OF COURSE there’s a way to solve the problem, Ted! You must know that! If you don’t, here’s how, and why:
Socialisation creates an enormous barrier to killing, the exceptions being the slaughter of non-humans for sport and/or the table. That’s why so many soldiers kill themselves: they can’t take the ethical and emotional disconnect between what they learned during socialisation and what authority later demanded of them. (Re-read Milgram’s report of his Obedience to Authority experiments for an account of the anguish some of the subjects experienced as they -so they thought- obediently tortured an innocent man to death.)
Everyone who’s going to go over the edge and commit a mass killing gives MANY signs of their distress for a long time before they finally lose their grip completely.
So: re-open the asylums (and make them into real hospitals, not warehouses), and put public-health laws in place that allow people who are radiating distress signals to be evaluated by competent professionals and taken into care if it’s clear that they’re on their way to the edge, the evaluation to be evoked on request by the individual, his (usually “his”) family, friends, neighbors, or co-workers, with strong safeguards against anyone’s (definitely including the state’s) hidden agendas.
That would eliminate 99.9% of all mass homicides, and most single homicides as well.
OF COURSE there’s a way to solve the problem, Ted! You must know that! If you don’t, here’s how, and why:
Socialisation creates an enormous barrier to killing, the exceptions being the slaughter of non-humans for sport and/or the table. That’s why so many soldiers kill themselves: they can’t take the ethical and emotional disconnect between what they learned during socialisation and what authority later demanded of them. (Re-read Milgram’s report of his Obedience to Authority experiments for an account of the anguish some of the subjects experienced as they -so they thought- obediently tortured an innocent man to death.)
Everyone who’s going to go over the edge and commit a mass killing gives MANY signs of their distress for a long time before they finally lose their grip completely.
So: re-open the asylums (and make them into real hospitals, not warehouses), and put public-health laws in place that allow people who are radiating distress signals to be evaluated by competent professionals and taken into care if it’s clear that they’re on their way to the edge, the evaluation to be evoked on request by the individual, his (usually “his”) family, friends, neighbors, or co-workers, with strong safeguards against anyone’s (definitely including the state’s) hidden agendas.
That would eliminate 99.9% of all mass homicides, and most single homicides as well.