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Notes -
There was an increase in censorship?
I would, if forced to make the decision, prefer our country's violent nutjobs target insurance company CEOs(who can hire private security, spend time behind secured areas instead of in public[eg going out to eat at country clubs rather than the local steakhouse], etc) than schoolchildren. From a utilitarian perspective I hope Luigi has copycats because it will redirect potential mass shooters. I would, of course, rather that our nutjobs be sane, or failing that confine themselves to long, thought out, and incomprehensible youtube comments, and if they must act out in public it's best they be institutionalized. But none of those things are going to happen.
I haven't noted any wave of censorship, either.
Is there a nutjob substitution effect?
I've heard (but not confirmed) that removing one suicide method (eg. putting fences on a bridge) reduces the total number of suicides by the marginal amount blocked by that intervention. In other words, there are bridge-jumping-suicidal people and pill-taking-suicidal people, but not suicidal-by-any-method people that would substitute one method for another.
Are there school-shooting-nutjobs and CEO-assassinating-nutjobs, or else are there mass-shooting-on-any-target-nutjobs?
I think there are murder-suicide oriented nutjobs, across all cultures and all time periods, and the particular expression their death-urge takes is socially mediated.
A man with the overactive murder-suicide gene born in the Arab world has an obvious path for it: he joins a jihadist group. In medieval Norway, he would go a-viking, while in Russia he would go off and become a Cossack, in the old west he would go off and fight injuns. In virtually every European country for virtually every male before 1945, at some point in his youth he'd have the opportunity to join an army and fight in a war, and if he went off to war with much desire to kill and little desire to return, he probably wouldn't make it back.
The school shooter is one of Tyler Durden's "middle children of history," with no great war or great depression he lashes out at random. He is offered no socially acceptable way to get himself killed and noticed, and picks the worst one possible. I'm a big believer that the best way to prevent school shootings is to give them another way to get themselves killed.
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I am very doubtful about that. Some of the suicides are likely by goal-oriented people following a long-term plan (e.g. in a MAID-like context), and for these I would expect substitution effects.
Even for spontaneous suicides, I think that there is some minor substitution effect. If a person had the worst day of their life and would jump off a bridge if not for the fact that it was fenced, I would expect at least a 20% chance that another convenient method (access to a tall building, a firearm, drugs) will present itself and be taken before they feel less suicidal.
I was told by a psychologist that the vast majority of suicidal impulses last minutes or even seconds. The idea is that they don’t have time to seek out a substitute before the impulse wears off. It may appear later in other circs of course.
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I don't think even this is the right framing. It's not a question of a tiny population of nutjobs of one stripe or another that we hope to disincentivize. We know from history that a large proportion of human beings will kill in cold blood, or at least approve of it, if conditioned and pressured to do so. Apologia and celebration of this killing will only shift the margin of how rabid an anti-corporation true believer needs to be to undertake such an action.
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There are ‘go kill people’ nut jobs- in the past they were serial killers, now they’re mass shooters and terrorists.
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