As Nortex posted, the Continental Army used teenagers - but those guys (and they were guys) had much more real life experience (want to eat chicken? process it yourself) than the modern smartphone savvy generation.
There seems to be a sort of "legend" among young, disaffected males that shooting up their school is somehow a justified protest action.
Making it harder to obtain anything beyond a single shot rifle until age 21 would probbly be an effective law, but will the 2nd Amendment allow it?
But the Army recruitment age needs to remain 18 (or younger) as that is the age when young people most need to find a job (or they tend to get into drugs too heavily to be useful, and/or they get a decent job and no longer want to enter the service) - teenagers are easier to train in the sense of instilling character (some would say brainwashing).

All very sensible and reasonable suggestions for the media. Thanks for the links, I haven't read all of them, but I will.

Zobel said:

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I tend to agree, but whether it is a consequence of modern society or a realization, it seems that young adults don't fully mature mentally until their twenties or later. Men especially seem to shed their proclivity to risky behavior in groups in their twenties. That's part of the reason why I think seeing the school shooting trend as a riot - a socialized act in which each even increases the likelihood of the next escalation - as so important.

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I appreciate your input on this thread.

Second thought; why is this observation significant to the discussion? Are you asserting this is different than, say, the 1940's? Wouldn't a change in said maturity over the past 200-300 years (or much less) be something that bears a greater burden of scrutiny vs. some inanimate objects that are not much more technologically advanced than they were 50, 100, or 150 years ago?

Gender dysphoria is a big problem, imho. This kid was bullied for wearing eye makeup, supposedly. Kids need, (a) be born alive, and (b) proper parenting to succeed, whether they are (pick your political leader), Elvis Presley, Audie Murphy, or Joe Blow.

We should all encourage programs that develop, support, and lead to better parenting, before we start excusing the youth of today as somehow inferior to their genetic forebears.

Rongagin71 said:

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As Nortex posted, the Continental Army used teenagers - but those guys (and they were guys) had much more real life experience (want to eat chicken? process it yourself) than the modern smartphone savvy generation.
There seems to be a sort of "legend" among young, disaffected males that shooting up their school is somehow a justified protest action.
Making it harder to obtain anything beyond a single shot rifle until age 21 would probbly be an effective law, but will the 2nd Amendment allow it?
But the Army recruitment age needs to remain 18 (or younger) as that is the age when young people most need to find a job (or they tend to get into drugs too heavily to be useful, and/or they get a decent job and no longer want to enter the service) - teenagers are easier to train in the sense of instilling character (some would say brainwashing).

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I would add (w the military angle), some sort of competency or training shouldn't be out of line because the military doesn't throw 18 year old kids out there with their weapon with no training.

Well, we have this observation in modern times. I don't know if this is a purely physiological thing, like humans have always aged like this, or if it is partially a development thing, like we mentally age differently now because of societal reasons.

If it is the former, the question is what changed, if anything, that this effect was moderated in the past. I'm not even sure we know if it was moderated in the past, to be clear. What I mean by this is, maybe 18 year old young men have always been exactly the same in their propensity towards mass killing, but 100 years ago men like this were either killed young in violent crime, had a fear of reprisal in such a way that they didn't carry it out, didn't have societal triggers to encourage the behavior (no imitation media push), were socialized differently by parents or school or faith or society, or just had this kind of behavior beaten out of them by their peers.

If it's the latter, maybe something did change, so we need to deal with it somehow. Either adapt to it as a normal thing - in which case maybe we have to change how we treat young men with regard to responsibility, or we make an attempt to put the genie back into the bottle by reinstating whatever ameliorating factors there were in the past.

I have no idea. Its stupid complicated. But it doesn't seem coincidental that the US has multiple expressions of violence and mental illness at multiples of other places.

The question to me with the riot propensity idea is kind of clear. We don't need to worry *at all* about the people who are on the far side of the bell curve. They're just never going to go do that, you could give them arsenals of firearms and grenades and whatever with no incremental risk. And on some level we can't really do anything about the people who are on the far left side, the people who are always going to riot. You can't predict it, just like serial killers, there is some aspect of it that isn't preventable short of an unthinkable reduction of liberty.

The people we need to focus on are the ones in the middle, especially the left of the middle - those seem to be identifiable and preventable. I think the focus has to be on that. What influences them, what aids them, what deters them.

Macarthur said:

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Rongagin71 said:

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As Nortex posted, the Continental Army used teenagers - but those guys (and they were guys) had much more real life experience (want to eat chicken? process it yourself) than the modern smartphone savvy generation.
There seems to be a sort of "legend" among young, disaffected males that shooting up their school is somehow a justified protest action.
Making it harder to obtain anything beyond a single shot rifle until age 21 would probbly be an effective law, but will the 2nd Amendment allow it?
But the Army recruitment age needs to remain 18 (or younger) as that is the age when young people most need to find a job (or they tend to get into drugs too heavily to be useful, and/or they get a decent job and no longer want to enter the service) - teenagers are easier to train in the sense of instilling character (some would say brainwashing).

