Whether or not it is true of love, it might be true of mass shootings-that is, one mass shooting encourages another, so that they seem to come in clusters, piling horror on horror.
Few people will believe that the mass shooting in Dayton, in which nine people so far have lost their lives, is entirely unconnected with the shooting just hours earlier in El Paso, in which 20 people have died.
The role of imitation in the commission of acts of violence by the susceptible has been known since at least the end of the eighteenth century, when romantic young men in Europe committed suicide after the publication of Goethe's novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, the eponymous hero of which killed himself for unrequited love.
There are exceptions: the pilot who deliberately crashed a Germanwings airliner into the mountainside might have been trying to ruin his ex-girlfriend's life forever by means of causing her an unassuageable sense of guilt; Anders Breivik killed those whom he believed would further dilute Norwegian national identity by their espousal of multiculturalism as a political ideology; and the El Paso shooter, yesterday, apparently explicitly intended to kill Hispanics.
Some mass shooters have also returned to their former places of work and killed their former colleagues.
More often the victims and the grievance are only loosely connected-so loosely connected that the mass killing suggests an inchoate rage against existence, against society, and against the perpetrator's own life.
Modern mass killing, usually though not always by shooting, seems to have started with the case of Charles Whitman, who consulted a psychiatrist about his increasing bad temper and desire to shoot people-then killed his mother and father, climbed the tower on the campus of the University of Texas, and shot and killed 16 people at random and injured 44 others.
https://www.city-journal.org/mass-shootings-el-paso-dayton
Few people will believe that the mass shooting in Dayton, in which nine people so far have lost their lives, is entirely unconnected with the shooting just hours earlier in El Paso, in which 20 people have died.
The role of imitation in the commission of acts of violence by the susceptible has been known since at least the end of the eighteenth century, when romantic young men in Europe committed suicide after the publication of Goethe's novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, the eponymous hero of which killed himself for unrequited love.
There are exceptions: the pilot who deliberately crashed a Germanwings airliner into the mountainside might have been trying to ruin his ex-girlfriend's life forever by means of causing her an unassuageable sense of guilt; Anders Breivik killed those whom he believed would further dilute Norwegian national identity by their espousal of multiculturalism as a political ideology; and the El Paso shooter, yesterday, apparently explicitly intended to kill Hispanics.
Some mass shooters have also returned to their former places of work and killed their former colleagues.
More often the victims and the grievance are only loosely connected-so loosely connected that the mass killing suggests an inchoate rage against existence, against society, and against the perpetrator's own life.
Modern mass killing, usually though not always by shooting, seems to have started with the case of Charles Whitman, who consulted a psychiatrist about his increasing bad temper and desire to shoot people-then killed his mother and father, climbed the tower on the campus of the University of Texas, and shot and killed 16 people at random and injured 44 others.
https://www.city-journal.org/mass-shootings-el-paso-dayton
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