Well, I’ll be the first and maybe only person to say this on this thread: white Americans have a problem with mass shootings. I’ll be the first to call out the Muslim community when some infidel gets Allah Akbared, but by the same token I have to be the first to call out my white American community when some school kids get Rambo’ed.
I should note first that it’s impossible for me to say how
much of this is a white American problem because there’s no official American (or universal) standard for what counts as a mass shooting. Therefore, statistics vary depending on who is conducting them. Finding neutrality in statistical findings can also be hard to find in such a politicized topic.
The “Stanford Mass Shootings of America (MSA) data project” seems to be the most legit and neutral source for mass shootings, though you have to request a copy of their data which I didn’t want to research for RVF posting purposes. Even there, I’m not sure if they have recorded race or ethnicity in that project either. The FBI also posts “active shooter incident” reports, but they don’t have any hard stats on race.
Since there's no official American or universal standard for what counts as a mass shooting, my thesis becomes a little bit murkier. White Americans
do seem to come out on top numerically in every study that I researched when it comes to committing the most mass shootings, though in those studies white Americans are not that far off from their proportion to the overall population at large. Nevertheless, I will try to do the topic justice.
Thesis:
“White Americans have a problem with mass shootings because of single parent households, mental health issues and the media”.
1. Thesis: White Americans have a problem with mass shootings because of
single parent households, mental health issues and the media.
Now the question becomes how the link between single parent households and mass shooters if there is no clear definition of a mass shooter?
While it's impossible to get a real scientific study done without a clear definition, we do know that some of the more famous mass shooters like the Boston Bomber or Dylan Roof came from single family households.
The source that they came from fatherless and single households is here:
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http://thefederalist.com/2015/07/14/gues...less-home/
So where there's smoke there must be fire. Below I have quoted the main findings of the study with the source linked below as well:
Source:
https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/Publications/a...?ID=167327
Quote:Quote:
The Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency reports that the most reliable indicator of violent crime in a community is the proportion of fatherless families.
If we go by what that journal says, and then see this nice little chart that Pew Research put up from 2014:
Than it shouldn't be a surprise that there seems to be a link between mass shootings and single parent households if we have so many single parent households in the USA. Though again how strong that link is can not be measured if we do not have a clear definition on what mass shootings are.
2. Thesis: White Americans have a problem with mass shootings because of single parent households,
mental health issues and the media.
We have established that there's a link between mass shooters and single parent households, though we can not measure how strong that link is without a clear definition of what mass shootings are.
However, staying on that topic I found this interesting tidbit:
Source:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3175702
Quote:Quote:
Abstract
The prevalence of psychiatric and psychosomatic disorders in a 1 year birth cohort from northern Finland followed up until 19 years was examined on the basis of hospital records and national registers for subsidies for chronically sick children.
Psychiatric disorders were found to occur with higher frequency in children of single parent families, especially those lacking a father during the child's whole life.
Ok, so we have a link between fatherless (single parent) households and psychiatric/psychosomatic (mental) disorders from a professional study done by the US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health.
Amazingly, I can not find a single source that shows a correlation between mental health and mass shootings. The first 20 pages of google searches are full of articles saying something along the lines of "links between mental health and mass shootings do not exists and to suggest otherwise is foolish."
I don't think that it's a coincidence that I can't find articles when searching on Google that argue that mental health affects mass shootings.
So while I can provide credible sources that show a link between single parent (and fatherless) households and mental illnesses, I can't connect those links to mass shootings because nothing is showing up on Google when is search for them.
3. Thesis: White Americans have a problem with mass shootings because of single parent households, mental health issues and
the media.
Source:
http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2...agion.aspx
Quote:Quote:
DENVER — People who commit mass shootings in America tend to share three traits: rampant depression, social isolation and pathological narcissism, according to a paper presented at the American Psychological Association’s annual convention that calls on the media to deny such shooters the fame they seek.
