Mass shootings concentrated in suburbs or small towns.

[ErikJ]

Last edited Tue Jan 15, 2013, 05:00 AM - Edit history (1)

Sandy Hook, Clackamas Mall,OR, Aurora,CO, Columbine,CO, etc etc. All in small towns or white suburbs. My theory is that suburbs and small towns have higher concentrations of Republican paranoid gun nuts.

Intense Alienation Can Be an Incubator for Violence

GINIA BELLAFANTE
Published: December 21, 2012 NYTimes
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Cities breed their own pathologies, and homicide is a predominantly urban form of lawlessness. But mass murder, in fact, is not. When James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has written extensively about extreme killing, compiled homicide data from across the country for 1976 to 2010, he found that 64 percent of mass murders — defined as any instance in which four or more people were killed more or less at the same time — had occurred in places with populations of less than 250,000.


When we narrow the field further and imagine the sort of tragedy involving a lone shooter, typically white and male, spraying bullets and embodying uncountable clichés of twisted solitude, the scales are tipped more. Researchers on school massacres have noted that those crimes almost always happen in rural areas or small towns, Randall Collins, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. Why is this? In one sense it would seem to have everything to do with where guns are dispersed in our society. According to a national exit poll of 2008 voters analyzed last week by The New York Times’s Nate Silver on the FiveThirtyEight blog, 60 percent of rural households and 42 percent of suburban households own guns, while only 30 percent of urban households do.

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In small communities, “large numbers of people know each other and know they know each other, so reputations and gossip circulate rapidly and intensely,” Mr. Collins said. “There is more sense of belonging, more social pressure to conformity. But if you are an individual who is not plugged into the network, who is regarded as an anomaly, the feeling of being excluded and looked down upon is much stronger.” Alternatively, in cities, networks are widely dispersed and no center of social gravity is perceived. If you are regarded negatively, that reputation isn’t likely to travel extensively. There’s always another world to penetrate.

Urban schools, although they are more violent generally, are not seen as easily susceptible to inexplicable mass assault. “All the violence that takes place is quite understandable, and there is always a story, well-known to most of those nearby,” Mr. Collins explained, “about why so-and-so is out to get someone.” Violence is motivated by vendetta, or jealousies.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/nyregion/intense-alienation-can-be-an-incubator-for-violence.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20121223&_r=0

[JaneyVee]

1. And the highest rate of gun deaths are in Red States with lax gun control laws.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2011/01/10/deadliest-gun-states.html#slide1

[Berserker]

4. Oh you mean

Like Chicago Ill. with some very strict gun laws. The only state in the union with no CCL.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/16/chicago-homicide-rate-wor_n_1602692.html
Chicago's murder rate is also currently quadruple that of New York and double Los Angeles' rate.

The war zone-like statistics are not new. As WBEZ reports, while some 2,000 U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001, more than 5,000 people have been killed by gun fire in Chicago during that time, based on Department of Defense and FBI data.

[JaneyVee]

5. Wouldn't that prove your side wrong that "if everyone had guns it would lead to a safer environment"

Anomalies happen. But the over-whelming statistics aren't on your side. Click my above link.

[Berserker]

6. What do you mean my side?

I am a Democrat. I am an American. I believe in the Bill of Rights. Is that the side you mean?

[JaneyVee]

7. Your side of the debate. Your position and/or platform.

[ErikJ]

9. Thanks. Very interesting.

[kelliekat44]

2. The people in these areas are naturally suspicious and most of the children despise their parents.

Fertile ground for breeding mass killers.

[ErikJ]

8. McMansions

I once held the theory that these McMansions might be part of the problem. A kid can be almost lost in some of these withoput having to come near the parents for days. How else did Kleibold of Columbine build an arsenal in his room?

[cali]

11. you mean like the entire state of vermont

white.

gun owning.

oops. also the most progressive state in the entire country.

[Daemonaquila]

3. Disagree...

Intense white male entitlement in response to alienation or severe upset can be an incubator for violence.

I used to work in a rural court system when i was clerking for a judge. It's not about guns or alienation, but about the white, entitled reaction to not getting one's way. Where there's nobody around who'll question that entitled world view, it just intensifies.

You'd be surprised by the shocking incidents, mostly sans-guns. Disappointed that you lost your custody fight with your daughter-in-law? Head over with duct tape, gasoline, and horse tranquilizer - if you can't have those kids, NOBODY can. You can't make some of this crap up.

[JDPriestly]

10. This surprises me, but when I read the article, I realized this is true.

[HereSince1628]

12. The weapons are expensive...some of this must be related to socio-economics and

thereby to socioeconomic geographic patterns.

Gun suicide, the most common form of gun death, is much more common in whites than in other ethnicities and also has a higher occurrence in suburban America.