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=== Sandy Hook Massacre <small>(6:00)</small>=== | === Sandy Hook Massacre <small>(6:00)</small>=== | ||
* [http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/some-thoughts-on-sandy-hook/ Some Thoughts on Sandy Hook] | * [http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/some-thoughts-on-sandy-hook/ Some Thoughts on Sandy Hook] | ||
S: So, we unfortunately have a very sad news story to talk about this evening, to start out our news items. Many of you have likely heard about the Sandy Hook massacre. To quickly summarize what we know as of the recording of this show, on Friday, December 14, a 20-year-old gunman shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut and went to the principal's office, shot the principal and I think there was one other person there, killed them both. And then proceeded to go to classrooms, shooting and killing teachers and students, before finally shooting and killing himself. In the end, he killed twenty children, all aged 6 to 7, and six adults, including his own mother, who he killed at his house before leaving for the school. Absolutely horrifically tragic. I mean, this has obviously been the talk around here all weekend, and it's just hard to wrap your head around something that horrific happening. | |||
R: And we should mention that you guys are all in Connecticut right now. And in fact, | |||
B: Yeah. | |||
R: Well, Jay and Bob, I mean, you guys are like, right there. | |||
B: Yeah, not just Connecticut. I mean this is bad enough if it happened three thousand miles away, but to have it happen literally two or three miles away, I mean, I could run there without much of a problem. So close, down the road, it's really just drives it home just a little bit deeper, and it's a bizarre feeling to know and think that something that horrific, that you've seen happen in the past before, Columbine and others. But to have it so close is really surreal and bizarre and one thing people, some people are confused about what's the relationship between Sandy Hook and Newtown. It's in Newtown. Sandy Hook is like a village that's ''in'' Newtown, so the town is Newtown. That's what it happened in . . . | |||
S: And Evan, you have an even closer connection in a way to what happened. | |||
E: Yeah, some friends whom I've been school, was schoolmates with, you know, growing up as a boy, and my junior high school years, and high school years. There's three families that now reside in Newtown I went to high school with all these good people, and they had children that were in the school, unfortunately, at the time that all this happened. None of them were victims in that sense that they died, so they are all alive. That is, you know, I was very relieved to hear that. One of my friends works for the Town of Newtown, and he's part of the fire, volunteer fire department as well. And part of the emergency response team there. So he actually was one of the very first people on the scene after the shooting. | |||
R: Unnh, horrible. | |||
E: Had occurred. And was sort of in charge of lots of different things going on at the time. His wife also happened to be at the school at the time of the shooting, as well. She was dropping something off to her son. Her son had forgotten to bring something to school. They have a son in third grade there. So she was at the school. She was approaching the front door and she noticed the glass was shot out. And she felt, sensed, yeah, something is wrong, and not a few seconds later she started to hear the gunshots. She ran for cover, managed to protect herself, but, you know, the thought of having your child inside there while you're outside taking cover is . . . unimaginable. I mean it's impossible to put yourself in a situation such as that. They're still in shock to a certain degree, over it all. You can't blame them for that. | |||
S: Imagine actually being one of the families who lost somebody in the massacre. It's just unbelievable. | |||
R: It's worth noting though, that there were some, I mean, as with all of these tragedies there are some amazing stories of particularly really courageous teachers and the principal who obviously stepped up and saved a lot of lives. There was one teacher who locked her entire class into a closet in the bathroom and protected them. And she ended up dying. | |||
B: Well, actually, some of those stories are kind of, it's kind of up in the air how much of that specific story might be true. Yeah, there was definitely heroism and incredible acts of bravery, but that specific I read today, was, might not necessarily be exactly true as people are saying, but there are plenty of examples like that. | |||
S: Yeah. The reporting of this story has been rife with misinformation all the way through. Every day it sounds like we're getting a different story. | |||
R: Yeah. Which is usually the case. | |||
S: Unfortunate. Yeah. | |||
E: Right. In huge world events, this is a world event, no doubt about it. | |||
R: And especially as a million different websites and mainstream news stations are rushing to be the first to break a story | |||
