Posts by Russell Brown
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Here’s Truth’s report on the Waikino school shooting. Check out the intro:
All the perfumes of Arabia will not cleanse the blood-stained hands of John Higgins, who, in a frenzy, of uncontrollable passion, appeared with dramatic suddenness at the Waikino school and shot two children dead. Dropping the schoolmaster with a bullet through the neck Higgins then fired at the panic stricken children rushing pell-mell from the schoolroom. The sensation shook Waikino to its foundations and for an hour an episode, reminiscent of our worst bushranging days, was staged. Shutin the schoolhouse, with two dead children and a wounded schoolmaster lying oh the floor, Higgins blazed away at the armed police and townspeople gathered outside. Then the tempest of his maniacal anger quickly subsiding he passed quietly into the hands of the law,i n whose grip he remains awaiting the day when a jury of his countrymen shall estimate the enormity of his crime.
The opening line adapts Macbeth.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
I do note that per capita, our three familicides puts us above the US, as well, as measured by wikipedia consensus.
Which is sorta what I was reaching for. Here's the revised paragraph.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
So not very remarkable, then.
Gah! Right you are. The formatting is confusing – “list of familicides” isn’t inclusive of familicides in the US, but “list of workplace killings” and school killing are inclusive of the US.
The corrected paragraph:
We appear three times on Wikipedia's list of familicides that took place outside the US and Europe (Stephen Anderson is absent presumably because although his spree was triggered by a family dispute, some of his victims were not friends or family, and the Bain family murders because the toll fell one short of the Wikipedia benchmark). The US appears three times on a separately defined international list of the 15 worst "domestic violence" familicides -- China appears four times -- and has its own list of 110 familicides with six or more victims.
So the US has plenty of mass family killings, but isn't quite as much of an outlier there as it is in other rampage categories. Feel free to check me on that, folks.
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Some people are very angry about the mother's framing:
The article doesn’t divulge, or even acknowledge, that its subject might have his own perspectives, beliefs and motivations that are worth mentioning. His mother’s perspective, mainly on his ‘evil eyes’ with their ‘calculated pupils’ is the only one given. Thus the child is presented solely as a problem, or at best, as a two-dimensional contradiction of his “behavioural problems” and his “intelligence” and not as a person with any more than shallow emotions. By reducing ‘mental illness’ to ‘outward behaviour’ the article dehumanises the mentally ill and completely glosses over the inner mental life and experiences of those with mental illness.
That framing did disturb me a bit -- which is why I wanted to think about why someone would think their troubled son is a potential rampage killer -- but the rebuttal manages to be more offensive than what it's trying to rebut.
This is a pretty familiar dichotomy in autism-world. Parents can be misguided or in denial, and Aspie activists can be remarkably insensitive about the real challenges parents face.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
An acquaintance has been quoting literature on facebook in support of his argument that gun control wouldn’t help America with its violence problem. I haven’t followed the links to know of what quality they are.
The WaPo's Wonkblog cites Richard Florida's finding that states with gun-control laws have lower rates of gun death than those without, and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center's review:
Our review of the academic literature found that a broad array of evidence indicates that gun availability is a risk factor for homicide, both in the United States and across high-income countries. Case-control studies, ecological time-series and cross-sectional studies indicate that in homes, cities, states and regions in the US, where there are more guns, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
The UK approach works – get caught with an unlicensed gun, and you’re going to jail for five years or more.
But the guns used in the Sandy Hook shooting were legitimately owned. The problem might be more with the kind of guns people are allowed to own.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to David Cormack,
Probably not, because in Israel it’s easier to get a gun but their rate of civilian shootings seems low (yeah yeah I know).
That appears to be a myth.
First of all, because they don’t have high levels of gun ownership. The gun ownership in Israel and Switzerland has decreased.
For instance, in Israel, they’re very limited in who is able to own a gun. There are only a few tens of thousands of legal guns in Israel, and the only people allowed to own them legally live in the settlements, do business in the settlements, or are in professions at risk of violence.
Both countries require you to have a reason to have a gun. There isn’t this idea that you have a right to a gun. You need a reason. And then you need to go back to the permitting authority every six months or so to assure them the reason is still valid.
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Hard News: Cultures and violence, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Where there is a huge cultural difference between NZ and the US is around the concepts of freedom. For many Americans there is an unquestioning association between freedom and gun ownership. In some of the places I lived it was a concept that could not be questioned.
I was about to engage someone on Twitter who declared (among other things) that "America is a culture that was built on the principle of liberty against tyranny, even if it takes bullets and blood," but decided there was no point.
He didn't seem likely to grasp that his culture might be in the grip of another form of tyranny.
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At Avondale Markets today.
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Interesting. Obama has been interviewed about marijuana legalisation and -- contrary to most predictions -- says it "wouldn't make sense" for the federal government to pursue pot busts in Colorado and Washington.
This is actually pretty big news.
