Can philosophy answer why there's so many mass shooters in america?

A person will come to terms with these economics, it not being all bad everywhere and there being survival to negotiate, but I think the mass shooter idiom maps onto the mass survival competition that is the theme of living in the United States these days. The economic ruins of people have challenged many of their spiritual and philosophical development and to add romantic turmoil or remove its ability to balance and heal and you have a highly traumatized person, pumped full of gruesome, crude, pharmaceuticals, and if they fall outside any of the curves and models that describe the world to American bureaucracies, we may have combined all the odds and ends necessary to spellbind a nondescript American drone into a crazed demon with nothing to gain and no other set of values celebrated within earshot.

Speak sense you crazy schizo

I am a janitor now, the old job is difficult to acknowledge even anonymously, I meant for it to stay a part of my life as it was important to me, but I needed a job I could just leave behind at the end of the day. The move has isolated me from society and all of my old friends, society said a janitor can not possibly be useful and friends view me as what I was and not what I am, they can not move past the nostalgia of those years, the same years society has made it crucial for me to forget.

It has been 9 months since I have taken part in any social activity but in a year or two I will find my boat and set out into a life largely away from people. More than anything I want to be in the middle of the ocean with nothing in sight but an unbroken horizon of water.

When I was at my lowest point and seriously considering giving up completely I heard a song by The Tallest Man on Earth, a couple lines of it really hit me hard.

And in the forest someone is whispering to a tree now, this is all I am so please don't fall on me.

Please let the kindness of forgetting set me free

Just thinking of those and the night I heard that song makes me tear up. I had spent nearly 5 years fighting tooth and nail to claw my way out and hearing those two lines completely destroyed what I was and sent me on a new path.

I think there's also a tacit indictment of American culture, especially the hyperbolic post 9/11 culture, in these mass shooters. Did our societies really have only affliction and maiming to offer them? Much of the US territory is bleak, vacuous, but more horribly, it is the people the shooters encountered in their lives prior which one wonders about, how awful and nasty Americans have become. We are disgusting. Revolting. Rage virus zombies. We wonder why these shooters turn on us? Do we really?
Granted, they're severely mentally deficient, requiring inpatient type care, in an ideal world. But consider the incredible gap or blockade between those crazed mass shooters and any modality of help. That mode of help largely does not even exist anymore. I don't think I'm covering new ground in saying all this, but when you think about it, mass shooters are jettisoning from our subconscious caldera as a natural physical consequence of cultural American bedrock, us. We are gross and unfeeling and too sick to not snarl. We have grown fat and weak and complacent and let good things dwindle and now must do without. Whatever they are, mass shooters are not a product of a strong, resolute, faithful people. Nothing short of sweeping revitalizing religious movements could reach the collapsing social capillaries that fester homicidal ideation. Or else those next economic miracles we know are coming.
I wonder if there's cultural adaptation possible to the uncertainties of American life in hyper competitive globalization. If we were upfront about more, about challenges and difficulties and the need to devote and dedicate and stay, perhaps the ruins wouldn't break people because there'd be something bigger to which we were all always contributing just by being.

its not the guns
this is an actually uinironic post

Ismael, is that you?

thesis:mass shooters do it cause american society is darwinian
antithesis:mass shooters do it cause american society is not darwinian
synthesis:???
How does the whole thesis/antithesis stuff work anyways?

It's quite easy actually.

>kid has mental problem
>wants someone to talk to
>wants to tell his parents but knows they won't understand and will just put him on pills and shit
>goes to counselor A
>counselor A tells him to go to counselor B
>goes to counselor B
>counselor B tells him to go to counselor A
>finally tells someone his problems
>they tell him "it's just a passing phase" and other meaningless bullshit
>kid goes through adolescence unable to truly open up to anyone
>everyone passes the buck to someone else
>kid gets prescribed hardcore depression meds which he probably doesn't need and ends up just fucking him up more
>one day snaps and kills everyone
>and his parents and teachers have the audacity to be shocked and question HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN????

tl;dr: Boomers are too busy going to wine and cheese tastings to be good parents and talk to their children.