S: Yeah, so they're going with any information they get. The cops are being very closed about the information. They don't want to really say anything until they've completed their investigation and they're sure about it. So, they're holding onto details and leaving the press to speculate. I think sometimes, you know, a little irresponsibly. | |||
E: But they're also warning people to be careful of all the rumors that are flying out there. They're pretty vociferous about that. And really telling people "Do not believe everything you're seeing on the internet." A lot of it is false. | |||
S: But you can't blame the public for curiosity. People struggle to make sense of something. | |||
R: And particularly, when mainstream news reports things, you give them a certain amount of respect. Unfortunately. And if they don't do their fact checking, then it's pretty easy for rumors to spread from there. | |||
B: Hey, guys. What's your take on this angle that I found a little bit intriguing? There was a quote attributed to Morgan Freeman on Facebook, which turned out to be false, he never said this. Somebody just posted it and it just took on a life of its own, was attributed to Morgan. But the basic gist is that the media, he was just, the person who wrote it was just horrified at the way the media was reporting this and similar disasters in that they basically, you know, they hold up this, the guy who perpetrated this act, focusing on him, his name, his image over and over and over and his point was that because you're turning this person into some sort of, not a hero, but just sort of this figure that will never be forgotten, the image and his name. He says it makes the next person want, maybe step a little closer to pulling off a similar or more dramatic act because he realizes, oh boy, I can be this infamous if I do something similar to this. | |||
E: Copycat, copycat actions. | |||
B: So, right. The suggestion was that maybe, at the very least, you could talk about it, everyone's curious, obviously, but do we really need to post this guy's picture and name over and over and over. Can we just do it without at least making him, you know, something that we focus so much, specifically his name and image. And not the victims. I mean, people can name the killers in Columbine, but can anyone name one victim, type of thing. | |||
R: Morgan Freeman may not have said that, but Roger Ebert had a great quote right after Columbine. A reporter was fishing for a story, and trying to get him to say something along the lines of violent films like ''Basketball Diaries'' contributed to this. And Ebert's response was to say "Events like this, if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song. These two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country. If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory." And Ebert says that somehow that quote never ended up making it into an actual news story. | |||
B: Yeah, right? | |||
E: Um hmm. | |||
R: Wasn't really what she was looking for. | |||
B: Obviously, something like this happening is, it has many, many different causes. You can't say "this is what happened." But this is one thing that I think can be addressed, and you know I got, I don't watch CNN that much, but I got new respect for CNN last night watching it, and, Anderson Cooper said "We haven't mentioned this guy's name for three days" and they make a point of not specifically addressing who it was or showing his image and they still talk about it plenty but they make an effort not to focus on the person and making him that other people might want to try and emulate. And I thought that was an interesting way to deal with it and one of the many things that can be done to try to minimize this from happening again, there's lots of different things that can be done and that's one thing that could be done that I think we should try, people should try, to do. | |||
S: So one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this news story was to cover that angle a little bit, the notion that when big events like this happen, there seems to be a feeding frenzy of speculation about what the cause is. And suggesting therefore there needs to be some remedy for ''this'' cause of that event. Around this latest shooting, the themes have been, the media is one, gun control or lack thereof being another, our lack of proper treatment of mental illness, and, for some reason, violent video games has been raised by multiple people as a contributor to this. | |||
R: And there have been several commentators, unfortunately, who have suggested that because God is not allowed in schools this has happened. And not just the nuttiest of them, but people like Mike Huckabee. | |||
E: Yeah, that's right. You're right, they did say that. | |||
S: It's like everyone picks their favorite boogey man or cause and attaches it to this event. | |||
E: Well, we like to think that there are simple answers to things that are very complex and I would say that this is an ''extremely'' complex issue. On all facets. | |||
