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-Lurid Crime Tales-
24 Mass Shootings during the Obama Regime Somehow Escapes News
2019-08-05
[National Affairs] Mass shootings occur with depressing regularity in contemporary American life. Whether those shootings take place in Parkland or Las Vegas, Newtown or Fort Hood, the effect on our public discourse is the same. Those on the left call for more gun control. Those on the right talk about mental health and better enforcement of the laws already on the books. The emotional and intellectual responses of most individuals to such tragedies rarely influence our national discourse, except in one notable case: the president of the United States.

Over the course of our history, the role and influence of the president during a local tragedy or crisis have evolved significantly. In the 19th century, presidents had little involvement in crisis response and disaster management, for both technological and constitutional reasons. Their influence was limited technologically because the country lacked the communications capabilities needed to notify the president in a timely manner when disaster struck hundreds of miles away. Even when the telegraph and later the telephone entered the equation, the nation still lacked the mass media needed to provide the American people with real-time awareness of far-flung events. Naturally, this affected the political call for presidents to involve themselves in local crises.

Posted by:Besoeker

#7  BREAKING: 'Copycat' Attack thwarted at Florida Walmart
Posted by: Lex   2019-08-05 16:40  

#6  To clarify, there is without question an obvious and meaningful long-term trend that has nothing whatsoever to do with who or which party occupies the White House.

Obviously, the driver of this trend is not politics or legislation but AMERICAN CULTURE.

We have a truly $hitty popular culture that harms our young men. That much is clear. How it harms them and who dies the most harm are less clear.
Posted by: Lex   2019-08-05 14:48  

#5  If you want to find statistically meaningful patterns in the data set, you will need much larger numbers than these. 1-3 incidents per year won't tell you anything at all.

The only possible trend is the increase from <1 incident year in the Reagan era to ~1/year in the 1990s and aughts to ca. 3/year since 2009.

What this really indicates is the increasing significance of COPYCAT behavior, and the drivers of copycat behavior are
1) the self-reinforcing tendency of such social phenomena
2) dramatic cultural changes i.e. how people think, what they value, and institutional changes in how the culture at large drives thought & behavior.

#1 is like many social phenomena - tulip crazes, hula hoop mania, conspiracy theories etc. It has a logic of its own, and swells until it's broken.

Re #2, the obvious huge change since 2009 is the rise of social media, which fuels copycattism.

Another change is the decline of the family as a source of stability in young American boys' lives.

Related to this breakdown, another potential fundamental cause should be studied: whether the rate of child abandonment and violent child abuse by American men has significantly increased since 1990.

If the answer to the above Q is No meaningful increase in abuse, then we need to examine the effect of the Left's demonization of men and masculinity that ramped up substantially after the Berlin Wall came down and the Left abandoned economics in favor of going all in on the Culture Wars.
Posted by: Lex   2019-08-05 14:45  

#4  No one ever had a double digit number before Bath House.

But why? Kinda makes you wonder, doesn't it?
Posted by: Abu Uluque   2019-08-05 11:17  

#3  No one ever had a double digit number before Bath House.
Posted by: M. Murcek   2019-08-05 09:33  

#2  Of course, Trump has only been in office two years; Obama was in office for eight. On the other hand, Obama had an average of 3 mass shootings a year. So if Trump had the same rate, there would have been six mass shootings so far.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia   2019-08-05 09:10  

#1  I guess this is a little harder to scrub than Kamala-mala-ding-dong's record as Cali AG. Fortunately journalists don't even need to plug their ears, screw their eyes shut and chant "la-la-la I can't hear you!" After all, they're professionals...
Posted by: M. Murcek   2019-08-05 08:50  

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