Thresholds of Violence By Malcolm Gladwell

[applegrove]

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-violence/amp?__twitter_impression=true

"SNIP.......


Meanwhile, the architect of the Columbine killings, Eric Harris, was a classic psychopath. He was charming and manipulative. He was a habitual lawbreaker: he stole, vandalized, bought guns illegally, set off homemade bombs, and at one point hacked into his school’s computer system. He wrote “Ich bin Gott”—German for “I am God”—in his school planner. His journals were filled with fantasies about rape and mutilation: “I want to tear a throat out with my own teeth like a pop can. I want to gut someone with my hand, to tear a head off and rip out the heart and lungs from the neck, to stab someone in the gut, shove it up to their heart.” A school shooter, it appears, could be someone who had been brutally abused by the world or someone who imagined that the world brutally abused him or someone who wanted to brutally abuse the world himself.

The LaDue case does not resolve this puzzle. LaDue doesn’t hear voices. He isn’t emotional or malicious or angry or vindictive. Schroeder asks him about violent games, and he says he hasn’t been playing them much recently. Then they talk about violent music, and LaDue says he’s been playing guitar for eight years and has little patience for the “retarded” music of “bands like Bullet for My Valentine or Asking Alexandria or some crap like that.” He likes Metallica: solid, normal, old-school heavy metal. “I was not bullied at all,” LaDue tells Schroeder. “I don’t think I have ever been bullied in my life. . . . I have good parents. I live in a good town.”

.......


In a famous essay published four decades ago, the Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter set out to explain a paradox: “situations where outcomes do not seem intuitively consistent with the underlying individual preferences.” What explains a person or a group of people doing things that seem at odds with who they are or what they think is right? Granovetter took riots as one of his main examples, because a riot is a case of destructive violence that involves a great number of otherwise quite normal people who would not usually be disposed to violence.

Most previous explanations had focussed on explaining how someone’s beliefs might be altered in the moment. An early theory was that a crowd cast a kind of intoxicating spell over its participants. Then the argument shifted to the idea that rioters might be rational actors: maybe at the moment a riot was beginning people changed their beliefs. They saw what was at stake and recalculated their estimations of the costs and benefits of taking part.



........SNIP"

[applegrove]

1. And then by not 'allowing' any change to solve the mass shooting issue the

GOP/NRA keep it alive as a wedge issue in the next elections.

[KT2000]

2. that is a good essay

the internet is building other groups who will act upon this model as well. Groups like Incels and supremacists will continue to up the ante.

[applegrove]

3. And the GOP/NRA need the cycle to continue in order to not solve the

gun issue and thus have constant open wound wedge issue where right wing gun owners are the real victims.

[Kurt V.]

4. good essay.

i would add that everything we do is for "social reasons". imho

[Leighbythesea]

5. Interesting

And provocative article. I love his books. The theory makes sense. And leaves you understandng we are in uncharted territory. We are desperate to predict why these things happen and that we must be able to be pre-emptive. It reinforces why gun laws are needed.

[applegrove]

6. Absolutely.