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Notes -
I agree that planning a shooting takes a lot of work and a long time. But the pattern still seems to hold: a teenager, most likely a male (at least a few have been trans, don’t know of any female spree shooters), with few or no close friends, no outside affiliations to groups like church, team, volunteer groups, no significant other, and no real plans for the future.
The number of people who fit that pattern and dont seem to spree shoot is huge, so you can’t really take the mere existence of one or two of those signs as warnings. At the same time, those signals are there for the vast majority of shooters. If you see someone in your orbit who’s exhibiting those things, it might be worth the effort to make sure that you keep tabs on them and notice if they seem to be spiraling or taking a sudden interest in guns and shooting.
It’s probably going to be on family members more than anything else to know the young men in their lives and make sure that they’re okay.
And the rest of the statement is just a bunch of ways to say the same thing.
Fact of the matter is, these are young men, and young men expect life. And the fact that most of them accept the
bullshitconcept they shouldn't expect that to occur until they're at least 40 is honestly an incredible feat of modernity- 100 years ago they'd organize and kill a society that expected that of them, and they'd be right to do that, but 100 years ago you still had to go outside to take a shit.Most of this demographic tend to be very rules-oriented, and this isn't a marketable skill for men yet reminders of a time when that used to be the case are omnipresent (this does include the trans shooters, which is perhaps why there are more of them now). This is the claim they all seem to make (aside from the ones for whom "I feel that I shall commit the violence" is a trapped prior, and those ones are different- those ones would probably benefit from a prescription of psychedelics); maybe taking it seriously would help?
These guys appear to fixate all over the equipment previous shooters use. Young men take an interest in guns and shooting because guns and shooting (and the things that involve it) are fucking awesome; I'm more concerned about the one guy whose interest is exclusively TEC-9s. (But not Sub-2000s- yes, it was used in a mass shooting too, but that shooting was so hideously uncool that it's probably an anti-signal to be interested in one.)
(Ironically, if you wanted to prevent mass shootings, the "anyone who wants to buy that as their first gun" heuristic for that one is pretty good simply because of how garbage of a gun it is compared to how much of a universal symbol for mass shooting it is. The kind of 'here's your universal basic weapon that is very boring and illegal to modify or paint, come back in a year for the other stuff' is legitimately a great place to start for a culture that inherently requires weapon use, because if someone's had a shotgun for a year without deciding to go out shooting the ability to buy more firepower doesn't actually make them more dangerous. Of course, we can't have that because it always turns into 'also you must jump through 7 flaming hoops, file paperwork in triplicate, and you may only now own the single universal rifle because fuck you'.)
The last female spree killer was international news about a month ago. Complete with copycats.
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