Hahah, thanks, I needed that.

Synthesis: It's highly competitive, but the competition isn't about creating good

so what would be the solution to that?

Americans RPing as oppressed and stifled ITT. Literally every other country has stricter social norms including other Englishspeaking countries. In reality it's:
-easy access to firearms with a casual gun culture (guns are just toys and spectacles, the thinking is removed from their purposes, from necessity, and shifted to plain action movie flavoured consumerism)
-individual cases of mental illness exacerbated by the instability and social/spiritual poverty of modern societies
-internet allowing escapism and congregating of these individual cases -- without escapism they would largely be alright as they'd have to engage with the world and not retreat into a virtual one
-culture that makes its people averse to introspection and maturity, Americans NEED to be ideologically/mentally subjugated by something and often take it to extremism.
-once-ironic internet communities infested by the above, turned dead serious radicalising vulnerable individuals into shooting usually merely to satisfy a meme. Joining their virtual world to the real world by realising a meme irl.
-3rdworldtier populace + material abundance and freedoms = crazy shit. Other 3rdies don't have the means to carry out their insanity nor the kind of soft living that allows them to fall further into it (no struggle or necessity of any sort that develops good qualities)

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t. Joan Donovan

Who?

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more like single moms + internet/porn/chans + easy guns

A Chan expert from lolcow

>More than anything I want to be in the middle of the ocean with nothing in sight but an unbroken horizon of water.
Will you be a sailor or is it another metaphor?

So in you're opinion its because americans are retards that just treat guns like toys and need be mentally or ideologically subjugated to not commit these acts.

We need a Femdom gynocracy, yesterday

SSRI's and single mothers. Nearly every mass shooter has this in common.

Not the same experience but I know what it's like to realise your friends are a complete disappointment, or will even betray you completely.

It's time.

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>school shootings only started becoming common in the 1960s

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>you don't like your slave shackles? well here's some for your mind!

The absolute state of society.

isn't that where the femcels congregate. sorry my friend, im a normieish young australian man im only here for a select few boards, i am no chan expert. my above post is largely bullshit i just pulled out of nowhere, if you take it seriously you're a dumb cunt and your worldview is probably changed by equally uninformed posts on an almost daily basis on this shithole of pretence.

>gynocracy
Already got it

>Femdom
Based taste my brother but it's contrary to our biologies. Even when administered by the state it is likely to morph into men being dominate under its guise (this is common enough already) because only a few, learned gentlemen such as ourselves, are suited to its subtleties.

Eruption of Yellowstone vulcan

Lack of community. In its reckless pursuit of individualism Western civilization has almost completely done away with the state (via democracy) and in doing so any sense of community. I've been reading Inventing the Individual by Larry Siedentop and he explains how the Greeks and Romans sense of community was as a citizen of the polis, and the early Abrahamic community was as part of God's kingdom. Western civilization today has no community, no sense of belonging, no obligation to serve or defend one's neighbor. Naturally this creates a feeling of aimlessness and even hatred of the entire system. All because of our obsession with the individual.

>not looking forward to the self-immunizing World-BioDome
Cheer up, weepy genes!
>With all of this doom and gloom, you may not suspect your humble author of being a hot-blooded synbio booster. But I believe this field could be the greatest boon to humanity in all of history. Advances resulting from research in synthetic biology could heal our bodies, our planet, and our often-brutal relationships with other creatures—and that’s just the start.

>I’ll add that time is on our side, for now. The most virulent dangers are years away. The worst could-be perpetrators may not be born yet. The darkness that led to Columbine and Newtown is exceedingly rare in humanity, and those it afflicts should always be outnumbered millions-to-one.

>Our deliverance lies in synbio’s own Promethean labs. And in the spirit of biomimicry, we should use its tools to start building an immune system—one for the entire biosphere. I sketch the rawest outline of such a system toward the end of my talk (starting at 13:04). And while my “ghost story” may stick in more minds, the actual message is one of empowerment and optimism.

