John R. Houk
© August 4, 2019
Democrats and other Left-Wing ilk are using mass shooting
deaths that stretch in a short time between July 28 through August 4 (Gilroy CA [and HERE], El Paso TX and Dayton OH) to steal guns from
law-abiding gun owners who are increasingly acquiring guns for self-defense
than just hunting.
If Dems got everything they wanted in “gun control” the
murderers who are capable of acquiring guns illegally will still shoot to kill
people who don’t have guns. The Dems care less about human life and care more
about controlling human lives. Folks, controlling human lives is the backbone
of totalitarianism.
In saying those sentiments, I liked what David Kupelian
posted today at WND. Kupelian cites a study that examines the bloody phenomenon
of multiple mass shootings one incident after another in terms of a mass
contagion of copycats influenced by the consumption bad habits polluting the
mind toward moral accountability for immoral actions.
JRH 8/4/19
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BACK-TO-BACK
MASS SHOOTINGS HIGHLIGHT ‘CONTAGION’ EFFECT
FBI expert: ‘More compromised, marginalized individuals … seeking
inspiration from those past attacks’
August 4, 2019
guns-bullets-ammo-ammunition… (Image
courtesy Pixabay)
With two mass shootings in the space of 12 hours – first
Saturday’s massacre at an El Paso Wal-Mart that left 20 dead and 26 wounded,
and then the shooting spree outside a bar in Dayton, Ohio, that killed nine and
injured 27 – pundits are already acting like they understand both the problem
and the solution.
Some are irresponsible opportunists, like Democratic
presidential candidate and El Paso native Robert “Beto” O’Rourke who stood
before TV cameras and blamed President Donald Trump for the
carnage, cravenly politicizing the catastrophe even before the
bloody, mangled, brains-splattered-everywhere bodies had been removed from the
Wal-Mart crime scene. Other more restrained and responsible voices have been
citing the usual suspects– semi-automatic firearms, mental illness,
“manifestos,” narcissism, social media, the desire for fame and so on.
But in light of the close proximity of these two most recent
mass shootings, as well as the mass shooting just six days earlier, at a garlic
festival in Gilroy, California, resulting in three dead (plus the shooter) and
12 injured, consider the problem from a different vantage point – one that
casts the growing incidence of mass-shootings in terms of “contagion.” Or in
more everyday terms, the “copycat crime” effect.
It’s not a matter of speculation.
In a 2015 peer-reviewed study titled “Contagion in Mass Killings and School
Shootings,” published in the Public Library of Science journal
PLoS ONE, researchers concluded that many mass shootings are triggered by other
similar attacks, especially very recent ones:
We find significant evidence that
mass killings involving firearms are incented by similar events in the
immediate past. On average, this temporary increase in probability lasts 13
days … We also find significant evidence of contagion in school shootings, for
which an incident is contagious for an average of 13 days … On average, mass
killings involving firearms occur approximately every two weeks in the U.S.,
while school shootings occur on average monthly.
As WND documented in a comprehensive report, during a
one-week window after the February 2018 mass-shooting in Parkland,
Florida, police across America stopped dozens of
threatened copycat school shootings before they happened.
“The copycat phenomenon is real,” confirmed Andre Simons of the FBI’s
Behavioral Analysis Unit in 2014. “As more and more notable
and tragic events occur, we think we’re seeing more compromised, marginalized
individuals who are seeking inspiration from those past attacks.”
The reality of copycat crimes, of course, is not new.
Examples abound throughout history, from Jack the Ripper imitators to the
1980’s “Tylenol murders” that initially resulted in seven deaths, but were
followed by hundreds of copycat incidents.
Sandy Hook killer Adam Lanza was enthralled with mass
murderers, researching multiple-fatality shootings going back to 1891, and maintained
a wall of infamous shooters. As reported by the Daily Mail, the
investigative book, “Newtown: An American Tragedy” by Matthes Lysiak, revealed
that Lanza was not only addicted to violent videogames, having “notched up more
than 83,000 ‘kills’ on his beloved video games including 22,000 ‘head shots’ as
he trained himself for the horrific Sandy Hook massacre,” but had “also became
fixated with researching mass killers, and spent hours poring over their
Wikipedia entries, updating some.”
Likewise, jihad – the Islamic variety of mass-murder madness
– has proven so susceptible to the copycat phenomenon that imitation may be the
single most important factor involved, especially since jihad cheerleaders and recruiters encourage
precisely that.
Thus, after the November 2015 coordinated terrorist attacks
in Paris that killed 130, including 89 at the Bataclan Theater, concern over
copycats prompted the FBI and Department of Homeland Security to send an urgent overnight bulletin to
18,000 local law enforcement agencies across America warning them to “be on the
lookout for suspicious people conducting surveillance on soft targets in the
United States.” Lone-wolf or self-radicalized terrorists, the feds warned,
“could seek to replicate the effects of the Paris attacks.”
The FBI’s fears were well-founded. A few months later, in
July 2016, Tunisian-born Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel killed 86 people and wounded
at least 430 others by driving a 19-ton truck into a crowd celebrating Bastille
Day in the southern French city of Nice. After ISIS claimed responsibility and
praised the mass murderer as a “soldier of the Islamic State,” a wave of copycat vehicular attacks followed around
the world – including major incidents in Vienna, Berlin, London, Antwerp,
Stockholm, Paris, Barcelona and Edmonton, as well as a driving-stabbing attack
in the U.S. at Ohio State University.
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Kupelian Writes about 2 of 3 Mass Shootings
in a Week
John R. Houk
© August 4, 2019
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BACK-TO-BACK MASS SHOOTINGS HIGHLIGHT ‘CONTAGION’
EFFECT
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