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I would add (w the military angle), some sort of competency or training shouldn't be out of line because the military doesn't throw 18 year old kids out there with their weapon with no training.

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Well, the Daniel Defense tweet advocating proper training for the youth was derided on this thread as irresponsible, first. Yet, there's no documentation that proper training in marksmanship is a...contributing factor at all to school shooters:



Second, yes, with marginal training, over millenia many teenagers have been tossed into battle as cannon fodder, certainly not just for Weimar Germany, Russia, or Iraq, but rather including draftees in the 20th century for the United States. "No training?" Ok, fine, but very little training and marginal weapons, yes. Over 26K 17-21 year olds in Vietnam alone.

Sad to say, but from what I have read on the internet, the amount of lead from car exhaust lowered the whole world's IQ and caused more autism, hyperactivity, and possibly even more sexual confusion.

Zobel said:

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Well, we have this observation in modern times. I don't know if this is a purely physiological thing, like humans have always aged like this, or if it is partially a development thing, like we mentally age differently now because of societal reasons.

If it is the former, the question is what changed, if anything, that this effect was moderated in the past. I'm not even sure we know if it was moderated in the past, to be clear. What I mean by this is, maybe 18 year old young men have always been exactly the same in their propensity towards mass killing, but 100 years ago men like this were either killed young in violent crime, had a fear of reprisal in such a way that they didn't carry it out, didn't have societal triggers to encourage the behavior (no imitation media push), were socialized differently by parents or school or faith or society, or just had this kind of behavior beaten out of them by their peers.

If it's the latter, maybe something did change, so we need to deal with it somehow. Either adapt to it as a normal thing - in which case maybe we have to change how we treat young men with regard to responsibility, or we make an attempt to put the genie back into the bottle by reinstating whatever ameliorating factors there were in the past.

I have no idea. Its stupid complicated. But it doesn't seem coincidental that the US has multiple expressions of violence and mental illness at multiples of other places.

The question to me with the riot propensity idea is kind of clear. We don't need to worry *at all* about the people who are on the far side of the bell curve. They're just never going to go do that, you could give them arsenals of firearms and grenades and whatever with no incremental risk. And on some level we can't really do anything about the people who are on the far left side, the people who are always going to riot. You can't predict it, just like serial killers, there is some aspect of it that isn't preventable short of an unthinkable reduction of liberty.

The people we need to focus on are the ones in the middle, especially the left of the middle - those seem to be identifiable and preventable. I think the focus has to be on that. What influences them, what aids them, what deters them.

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I dunno, I kinda lost your train of reasoning on this one. Mass shooters (as here) are generally confused, lonely, young, fatherless leftists/environmentalists.

Quote:

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Of the 82 mass public shootings from January 1998 to May 2021, 9 percent have known or alleged ties to white supremacists, neo-Nazis, or anti-immigrant views, and many of those, such as the Buffalo murderer, hold decidedly socialist, left-wing views. Another nine percent are carried out by people of middle eastern origin, making Middle Easterners, who make up only 0.4% of the country, by far the most likely ethnic/racial group to carry out mass public shootings. Non-Middle Eastern Whites and Hispanics who engage in these attacks are underrepresented as a share of the population. Blacks, Asians, and American Indians commit these attacks at a slightly higher rate than their share of the population.

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Quote:

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The Government Accountability Office has a report identifying white supremacists and neo-Nazis from 2000 through 2016. There were 52 mass public shootings over that period and the GAO identifies four of them who are either white supremacists or neo-Nazis (7.69%). Over the 1998 through May 20, 2021, there were 82 mass public shootings and between 7 and 9 attacks that involved people who were white supremacists, neo-Nazis, visiting neo-Nazis or white supremacist websites, or anti-immigrants (8.5% and 10.97%). One of these racists, Patrick Wood Crusius, who did the El Paso, Texas, mass public shooting, was an environmentalist extremist. He didn't want immigrants because he thought they would have more children, which would harm the environment.

All this isn't too surprising given that we have pointed out that 71% of mass public shooters have no identifiable political views.

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Given the deliberate surge in homelessness, single parent households, and drug violence antecedent to this in major cities in America, I think we can predict more of this, regardless of lamentations about 'change' being needed in gun laws. The reason for this is that I see zero evidence for a shift in the human DNA to mature later in life, but major social changes that are impacting the young adults (and children) today.

Macarthur said:

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Zobel said:

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Well, we have this observation in modern times. I don't know if this is a purely physiological thing, like humans have always aged like this, or if it is partially a development thing, like we mentally age differently now because of societal reasons.