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This but unironically

Don't forget Diversity causing alienation as well

wait i got it.
Synthesis:American society is darwinian towards the mass shooter but not towards the people the mass shooter considers inferior.

I sympathise more with the shooters than the victims.

Fuck normies.

Then you're gonna love this movie.
Best movie on the subject of school violence out there, a must watch

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>have some soma goy!

Modern man is merely a caged animal, with the prison bars being composed of society and government. Behind those bars lies a funhouse mirror which distorts the individuals view of the world and themselves, this being the internet and social media. The animal, being unable to escape or bend the prison bars, is condemned to the warped reality of the funhouse mirror going stir crazy and frothing at the mouth raging against its own reflection.

Using this analogy once the animal, or in this case white male, has become so depraved, frustrated, and hopeless they either begin to rationalize that one of those two pillars (government or society) is weak and will try their best to attack that pillar in hopes of escaping the cage.

plus the moon landings were faked
just look at those shadows

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-Cultural Alienation
-Over prescription of SSRIs
-Lack of Hope
-Death of God

In all frankless, it's a problem created by Jews and the Left, and thus they deserve to suffer its consequences. Thankfully, they overwhelmingly do.

Because americans lack a brain and truly believe the world is a perfect meritocracy and everything bad that happens to you is entirely your fault and you should just suck it up and take some happy pills and continue your daily toll or get labeled a leech. This creates a society of opportunistic shitheads who clean the ass of everyone who's on top of them and shit in the mouth of everyone who is below them. Hence it's very easy to feel like the system and the people who are suppose to help you when your down are actually cheating you, making you lose faith and once you lose faith if the system you lose all reason to abide it's rules.

>only happens in America
You have to add no mental health care and racial autism to the mix

Yeah, like anywhere else in the world.
The difference is in how 'Murricans think about those things.

US Society is far from Darwinian.

Yeah. Well, no. 'Murricans just don't get that meritocracy is a ruthless way of going about things.

>the difference is how muricans think about these things
No, the only difference is gun access. School shootings have taken place outside of USA, retard

Yeah, no. Read again.

pretty sure this is not a real tweet

This thread shows a big part of the problem, people would rather play politics with it than actually care and help people.

Sailor, I was a little drunk last night.

It is not that they failed me, it is I expected them to do a very difficult thing, forget the past decade. If I had been clearer of mind I would have just said to focus on the present and future instead of expecting them to remove a decade from the middle of our friendship.

Little white boy entitlement

>The difference is in how 'Murricans think about those things.
Perhaps, but it is not like everyone else in the world has a utopia, they have had their problems and will most likely have more in the future, just as America will as well.

In no particular order or rank.

1. Media promotes infamy. Attention seeking discontents leverage the media to get their name out there.

2. Cultural self-perpetuation. The very fact that the shootings happens causes other shootings to happen. There is a morbid subculture and intertextual reference between different mass shootings, with shooters citing others as inspirations

3. An alienating, winner take all culture. Leaves the weakest and most incapable burned . Resentment is induced.

4. Social media broadcasting social imbalances, leading to furtherance of alienation and feelings of inferiority in perpetrators

5. Easy access to guns

6. Far right ideological motives (often combined with strong alienation and sense of being rejected by society)

7. A wound-gathering mentality . The vengeful perpetrator is always railing about how he is the victim, how he should have been treated better, how it is only him who suffers and deserves pity.

8. Sexual frustration, inceldom (wound up with the notion of social imbalances)

9. A failure of masculinity, distorting into outrageous violence. Many of these young male perpetrators feel a strong sense that they are failed males. The ruined economy, the lack of options, and a belief in a fictional pull yourself up by your bootstraps narrative drives them mad with feelings of inferiority which they counteract by becoming violent. Often they are scrawny, physically different, unimposing individuals.

Though I understand what you mean and it's nicely put, I couldn't help but laugh at your mental process from being kicked off a train to sympathizing with mass shooters, kek

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your brain on leftist logic. fucking retard.

Change shooting to killing and remove #5. Guns have nothing to do with it, they are picking the method which will have the most impact, plain and simple. If the media hypes up bombs, they will start making bombs.