S: So I did a lot of reading, trying to see what literature there is out there that would even address some of these questions. The only real consensus I've found was that these kind of school shootings or even spree killings are too rare to do ''any'' kind of meaningful analysis of cause and effect. You know, there is more variables than there are data points, and so you just can't in any way do a meaningful analysis. So we just don't know. We just don't know what are, the important influences are, and what policies might reduce the risk of this happening in the future. Of course, nobody wants something like this to happen again. And attention will be paid to certain issues, but we have to just accept the fact that we're doing this without really knowing what the effect of these policies are in reducing the probability that this kind of thing will happen again. | |||
E: It's good that we don't have enough data, if you think about it, right? I mean, if we had more data on this, a lot more people would be dead, so, I'm not disheartened by that. | |||
S: Yeah, we just have to acknowledge that that's the case. Nobody has the answer. It's like these events are caused by this type of person in this situation or that trigger. We just don't, we can't make those statements. | |||
B: Yeah, that level of competence is just not warranted. | |||
R: It seems insufficient to me though, to say that, because there are tons of rare events that we can analyze and at least get some hypotheses about, like, do these more and more in certain, in one country more than other countries? You know, we can look at how the data matches up to, for instance, gun control laws, or mental health standards. Like, for instance, there have been studies that have looked at that. I was just reading about one, though, that showed that there didn't seem to be any connection between mental health standards and mass shootings like this. But there was a correlation with gun control laws. So I mean, that's by no means definitive. But it is a data point that we can add. So just because these things are rare doesn't mean we can't analyze them. | |||
S: No, there is data, there absolutely is data looking at certain variables. But again, but not enough to really make the kind of statements we'd like to make about cause and effect. So then the data is kind of all over the place. For example, you bring up mental illness. There is a study which, a few studies actually, which looked at the, just the percentage of these kinds of major violent crimes that are perpetrated by people with mental illness and the figure is 15%. That's what they found. Fifteen percent of these kinds of crimes are committed by people with mental illness. | |||
R: We should mention that at the time of this recording, there's no evidence one way or the other to say whether or not this person had a mental illness. | |||
S: We know nothing about that, so, yeah, this is all generically speaking. However, if you look it at the other way, what's the risk of committing these crimes if you have any kind of mental illness and certain kinds, like paranoid schizophrenia or paranoid schizophrenia plus alcoholism, and the risk does go significantly higher. There are correlations there. Not necessarily, so now we're looking more at all violent crime, not these specific kinds of spree killings, so just to clarify further, Rebecca, thinking a lot of the statistics you're quoting have to do more with violent crimes. | |||
R: Actually, yeah, you're probably right. | |||
S: If you're looking at just these spree killings really are rare, like | |||
R: Well, what counts as a spree killing, though, out of curiosity, because there have been, in the past week, there have been several in the news. I've read at least four happening. Not necessarily as quote unquote successful as this one. Like for instance, there was one in a hospital just a couple, two days ago, I think. Someone opened fire in a hospital. I guess it depends on what your definition is of spree killing. | |||
E: I'm also curious as to how many of these otherwise sprees that were plotted out and going to take place were thwarted in some capacity. Either someone got a tip and they actually stopped the person before they were able to go through with it, or actually some people who have been on, started a spree have been, you know, taken down by other people who are carrying guns. | |||
R: Yeah, that's what happened in the hospital. The person shot two people before a security guard, I think, shot the gunman. | |||
S: Having armed security certainly seems like a good idea, but it's still, you know, have to be in the right place at the right time. Some other data points, you know, so you brought up gun control. That's, the data there is really tricky. So, for example, in Australia they passed an anti-assault rifle ban, and after | |||
E: 1997. | |||