If it is the former, the question is what changed, if anything, that this effect was moderated in the past. I'm not even sure we know if it was moderated in the past, to be clear. What I mean by this is, maybe 18 year old young men have always been exactly the same in their propensity towards mass killing, but 100 years ago men like this were either killed young in violent crime, had a fear of reprisal in such a way that they didn't carry it out, didn't have societal triggers to encourage the behavior (no imitation media push), were socialized differently by parents or school or faith or society, or just had this kind of behavior beaten out of them by their peers.

If it's the latter, maybe something did change, so we need to deal with it somehow. Either adapt to it as a normal thing - in which case maybe we have to change how we treat young men with regard to responsibility, or we make an attempt to put the genie back into the bottle by reinstating whatever ameliorating factors there were in the past.

I have no idea. Its stupid complicated. But it doesn't seem coincidental that the US has multiple expressions of violence and mental illness at multiples of other places.

The question to me with the riot propensity idea is kind of clear. We don't need to worry *at all* about the people who are on the far side of the bell curve. They're just never going to go do that, you could give them arsenals of firearms and grenades and whatever with no incremental risk. And on some level we can't really do anything about the people who are on the far left side, the people who are always going to riot. You can't predict it, just like serial killers, there is some aspect of it that isn't preventable short of an unthinkable reduction of liberty.

The people we need to focus on are the ones in the middle, especially the left of the middle - those seem to be identifiable and preventable. I think the focus has to be on that. What influences them, what aids them, what deters them.

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Well, I can tell you one thing for sure is different. In the past, those 18 year olds didn't have the ability to get their hands on such a powerful and efficient killing machine as they can now.

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Oh really?

Lord Have Mercy

This is not true. NFA not passed til 1934. Thompson submachine gun invented 1921. First semi automatic invented in the late 1800s. Remington model 8 for example, produced in 1905. And you can do *plenty* of damage with a 1903 Springfield bolt action rifle or a 45 pistol. Those are weapons of war more than an AR-15.

Dude, you are seriously trying to argue that mass distraction weapons were just as easy to get as AR types are now? Are seriously going to stick w that?

Arguably, a well trained marksman with an M14, or M1 Garand, is much more deadly than some idiot with a high dollar "AR-15."

The CMP has made it absolutely easy to have an M1 delivered, to your doorstep, for a nominal cost without an FFL for many decades, yet I am not aware of any being used in a mass shooting.

Inconvenient facts, to some.

I own two CMP weapons myself, actual weapons of war. My 1903 serial number dates from late WWI and shows up as being serviced on Guadalcanal. It's a two-world-war weapon, fired in anger… unlike the vast majority of the millions of AR-15s in the US. Best shooting gun I've ever owned, I prefer it to my M1 or M1A.

Ah yes. The M1; famously still used by the US military because it's better than a modern AR-style rifle. Seriously?

Do you really think there is a material difference between the efficacy of shooting unarmed people at point blank range between the two? Or with a handgun, for that matter?

Now do pistols.

This is a stupid argument because a person with a single M1911 has more than enough firepower to kill a lot of unarmed people in an ambush. The only reason historical firearms entered into the picture was because he disputed the idea that people a hundred years ago had access to sufficient firepower. That's demonstrably false. The ease of purchasing firepower has gone down, not up.

The shorter barrel of a pistol makes accurate shooting more difficult and the rounds are relativity lower powered and slower.

Once again, there's a reason the AR is the school shooter's weapon of choice.

However, any "modern" weapon will allow you to rack up an impressive body count if you've got a decent amount of training. You don't want to be confined in a space unarmed against someone with any kind of firearm, especially one from last 120 years or so.

I think it's reasonable to concede that an AR is just that next step better and easier at killing a bunch of people than the previously discussed substitutes. Do you disagree?

Are you asking me to quantify the advantage of an AR vs a handgun? If they're so great why do handgun deaths outpace that of rifles by orders of magnitude?

Whatever tactical advantage an AR may give, in this context it is surely outweighed by the comparative ease by which people in the past could obtain firearms.

The argument seems to have shifted from guns alone creating opportunities in a causal way to better guns creating more opportunities for death. If this were the case we'd expect a static number of incidents - or indeed more in the past as laws were more lax - but a rising number of deaths. Of course this is not what we see. Doesn't seem to register for some reason.

Zobel said:

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What I think is dumb is failing to account for the facts that in the past we had more guns, more access to guns, less school security, and fewer school shootings and fatalities. Guns in school parking lots, on campus. Guns in airplanes. Guns shipped to you in the mail no questions asked. No age restrictions.

How do you look at this and say "ayup, it's ar15 / gun loving culture to blame"? Honest question.

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Our gun loving culture is why we haven't made reforms to better regulate the ownership of firearms. And that is why firearm deaths in the US dwarf those in Europe.

As we love guns less, and gun ownership declines, and regulations increase, school shootings go up. Explain.

Thank you.