Laugh away, I do. It is absolutely ridiculous how fragile any single persons ties with the community actually are, just takes one person to start screaming 'witch' and pointing a finger. I have come to view progress as an endless redefining of the word 'witch.'

Because they're very good at making people take it out on each other with the added benefit of taking guns away slowly over time
Instead of going after the people that really fuck them over
Hello FBI!

You got me thinking about this mental quirk of mine, I think I got it from Richard Brautigan, mainly from, So The Wind Won't Blow it All Away, which is written in this broken style. Or perhaps it is that I have always thought this way and that is the draw towards Brautigan for me. Highly recommend the previously mentioned book, it is a fairly quick and enjoyable read, his writing in it is wonderful.

I probably should have just bought a hamburger.

I think I have always thought this way.

It's joined at the hip to the increase of suicides and other deaths by despair. Using a gun to shoot a bunch of people has worked out for precisely zero people. No one has ever shot up a school and gone on to have any kind of life. Whether they cap the spree by killing themselves, are shot by police, or collected to be either executed or locked in a little concrete room until they die of natural causes, it's all over for them as soon as they start firing.

For some people, there isn't much of a line between wanting to kill themselves and wanting to kill everyone around them. Some folks are content to snuff their lives out in the garage; others want to kick the world on their way out.

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About the politically motivated ones

If someone cares alot about their country, and cant express their opinions without being exiled and labeled as a racist / nazi, what other method does one have to achieve the goal they believe in?
We are taught to stand for what we believe in, but a wrong opinion can get you lynched. Thats where one of the major issues lie imo

It's a civil war, user.
The shooters themselves acknowledge this since a few years ago.

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>There is a social use of language. No one still believes in it. Its exchange value has fallen to zero. Hence this inflationist bubble of idle talk. Everything social is mendacious, and everyone knows that now. It’s no longer just the governing authorities, the publicists and public personalities who “do communication,” it’s every self-entrepreneur that this society wants to turn us into who practices the art of “public relations.” Having become an instrument of communication, language is no longer its own reality but a tool for operating on the real, for obtaining effects in accordance with more or less conscious strategies. Words are no longer put into circulation except in order to distort things. Everything sails under false flags. This usurpation has become universal. One doesn’t shrink from any paradox. The state of emergency is the rule of law. War is made in the name of peace. The bosses “offer jobs.” The surveillance cameras are “video-protection devices.” The executioners complain that they’re being persecuted. The traitors profess their sincerity and their allegiance. The mediocre are everywhere cited as examples. There is actual practice on the one hand, and on the other, discourse, which is its relentless counterpoint, the perversion of every concept, the universal deception of oneself and of others. In all quarters it’s only a question of preserving or extending one’s interests. In return, the world is filling up with silent people. Certain ones of these explode into crazy acts of a sort that we’ve seen at briefer and briefer intervals. What is surprising about this? We should stop saying, “Young people don’t believe in anything anymore.” And say instead: “Damn! They’re not swallowing our lies anymore.” No longer say, “Young people are nihilistic,” but “My lord, if this continues they’re going to survive the collapse of our world.”

people have forgotten that the first French “mass killer” of the new century, Richard Durn, at Nanterre in 2002, was a man literally disgusted with politics. He had passed through the Socialist Party before joining The Greens. He was an activist with the Human Rights League (Ligue des droits d’homme). He had made the Genoa “alter-globalization” switch in July of 2001. In the end, he had taken a Glock and, on March 27, 2002, opened fire on the municipal council of Nanterre, killing eight elected officials and wounding nineteen others. In his private journal he wrote: “I’m tired of always having in my head this sentence that keeps repeating: ‘I haven’t lived, I haven’t lived at all at the age of 30.’ [...] Why continue pretending to live? I can only feel myself living for a few moments by killing.” Dylan Klebold, one of the two conspirators of Columbine High School confided to his notebooks: “The meek are trampled on, the assholes prevail, the gods are deceiving [...] Farther and farther distant...That’s what’s happening...me and everything that zombies consider real…just images, not life. [...] The zombies and their society band together and try to destroy what is superior and what they don’t understand and what they are afraid of.” There you have some people who clearly took revenge instead of continuing to stew in their resentment. They dealt death and destruction because they didn’t see life anywhere.

theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-invisible-committe-now#toc1

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In the Spectacle, power is everywhere; that is, all relations are in the final analysis relations of domination. And because of this no one is sovereign in the Spectacle. It is an objective world where everyone must first subjugate themselves in order to subjugate others in turn.