S: Yeah, in the years after that, there actually was a fairly dramatic decrease in gun-related homicides, compared to the, the numbers were already decreasing but they, the decrease accelerated after the ban. But it's one, still one data point, one country, and don't necessarily know if we can extrapolate that to the U.S., but then again I found another study and it's actually a systematic review that looked at all the data, looking at the state firearm regulations, and essentially concluded that there is no correlation between any of the types of state restrictions on gun ownership and violent crimes. So the data that we have; but they also said that we don't really have the best data, but the data that exists it's hard, you can't make any statistically significant correlation. But then you could argue that, okay, within the United States there's not enough difference among the regulations to make a difference. | |||
R: And you can easily travel from state to state, with a gun, things like that. And that could make a difference, too. | |||
S: Right. There's also, yeah, there's the gun regulations, there's the culture, the quote unquote gun culture, the availability of illegal guns. There's lots of variables. It makes it difficult to say, if we pass this one law, it would have this effect. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't be considering such laws. I think there are some low-hanging fruit, you know, that should be considered, and these tend to come up every time there's a high-profile case like this. For example, the shooter in this case had a military-style assault rifle, a Bushmaster, which is a civilian version of the M16, and he had magazines with 30 rounds in them. So that raises the debate, do civilians, for target shooting, hunting or even personal security, need military-style assault rifles with large volume magazines? | |||
E: Yeah. This is military equipment. | |||
S: Yeah, exactly. | |||
B: They're weapons of war, and that's definitely something that needs to be considered. We don't, even for home defense, even, well, except maybe for a zombie apocalypse, but all bets are off when that happens. | |||
S: Of course, gun proponents argue that the assault rifle ban in the United States in the 1990s, and this studied specifically, had no effect on violent crime, these kind of killing sprees, or even gun-related deaths. But then the other side says, well, that's because there's already hundreds of millions of guns in the United States and guns are in operation for a very long time, so a ban now isn't going to have an effect. The guns are already out there. | |||
B: Oooo. Really. | |||
S: So the data is really messy, so of course, what that means is you could support any position you want, any political position, you could cherry pick or spin what information is out there to support your side and it doesn't mean that we should not act or that we should not consider, yeah, you know, maybe there should receptor sites for people who have mental illness. Are we really optimally providing services for people who are isolated and maybe struggling, in that very vulnerable age category, et cetera, et cetera. Do we really need to let private citizens own military grade assault rifles? These I think are questions worth addressing and I think they should be evidence-based as much as possible but we need to acknowledge that evidence is messy. | |||
E: Agreed. | |||
=== China Stabbing <small>(24:22)</small>=== | === China Stabbing <small>(24:22)</small>=== | ||
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| SGU Episode 388 |
|---|
| 22nd Dec 2012 |
 |
| (brief caption for the episode icon) |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
R: Rebecca Watson |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
There is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves. |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| SGU Podcast archive |
| Forum Discussion |
Introduction
You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Monday, December 17, 2012, and this is your host Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella,
B: Hey, everybody.
S: Rebecca Watson,
R: Hello, everyone.
S: and Evan Bernstein.
E: So this is what the afterlife is like. Looks a lot like real life.
B: Oh, yeah, that's right. (he laughs)
E: December 22nd!
B: I forgot I was dead. Cool.
S: Yeah, right.
E: When you're listening to this.
R: Well, yeah, I mean, but we don't know, because we are recording this beforehand, so who knows?
E: I am therefore putting down my chit right now, placing my bet. Here we are. December 22nd.
B: I'm gonna hedge my bets. To the aliens that find this as they examine the dead husk of the Earth: Wha'sup? Send more Chuck Berry! (Laughter)
S: Jay is in the process of moving, so he's not available tonight.
R: So sad. I mean, happy for him, but sad for humanity that we have to go without. (Laughter)
E: How will we manage?
S: For one week.
This Day in Skepticism (1:05)
- December 22, 1938: Coelacanth Discovered
R: Hey, happy Coelacanth Day, everybody!
B: Yay!
S: Happy Coelacanth Day, Rebecca.
E: Coelacanth Day.
B: I love coelacanths!
R: On this date in 1938, the coelacanth was rediscovered. It was a primitive fish that was thought to be extinct, and it was discovered by a trawler. Well, I should say, it had probably been seen quite often by people near this South African town where it was eventually quote unquote found. But it was re-found by somebody who knew exactly what they were looking at.
