Corpsey
bandz ahoy
I wonder if there's a correlation between mass media and mass murder of this type. The Japanese massacre has no motive (yet revealed) in common with the Munich shooting, but the coverage of that shooting and other acts of violence could conceivably have given the Japanese lunatic a kick up the arse. I think this is where the contagion comes in. (After all, the Munich killer was a student of school shootings, as are many others - the Virginia Tech killers admiration of the Columbine killers, e.g.).
This article is quite good fun, a series of historians naming years that were probably a lot worse to live in than 2016: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...016/07/is_2016_the_worst_year_in_history.html
Still, this sort of mass murder by an individual is a relatively contemporary phenomenon. I think it's tied in with the media above all else. Anybody who gains mass media attention, if only for a week, becomes a kind of immortal.
While violence is falling overall (Statistically), I wonder if such incidents are the death throes of violence or the first signs of a new wave of mass violence to be unleashed by overpopulation and scarcity of resources. Reminds me of Naomi Klein's essay on the Syrian migrations and the often unremarked upon connection between ecological catastrophe and wars: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n11/naomi-klein/let-them-drown
This article is quite good fun, a series of historians naming years that were probably a lot worse to live in than 2016: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...016/07/is_2016_the_worst_year_in_history.html
Still, this sort of mass murder by an individual is a relatively contemporary phenomenon. I think it's tied in with the media above all else. Anybody who gains mass media attention, if only for a week, becomes a kind of immortal.
While violence is falling overall (Statistically), I wonder if such incidents are the death throes of violence or the first signs of a new wave of mass violence to be unleashed by overpopulation and scarcity of resources. Reminds me of Naomi Klein's essay on the Syrian migrations and the often unremarked upon connection between ecological catastrophe and wars: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n11/naomi-klein/let-them-drown