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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!!

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To: Ilaine who wrote (35954)	4/26/1999 5:49:00 PM
From: nihil	Read Replies (2) of 108807

It is very difficult for a rational person to rig up a logical argument for killing anyone in a society with even partially effective law enforcement. Let's look at Columbine. There was no effort to prepare an escape for the killers. They apparently planned to kill themselves or hijack a plane and crash it into New York City. Their plan B was sheer fantasy. The only benefit they expected was the pleasure of revenge on people who had done them no measurable or easily avoidable injury. Anyone who values his life so lightly is hardly capable of rational thought -- rational in terms of normal people like us. Anyone who plans to kill himself after or during murdering someone is operating on another mechanism than rationality. The death wish is a powerful but rare syndrome. Talk with gangbangers, addicts or drug dealers about the consequences of their acts. They sound like the infantry poets in World War I. They have a rendezvous with death ... The problem in trying to explain murder rationally is that we can find dozens of people who don't for everyone of given experience and ancestry that does. I suspect that even if we measured everything we could that was correlated with or preceded murderous behavior we would still explain (predict) only a modest fraction of the killers. If you look at data, you will be astounded at the disproportionate rates of African-American males (about 9 times as great as white males) and A-A females (about four times as great as white females). This applies both to victims and to perps. In purely quantitative terms, the primary task is to explain why the murder rates of A-A's is so high. I would guess the prime explanatory variables are 1. ready availability of firearms; 2. widespread drug trade, especially crack and crystal meth; and 3. lack of rewarding job alternatives. The variations and different incidence of murder among various groups of whites are largely statistical noise (IMO). There is some hope of predicting who mass murderers will be, but the cost of doing something after they are identified is staggering, not to mention the violation of individual rights. But this is a society that put Typhoid Mary away for life. I believe that convicted murderers should be studied in detail, rather than executed. I believe a large proportion of them will be found to have minimal brain injury and other localized abnormalities in the brain. I believe most of them will be found to be victims of extensive abuse. I believe most of them will have been in the hands of the police or juvenile authorities (many of them foster children) at some time before their murderous propensities exhibited themselves. I beliebe most of the young one will have been interviewed or tested by psychologists. It is worth noting that the two Columbine killers were in the hands of juvenile authorities and were given hopeful prognoses during the time they were plotting this major kill.

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