Because we like to keep our fingers on the pulse, the office telly is usually on one of the 24-hour news channels – except on Friday mornings, when we might watch a little Super Rugby.
You know the mass killings are coming thick and fast when those channels can’t keep up, the rolling coverage simply switching from one to the next as each story develops.
Of course there are stats that point to this being a result of increased coverage heightening our awareness of these issues, but it’s hard to dispel the notion that there is something truly rotten going on around the world.
The Daily Beast has taken a stab at trying to make sense of it, and here’s some of what they had to say:
Every morning, it seems, we wake to new madness. Somewhere in the world, and sometimes close to home, someone has been slaughtered in what looks like an epidemic of terror.
Often, it is related to Islamic extremism, but in many cases it is not. A man in Japan stabbed to death 19 residents of a nursing home because, he said, the world should be rid of invalids. Before that, there was a new nightclub shooting in Florida, a suicide bomber in Bavaria, a random slaughter at a McDonald’s in Munich, and a man rampaging with an axe in a German train. In Louisiana, meanwhile, a killer gunned down cops in the street. And add to that the massive carnage wrought by suicide bombings in Afghanistan and Iraq—all of it in just the last 10 days.
That’s not even a completely comprehensive list – what about the priest who had his throat slit in France just yesterday? Anyway, you get the drift:
One of the first things that’s apparent from the new research is that violence inspires violence, whether conscious copy-cat killing or subconscious emulation.
In the United States, there’s a lot to look at in this respect; mass murder takes place with almost metronomic regularity. A ground-breaking statistical analysis, “Contagion in Mass Killings and School Shootings,” published a year ago by Sherry Towers and her colleagues at Arizona State University, looked at data from 1998 to 2013 and noted that “mass killings involving firearms occur approximately every two weeks in the U.S., while school shootings occur on average monthly.”
The study concluded that after each highly publicized [sic] event, the probability of new attacks rose dramatically for a period of roughly two weeks—and that was well before the surge in violence we’ve been watching since at least the beginning of 2015.
The results of that study – and the analysis of the recent spate of killings – is far too in-depth to do justice with a summary, so if you’re trying to wrap your head around what’s happening across the globe then give it a read HERE.
[source:dailybeast]
