* I note once again that since the Age of Reagan, the US has seen a net gain of some 100 million (that we know about) in one generation, and all of it due to immigration. 229 million 1981, 324 million 2016, and close to 10% of the latter foreign born.
http://www.susps.org/overview/immigration.html
Plus we know that second-generation immigrants tend in the direction of anger, frustration, etc., when they find themselves in environments at odds with their genetic dispositions. (Which for some reason is now the main reason for bringing them in as “refugees”….)
We would surely expect to see a corresponding shift in what the nature of used to be called crimes of passion.
* Yet we still have the same number of Senators (100) and Representatives (435) we had 100 or even 150 million people ago. So your vote is definitely being watered down and your congressional districts are significantly larger, which means your congressman cares even less about you than he did fifty years ago.
The US was fully populated at 150 million. We fought WW2 with about 140 million which was enough to put 12 million into uniform and fill our factories with enough workers to crank out 300K airplanes and all the assorted kit needed to win the largest war in history.
Incidentally if we still had 140 million today, we’d be the 9th or 10th most populous nation on Earth depending upon whether the EU is counted as one entity. And looking at the other nations that would top us at that level would bring no cause for envy. Pretty much all the nations above 140 million are shit holes. In fact outside of Japan the six or so nations that would follow us are shit holes too.
Maybe our leaders should look at the population list and see how the overwhelming majority of the top twenty are all pretty much shit holes. It might, I say might, give them pause.
* Hollywood and the video game industry have acted as a feedback loop amplifying the fascination with lone mass killers amongst alienated men.
* Intimate forms of serial killing are much more difficult to sustain, now, thanks to DNA identification and other forms of modern forensics.
* What we have going on in this country is a “slow, rolling Jihadist Zombie Apocalypse.” By that I mean you can never know when that nice young Muslim boy next store is going to show up at your door screaming “Allahu Akbar” and waving a machete.
This man is a pious young Muslim who attends the Mosque frequently and is quite Religious. He may or may not be outspoken about his beliefs. Unfortunately, there are thousands of Muslims in this country that fit that description and we can’t tell which ones will go ‘Zombie” on us.
Our best bet to ID them is to cut the population of this type of person as much as possible. Start by eliminating all Muslims coming into the country except for those on Diplomatic Passports and spouses. Deport all non-citizen Muslims that we can.
Then make it tough on Muslim families and Mullahs who suspect they might go bad and give them an incentive to turn them in. Do this by deporting all Families that we can of Jihadists who act on their beliefs and closing the Mosques they worshiped at. Put the word out that this will happen.
To do the above will take a change of the POV in DC. A lot more of us will have to die before their attitude will change.
* The serial killer heyday of the 70s and 80s had some characteristics that have declined or disappeared from society. These include hitch hiking, people’s willingness to interact with strangers, street prostitution, the ability of a person working odd jobs to afford a detached house with a basement, and potential victims not leaving a constant trail of their whereabouts with text masseages, selfies, and tower pings. It’s hard to be a psycho killer these days.
* The only good thing that came out of America going from a high trust society to a low trust society is that it has made it a lot harder for serial killers to ply their trade.
* The response to the Orlando massacre sounds like it was a fiasco. One off-duty cop was there when it started and exchanged shots with the Afghan. 14 cops were there at 2:15am, 14 v. 1 (as far as we know), and the killing continued until 5am?
What percentage of the victims do you think were shot by cops?
* [Charles] Whitman [Texas bell tower shooter) tried to get help ahead of time and told medical people he wasn’t right in the head anymore.
But that kind of goes a long with the idea that kamikaze killing wasn’t much at all part of American culture up through the mid-1960s. The seminal event was a guy with a massive medical problem. But that injected the meme of the kamikaze killer into American culture.
Stuff like that had happened before in America, but it didn’t really become part of culture. I’d be interested in reading a study of news coverage of the Whitman shooting. There were big technological advancements in television news around that time, and they may have played a role, along with the rise of the Baby Boomers, in why so much of current social history seems to start right around the time of JFK’s assassination / the Beatles on Ed Sullivan.
* Technology has played a role in both the decline of serial killers and the rise of spree killers. Semiautomatics are far more widely available than they were in the past, which makes spree killing easier. Spree killers also crave attention, which they get far more of now than 50 years ago.
Serial killing is harder thanks to cell phone use, widespread use of security cameras, DNA and other forms of forensic evidence, media, better cooperation and sharing of evidence across jurisdictions, etc. Ted Bundy was probably one of the smartest serial killers ever, and yet he would’ve been caught rather quickly if he were trying to commit his murders in the same manner today.
* Sailer’s description of a ‘Christian’ ethnicity might be valid. Think of how they describe people in Iraq. They have Kurds, Sunni and Shia. Supposedly the Sunni and Shia are both ethnic Arabs, but are classed differently due to religion. Or consider Bosnia where you have Bosniaks (muslims) and Serbs. Bosniaks are probably genetically identical to Serbs, but are treated as a different ethnic group.
You could say they are really treated differently due to religion, but since religion takes on so many features of ones’ diet, holidays, culture, etc., they are effectively treated as different ethnic groups.
* I’d like to think there was some correlation between belief in the afterlife and being judged, and that that would explain why we have so many mass killers in our society today, rather than yesterday, but it just doesn’t work. In the first place I don’t think that mass killings are common in faiths such as Hinduism, Buddhism, or whatever faiths are most common in China and Japan. So there has to be some reason why it is so common that doesn’t have to do with a doctrine of salvation/damnation.
Serial killers presuppose a degree of urbanization and fragmentation. But even so, people like Hamilton Fish, Belle Gunness, the Lonely Hearts Killers, as well as the ones you mentioned were active well before the 1960′s.
I think the reason serial killers took off in the ’60′s up through the early ’90′s (e.g., Joel Rifkin, Jeffrey Dahmer) is because people, usually women but always (cf. John Wayne Gacy, Dahmer, Wayne Williams) were floating around anonymously and were easy to kill without anyone noticing.
In addition to serial killers however you have also spree killers like the Starkweather-Fugati dyad in 1957. They are not exactly the same thing.
Mass killers like Charles Whitman probably start there, but as a grace note I should say that Whitman was preceded by the shocking murder of the 8 nurses in Chicago by Richard Speck, which took place about two weeks earlier. I remember the Whitman case unfolding on the radio that day, I don’t recall there being any significant TV coverage. At any rate, the latter was I guess a spree killing, rather than a “kamikaze killing.”
As for kamikazes the Japanese in WW2 were not the only ones to do this, the Balinese did it several times against the Dutch in the early 20th Century. (and they are Hindus.) And we also know that modern suicide bombing began in Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers, and they, too, are Hindus, I believe.
It’s really hard to connect up all of these types of killings.
I would agree that the Orlando killings, the VA Tech killings, 9/11, Sandy Hook, Columbine, Bataclan, the Aurora theater shootings, and others, might fit this typological setting of “Kamikaze killings,” except even there there are differences; most of those were brought on by anger and a desire to take the world with them, while three of them were clearly motivated by Islamic rewards. Except: some of the Bataclan killers tried to flee, as did the Charlie Hebdo killers, so we are back at square one. Also, we have to include the Bath School Disaster in this enumeration, even though it happened 80 years ago, and was motivated by nothing more complicated than raised taxes and a lost election. And we can’t forget the various terrorist and anarchist bombings, either.