S: Right.
R: In 1938. Quite remarkably, in a trash pile of fish.
E: Jeez.
R: So what happened was, Hendrick Goosen was the captain of a trawler, who would occasionally call upon a local museum curator named Majorie Courtenay-Latimer, at a nearby museum, whenever he found a fish or anything that he thought was kind of weird, because she would be able to identify it and appreciate it. So he called her over to see his catch, but the actual specimen that he wanted to show her apparently wasn't very interesting. But she did look over into his trash pile, and spot the coelacanth, which is, it's not hard to see, when you see the coelacanth, it's not hard to see why the average person would probably not think much of it. It's sort of ugly. It's a dumb-looking fish. There.
S: It's a fish.
R: There's just nothing really interesting about it.
B: It definitely looks odd, though.
E: It's got a big dorsal section.
R: Yeah, I guess so, but it just sort of looks like a fish. Just a fish. But, it turns out that this fish was quite famous because it had been thought extinct, up until that point. So now there are two species, I guess, two species of
S: Yeah, two species.
R: of coelacanth. Both of which are threatened. The West Indian Ocean is critically endangered, still. But, it's kinda cool because it's a living fossil, as they say. It's like dinofish. Because it evolved into its current form about four hundred million years ago.
S: Yeah, but to be clear, 'cause you know how creationists love to play with that "living fossil, evolution is not true."
E: Oh, yeah.
S: This is not the same species that was alive that long ago. This is part of the same family, that family has existed, with little change. But still, this species has not been around for that long. The two species that are around today.
B: But, Steve, it says that it's evolved, I'll quote Wikipedia, "evolved into roughly its current form four hundred million years ago." So it hasn't changed much for four hundred million years.
S: Yeah, but they're talking about the family. Not the species.
R: It's an order. It's an order, not
S: Oh, is it an order?
R: Yeah.
S: Oh, good, cool. Did you know that it has eight fins? Two dorsal, two pectoral, two pelvic, one caudal and one anal.
B: Caudal, ooooh. Oooooh, nice.
R: Anal!
S: It's an anal fin.
R: I can see how that could be handy.
B: So I'm not the only one.
R: Ew.
E: Multi-purpose back there?
B: That is the oddest thing about it, though. It's really
R: About your anal fin?
B: No, not about that. There's more things than that. I'm talking about the coelacanth. It looks very odd with all these fins, sticking out everywhere. Did you know it's more closely related to reptiles than mammals, than to the common ray-finned fishes?
R: I didn't know that.
E: I didn't know that.
B: That's kind of striking.
S: Yeah, it's related to tetrapods and lungfish.
B: Lungfish.
S: It seems odd that that group of fish that are closely related to tetrapods, to vertebrates that walk out on land, are more closely related to creatures on land than they are to other fish, 'cause they're past that branch point that led to land-based vertebrates. You know?
B: Yeah, yeah.
S: Because everything else kept evolving, too. You know what I mean? It's just, a little bit, it's counterintuitive at first, but when you look at the branching tree then it makes perfect sense.
E: So this is kind of a fish out of time in a sense.
S: It's just a remarkably stable order. It's like sharks have been around for a long time. Not the exact same sharks we have today, but sharks as a group, they have been around for a long time, same thing.
R: But of course, Disney still has the right to option fish out of time. (Laughter)
S: Fish out of time.
B: Oh my god. Hey, I didn't know this. The West Indian Ocean coelacanth is a critically endangered species. That kind of sucks. I mean, don't they live so deep. I mean, are they just getting, I guess they're getting . . .
E: That's amazing.
B: . . . picked up all the time. Or maybe their environment's changing, which I doubt. But that's pretty, that would stink if it lasted this long, and just said, "Ahhhh, I'm done."
E: Right? An order, a class for four hundred million years, and then, what? Humans come along and kind of mess things up in a few hundred years, and that's that. Assuming that that's why it's on the critically endangered species list. I don't know that for sure.
