Well, time for #12. Still ranting & raving about all aspects of this latest shooting. After this most recent crime that stopped the nation, I began to wonder about something. Perhaps it is politically incorrect or a little crass to wonder about such things, but what can I do? These thoughts are in my head bouncing about.
There is no shortage of really angry, unbalanced armed like The Terminator people out there hoping to achieve notoriety & a form of immortality through their acts. The act itself becomes a message often more eloquent than their rambling manifestos. Now that this Lanza character has done his thing, I wonder about what the next person will have to do to match or beat him in terms of the amount of publicity the act itself generates. Whether the media chooses the old fashioned route of giving the shooter a snazzy moniker or repeatedly showing meaningless photos of him as a rosy cheeked grinning toddler or the modern route of focusing on the victims, the shooter steals the media's & the world's attention.
This guy set the bar really high (not in a laudable way but in terms of truly base awfulness). Can you imagine the quiet frustration in basements, attics & assorted lairs the world over? Wanna be bad guys now have to out-do this last crime since with each increasingly shocking horror, the public becomes just a little bit more jaded & desensitized. Think about it: barely 4 days after Lanza's spree, some guy went ape-$#!T & shot to death 6 people in his family including himself. It barely warranted a blip on CNN. The public had seen this all too many times: family annihilators are boring.
So much seems to have been done before that these repetitive crimes are 'more of the same' & don't have the desired effect from the shooter's perspective-even though many will not be around to witness the ensuing circus. They do seem to want to be certain going in that they will generate the desired astonishment in the aftermath of the climactic event. The juxtaposition of these 2 recent cases is of disturbingly instructive value to would be shooters.
The question, What the hell will it be next time is legitimate & not merely a hand-wringing formulaic expression of shock or summary rhetoric. Societies need to get diabolically creative, look at the remaining options as this effort would reveal much about what potentially lurks in the minds of those who would harm us.
There is no shortage of really angry, unbalanced armed like The Terminator people out there hoping to achieve notoriety & a form of immortality through their acts. The act itself becomes a message often more eloquent than their rambling manifestos. Now that this Lanza character has done his thing, I wonder about what the next person will have to do to match or beat him in terms of the amount of publicity the act itself generates. Whether the media chooses the old fashioned route of giving the shooter a snazzy moniker or repeatedly showing meaningless photos of him as a rosy cheeked grinning toddler or the modern route of focusing on the victims, the shooter steals the media's & the world's attention.
This guy set the bar really high (not in a laudable way but in terms of truly base awfulness). Can you imagine the quiet frustration in basements, attics & assorted lairs the world over? Wanna be bad guys now have to out-do this last crime since with each increasingly shocking horror, the public becomes just a little bit more jaded & desensitized. Think about it: barely 4 days after Lanza's spree, some guy went ape-$#!T & shot to death 6 people in his family including himself. It barely warranted a blip on CNN. The public had seen this all too many times: family annihilators are boring.
So much seems to have been done before that these repetitive crimes are 'more of the same' & don't have the desired effect from the shooter's perspective-even though many will not be around to witness the ensuing circus. They do seem to want to be certain going in that they will generate the desired astonishment in the aftermath of the climactic event. The juxtaposition of these 2 recent cases is of disturbingly instructive value to would be shooters.
The question, What the hell will it be next time is legitimate & not merely a hand-wringing formulaic expression of shock or summary rhetoric. Societies need to get diabolically creative, look at the remaining options as this effort would reveal much about what potentially lurks in the minds of those who would harm us.