To live in conformance with man’s fundamental aspiration to sovereignty is impossible in the Spectacle except in one single instant: the instant of the act.

He who isn’t just playing around with life has a need for acts, for gestures, so that his life can become more real to him than a simple game which can be oriented in any given direction. In the world of the commodity, which is the world of generalized reversibility, where all things merge and transform into one another, where everything is merely ambiguous, transitional, ephemeral, and blended together, only acts cut through it all. In the splendor of their necessary brutality, they carve an unsolvable “after” into what had been “before,” which PEOPLE will regretfully have to recognize as definitive.

A gesture/an act is an event. It cuts open a wound in the chaos of the world, and installs at the bottom of that wound its shards of unambiguity/univocity. It is a matter of establishing so profoundly in their difference things that have been judged as different that what separated them out from each other can never have any possibility of being erased. If there’s anything in Bloom that thwarts domination, it is the fact that even dispossessed of everything, even in all his nudity, man still has an uncontrollable metaphysical power of repudiation: the power to kill others and to kill himself. Death, every time it intervenes, rips a disgraceful hole in the biopolitical tissue. Total nihilism/nihilism fulfilled, which has really fulfilled nothing but the dissolution of all otherness in a limitless circulatory immanence, always meets its defeat right there: upon contact with death, life suddenly ceases to be taken for granted. The duty to make decisions which sanctions all properly human existence has always been in part tied to the approach to that abyss.

On the eve of the day in March 1998 when he massacred four Bloom-students and a Bloom-professor, little Mitchell Johnson declared to his incredulous schoolmates: “Tomorrow I will decide who will live and who will die.” This is as far from the Erostratus-ism of Pierre Riviere as it is from fascist hysteria. Nothing is more striking in the reports on the carnage brought about by Kipland Kinkel or Alain Oreiller than their state of cold self-control and total vertical detachment relative to the world. “I’m no longer acting out of sentiment,” said Alain Oreiller while executing his mother. There’s something calmly suicidal in the affirmation of so omnilateral a non-participation, indifference, and refusal to suffer.

Often the Spectacle uses this as a pretext to start talking about “gratuitous” acts — a generic qualifier with which it hides the purposes it doesn’t want to understand, all the while making use of them as a fantastic opportunity to reinject some life into one or the other of bourgeois utilitarianism’s favorite false paradoxes — as long as those acts aren’t lacking in hatred or reason. To prove this all one needs to do is watch the five video tapes that the “monsters of Littleton” filmed in anticipation of their operation. Their program appears in them quite clearly: “We’re going to set off a revolution, a revolution of the dispossessed.”

Here hatred itself is undifferentiated, free of all personality. Death enters into the universal in the same way as it emerges from the universal, and it has no anger about it.

This isn’t about giving some revolutionary significance to such acts, and it’s hardly even about treating them as exemplary. It’s about understanding what they express the doom of, and grasping onto them in order to plumb the depths of Bloom. And whoever follows this path to the end will see that Bloom is NOTHING, but that this NOTHING is a nothing that is sovereign, an emptiness with a pure potential.

