“While the terms mental health and emotional health are sometimes used interchangeably, they are distinctly different. … Mental health refers to your ability to process information. Emotional health, on the other hand, refers to your ability to express feelings which are based upon the information you have processed.” - from a WebMD article entitled, “The Emotional and Mental Aspects of Well-Being”. The shooters are/were able to process information, but they are/were unable to express their feelings about information they processed in socially-acceptable and non-lethal ways. In short, they are/were emotionally ill. Or am I way off on this?
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I guess I’m not convinced they were unable to express themselves in non-lethal ways, given that they wrote manifestos before killing people.
These are people choosing to be criminal. I think because so many die at the scene and never go to trial that part’s easy to forget.
Put it this way: Paul Bernardo is a sick, sick man, but he knows right from wrong, and I firmly believe he ought to be in jail. I don’t see why that’s so difficult to conceive for a Nazi mass murderer.
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I wonder: Should I’ve used “capable of expressing themselves…” instead? In any case they chose not to express themselves in non-lethal ways.
Now, how do we get folks like that to express themselves non-lethally to the point where their negative emotions are deflated? How do we get them to not have those negative emotions in the first place?
I don’t know the answers to any of the above. If I did, I’d be at the Mayo Clinic. Does this look like the Mayo Clinic? And I don’t know if there are answers. We need solutions, not answers.
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I agree we do need solutions, but that cycles back to gun control.
I could probably drive to your house in less than 4 hours, but the rate of mass shooters where I live is far less than where you live – and the single biggest practical major difference is gun control. The fallout of mental and emotional illness, or even plain old Nazism, is a lot easier when there is gun control.
And then again, compared to similarly-sized developed countries, the mass shooting rates in Canada are horrible – which circles back around to gun control, because we’re constantly trying to get guns illegally smuggled from the US and (to a lesser extent) other countries off the streets. It’s a lot easier in a place where the neighbouring countries have strict gun control too.
Remember that guy in the Netherlands who tried to stab a bunch of kids at a school, and the kids threw chairs and textbooks at him until he ran away? He only had a knife on him. Gun control is the difference between that and Sandy Hook.
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Yeah, we can’t control the crazies, so we gotta restrict their access to deadly weapons. And per that interview with the ex-neo-Nazi, they all want to outdo Timothy McVeigh and the OKC disaster. Which involved a bomb, if I remember correctly.
So let’s say firearms are successfully held out of reach of the crazies. They can still make bombs. Hell, that’s been going on longer than gun-mass murder, but before automatic weapons became available; plus some of them may actually reason, “What if this goes off before I get to…?” (we could only hope…)
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That’s a really good point. I guess the saving grace is making bombs, even simple ones, takes a certain amount of skill, so there’s always a chance they’ll blow themselves up first.
Bombs also require substances which are often (though not entirely) controlled. You’ll be tracked on Amazon for buying too many pressure cookers at once, but not if you buy ammo. Go figure.
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Then there’s the Anarchist’s Cookbook…
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I think you might be underestimating the impact of limitations Canada have put on hate speech.
There are people up here who are trying to spread the same kind of messages that are being spread in the States, and they’re getting shut down hard. Rebel Media and the Post Millennial have to pitch their dogwhistles a lot higher than their counterparts south of the border to keep them legal.
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When Cloudflare finally had enough of 8chan and fired it, the site—notoriously a haven for mass shooters and their fans—immediately jumped ship for BitMitigate, the same CDN that hosts far-right white nationalist site The Daily Stormer. The site also changed DNS and Web hosting to Epik, which is the parent company to BitMitigate and the host of far-right social media platform Gab.
Alex Stamos, cybersecurity expert at Stanford University and former CSO of Facebook, observed that BitMitigate seemed itself to be almost entirely made of equipment and network infrastructure leased from a company called Voxility. This public and pointed observation prompted Voxility to fire BitMitigate and Epik, leaving both 8chan and The Daily Stormer dead in the water.
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You’re right; I expect I am.
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<.<
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…
ZOINKS AND AWAY!
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Throughout childhood and into adolescence, the cortical areas of the brain continue to thicken as neural connections proliferate. In the frontal cortex, gray matter volumes peak at approximately 11 years of age in girls and 12 years of age in boys, reflecting dendritic overproduction [7]. Subsequently, rarely used connections are selectively pruned [6] making the brain more efficient by allowing it to change structurally in response to the demands of the environment [13].
http://ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2892678
People with more gray matter than me suffer from “overproduction.”
But as their neural connections wither and become more like mine, they become more “efficient.”
Totally not phrenology 
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My secret is in never letting go of shit. I knew there was a reason.
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