“Mass shootings are on the rise and so is media coverage of them,” said Jennifer B. Johnston, PhD, of Western New Mexico University. “At this point, can we determine which came first? Is the relationship merely unidirectional: More shootings lead to more coverage? Or is it possible that more coverage leads to more shootings?”
Johnston and her coauthor, Andrew Joy, BS, also of Western New Mexico University, reviewed data on mass shootings amassed by media outlets, the FBI and advocacy organizations, as well as scholarly articles, to conclude that “media contagion” is largely responsible for the increase in these often deadly outbursts. They defined mass shootings as either attempts to kill multiple people who are not relatives or those resulting in injuries or fatalities in public places.
The prevalence of these crimes has risen in relation to the mass media coverage of them and the proliferation of social media sites that tend to glorify the shooters and downplay the victims, Johnston said.
“We suggest that the media cry to cling to ‘the public’s right to know’ covers up a greedier agenda to keep eyeballs glued to screens, since they know that frightening homicides are their No. 1 ratings and advertising boosters,” she said.
The demographic profile of mass shooters is fairly consistent, she said. Most are white, ostensibly heterosexual males, largely between the ages of 20 and 50. They tend to see themselves as “victims of injustice,” and share a belief that they have been cheated out of their rightful dominant place as white, middle-class males.
“Unfortunately, we find that a cross-cutting trait among many profiles of mass shooters is desire for fame,” she said. This quest for fame among mass shooters skyrocketed since the mid-1990s “in correspondence to the emergence of widespread 24-hour news coverage on cable news programs, and the rise of the internet during the same period.”
She cited several media contagion models, most notably one proposed by Towers et al. (2015), which found the rate of mass shootings has escalated to an average of one every 12.5 days, and one school shooting on average every 31.6 days, compared to a pre-2000 level of about three events per year. “A possibility is that news of shooting is spread through social media in addition to mass media,” she said.
“If the mass media and social media enthusiasts make a pact to no longer share, reproduce or retweet the names, faces, detailed histories or long-winded statements of killers, we could see a dramatic reduction in mass shootings in one to two years,” she said. “Even conservatively, if the calculations of contagion modelers are correct, we should see at least a one-third reduction in shootings if the contagion is removed.”
She said this approach could be adopted in much the same way as the media stopped reporting celebrity suicides in the mid-1990s after it was corroborated that suicide was contagious. Johnston noted that there was “a clear decline” in suicide by 1997, a couple of years after the Centers for Disease Control convened a working group of suicidologists, researchers and the media, and then made recommendations to the media.
“The media has come together before to work for good, to incite social change,” she said. “They have done, and they can do it. It is time. It is enough.”
Thesis: White Americans have a problem with mass shootings because of single parent households, mental health issues and the media.
Conclusion: It's apparent that single parent households are a fucking disaster. That chart that I showed shows how much single parent households have increased in the USA over the past few generations. There are studies that show, as I cited earlier, that children are more likely to have mental illnesses in single parent and fatherless households.
Which makes it even more surprising that single parents are so celebrated in America, as if that's a good thing despite academic and scientific studies clearly showing otherwise.
It is my belief that that an increase in mass shootings among white Americans, if there is actually an increase, can partially be attributed to the result of (rapidly increasing) single parent households that cause mental illnesses in their children along with a rise in narcissism that leads to "media contagion" as that article that I posted stated.
On the individual level, white Americans can fix the fatherless households by trying to have a strong traditional nuclear family, despite all the obstacles that lay in our way in society right now. We can't really do anything about the "media contagion" with news station showing the shooters faces for a week straight and giving the shooters lots of attention. That's on the media, individuals can't do much about that.
While Google doesn't provide me with any sources that give a link between mental illness and mass shootings, my simple mind thinks that there is surely some type of link there.
Final Note: When somebody wants to debate you on guns, tell them to stop promoting fatherless families and encouraging the destruction of the traditional nuclear family.