The contradiction between Bloom’s isolation, apathy, powerlessness, and insensitivity on the one hand and on the other his dry and brutal need for sovereignty can only bring about more of these acts, absurd and murderous as they may be, yet still necessary and true. It’s all about knowing how to deal with them in the right terms in the future: like [in Mallarmé’s] Igitur, for instance: “One of the acts of the universe has been committed there. Nothing else but the breath remained, the end of speech and gesture united — blow out the candle of being, by which everything has existed. Proof.”

theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-bloom-theory

just posting to remind everyone that tiqqun are hacks and cringe

semiotexte is a meme

>semiotexte is a meme

implying that for the spectator there are thing besides memes

>Boomers also love to blame abstractions couched in the most brainless and nonsensical paradigms instead of addressing the actual issues at stake head on. Hence why mass shootings become heavily partisan debates about "gun control" "violent video games/media" "mental healthcare" instead of frank discussions of the fact that American society is soulless, dysfunctional and cruel towards young outsiders despite its glorification of individuality.
>As pointed out by an user in another thread, the wave of mass shootings in the last 20 odd years are emblematic of the fundamental breakdown in American social cohesion and are a sure a sign as any that this country is moribund.

t. someone from the last time we discussed this on /his/

I don't really agree with the boomer part but the rest of that tirade is pretty much spot on.

America is unironically cultivating a generation of murderous Al Qaeda, Red Guards, and Waffen-SS-tier fanatics, Lonely angry young men are exactly the kind of person you recruit to strap on suicide belts or machine gun crowds of people.

Honestly, I don't see any other alternative for American society other than a bloody civil war. The sheer level of hatred shows no sign of subsiding and it's only a matter of time before it boils to the point where no level of state-sanctioned intimidation can keep it in check.

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The Media. Unironically.

Mass shootings were basically unheard of when gun laws were non-existent. Even after the Gun Control Act of 1968, they were comparatively intermittent for a good 30 years and generally didn’t get that much coverage in the news. Even the San Yisdro massacre which was the worst mass shooting of the time only attracted a brief spike in attention, and was promptly forgotten.

Then Columbine happened. And a fucking media frenzy ensued.

>GUNS ARE AT FAULT
>VIOLENT VIDEO GAMES ARE AT FAULT
>ACTION MOVIES ARE FAULT
>PSYCHOTROPIC DRUGS ARE AT FAULT
>REPUBLICANS ARE AT FAULT
>DEMOCRATS ARE AT FAULT
>GLOW-IN-THE-DARK CIA NIGGERS ARE AT FAULT
>THE JEWS ARE AT FAULT
>EVERY INANIMATE OBJECT AND GROUP OF PEOPLE THAT I DON'T LIKE IS AT FAULT

Mass shootings have skyrocketed in the 20 years since then. Now every asshole with a gripe against the world knows they can be elevated to celebrity status by murdering a few people in broad daylight.

It's gotten even worse since Sandy Hook because it's infected political discourse to the point where both parties (and the media outlets that shill for them) have basically declared that that they're willing to start a civil war over gun laws. The Christchurch shooter literally cited his hope that specifically using an AR-15 to waste 50 Muslims would help accelerate the shitting up of American political discourse to the point where civil war became unavoidable as a major motive. And the media basically went on to give the man all the attention he fucking wanted and now he’s got an increasing number of copycats hoping to follow the same formula.

You want to stop mass shootings? Stop talking about them. Stop writing articles about them. Stop making movies and TV shows about them. Don't give the perpetrators the attention they so desperately seek.

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It's easier to get guns than sex or drugs here.

based somehow in my head at least.
I don't completely buy a
fundamental breakdown in American social cohesion
like lonely mentally ill people that feel stifled and oppressed can now meet and make themselves feel even more lonely and stifled and oppressed. also I think that when kids create lives for themselves online that exceed their lives in real life, they're more likely to do something drastic in real life. an active online life doesn't solve loneliness too, but talking to people online seems like it would, so its easy for people to keep digging deeper in hopes of being less lonely and only becoming more starved of human interaction. American culture becoming more and more nihilistic doesnt help because that just means real life matters less and less.
even if religion is a spiritual thing, and half the time it occupies a very different space than real life, it pushes you to be good in real life

Then again though the hikikomori in japan I feel are almost an extreme version of the being starved socially and they haven't been out shooting people

Tiqqun were right about everything

>Then again though the hikikomori in japan I feel are almost an extreme version of the being starved socially and they haven't been out shooting people
Kyoani though