaching these people get from producers, what's going on in their heads, what their personal history is, what drugs they're on, what expectations they feel the need to meet, etc. etc. Furthermore, the very idea of a "proper" reaction to tragedy is witch trial territory.

I agree that it's worthwhile to question the reality of these events and wouldn't be surprised if massive fakery were afoot. But with due respect, I move on the moment I see claims being made about insufficient / improper displays of grief. "Cry better." Objective evidence is interesting; normative opinions are not.

[km artlu]

Yes, good rant from National Review.

The consequences would be the same, but isn't the more plausible means an exec order, such as 6102 prohibiting 'hoarding' of gold?

[Sounder]

Thank-you Novem5er for your well considered response.

I meant to avoid this thread and am now sorry to have broken down and read it.

Oh well, I did enjoy this, although it would be nice if more folk could hear the sardonic elitism in Plato's words.

(He helped put the intellect on a pedestal that has enabled the elites to maintain their position for centuries (more than necessary)).

[Novem5er]

Thank-you Novem5er for your well considered response.

I meant to avoid this thread and am now sorry to have broken down and read it.

Oh well, I did enjoy this, although it would be nice if more folk could hear the sardonic elitism in Plato's words.

(He helped put the intellect on a pedestal that has enabled the elites to maintain their position for centuries (more than necessary)).

Not a problem! And great Plato quote.

I'm actually glad the issue of SSRIs was brought up because it made me look into the subject. I've known a lot of people taking these meds and I've had some experience with bad medicine in the past. Side effects can sneak up on a person and when they are basically charged with self-monitoring their mental state, things can go bad very fast. So I was actually curious if there was any truth to these SSRI drugs being linked to tragic violent behavior.

No, there isn't any link. Not that I could find.

I looked at various articles to find the anti-depressant rates for different countries, and then looked at statistics of their mass shootings. There was no correlation between SSRI use and mass shootings that was consistent across the world.

One example. Norway has an estimated SSRI use of 58 per 1000 people, about 6% of its population, or 300,000 people. Of those 300,000 people, Norway has experience a single mass shooting event in the last 15 years, and quick research does not link him with SSRIs at all (he was actually abusing steroids and amphetamines).

Iceland uses SSRI at an astounding rate of 101 per 1000 people, 10%, and they have not had a single mass shooting in 70 years. In fact, their police shot and killed a suspect for the first time EVER just in 2013.

I couldn't find a single country that had as high a frequency of mass killings as the US does, despite very similar levels of SSRI usage with their populations.