News Items
Sandy Hook Massacre (6:00)
S: So, we unfortunately have a very sad news story to talk about this evening, to start out our news items. Many of you have likely heard about the Sandy Hook massacre. To quickly summarize what we know as of the recording of this show, on Friday, December 14, a 20-year-old gunman shot his way into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut and went to the principal's office, shot the principal and I think there was one other person there, killed them both. And then proceeded to go to classrooms, shooting and killing teachers and students, before finally shooting and killing himself. In the end, he killed twenty children, all aged 6 to 7, and six adults, including his own mother, who he killed at his house before leaving for the school. Absolutely horrifically tragic. I mean, this has obviously been the talk around here all weekend, and it's just hard to wrap your head around something that horrific happening.
R: And we should mention that you guys are all in Connecticut right now. And in fact,
B: Yeah.
R: Well, Jay and Bob, I mean, you guys are like, right there.
B: Yeah, not just Connecticut. I mean this is bad enough if it happened three thousand miles away, but to have it happen literally two or three miles away, I mean, I could run there without much of a problem. So close, down the road, it's really just drives it home just a little bit deeper, and it's a bizarre feeling to know and think that something that horrific, that you've seen happen in the past before, Columbine and others. But to have it so close is really surreal and bizarre and one thing people, some people are confused about what's the relationship between Sandy Hook and Newtown. It's in Newtown. Sandy Hook is like a village that's in Newtown, so the town is Newtown. That's what it happened in . . .
S: And Evan, you have an even closer connection in a way to what happened.
E: Yeah, some friends whom I've been school, was schoolmates with, you know, growing up as a boy, and my junior high school years, and high school years. There's three families that now reside in Newtown I went to high school with all these good people, and they had children that were in the school, unfortunately, at the time that all this happened. None of them were victims in that sense that they died, so they are all alive. That is, you know, I was very relieved to hear that. One of my friends works for the Town of Newtown, and he's part of the fire, volunteer fire department as well. And part of the emergency response team there. So he actually was one of the very first people on the scene after the shooting.
R: Unnh, horrible.
E: Had occurred. And was sort of in charge of lots of different things going on at the time. His wife also happened to be at the school at the time of the shooting, as well. She was dropping something off to her son. Her son had forgotten to bring something to school. They have a son in third grade there. So she was at the school. She was approaching the front door and she noticed the glass was shot out. And she felt, sensed, yeah, something is wrong, and not a few seconds later she started to hear the gunshots. She ran for cover, managed to protect herself, but, you know, the thought of having your child inside there while you're outside taking cover is . . . unimaginable. I mean it's impossible to put yourself in a situation such as that. They're still in shock to a certain degree, over it all. You can't blame them for that.
S: Imagine actually being one of the families who lost somebody in the massacre. It's just unbelievable.
R: It's worth noting though, that there were some, I mean, as with all of these tragedies there are some amazing stories of particularly really courageous teachers and the principal who obviously stepped up and saved a lot of lives. There was one teacher who locked her entire class into a closet in the bathroom and protected them. And she ended up dying.
B: Well, actually, some of those stories are kind of, it's kind of up in the air how much of that specific story might be true. Yeah, there was definitely heroism and incredible acts of bravery, but that specific I read today, was, might not necessarily be exactly true as people are saying, but there are plenty of examples like that.
S: Yeah. The reporting of this story has been rife with misinformation all the way through. Every day it sounds like we're getting a different story.
R: Yeah. Which is usually the case.
S: Unfortunate. Yeah.
E: Right. In huge world events, this is a world event, no doubt about it.
R: And especially as a million different websites and mainstream news stations are rushing to be the first to break a story
S: Yeah, so they're going with any information they get. The cops are being very closed about the information. They don't want to really say anything until they've completed their investigation and they're sure about it. So, they're holding onto details and leaving the press to speculate. I think sometimes, you know, a little irresponsibly.
E: But they're also warning people to be careful of all the rumors that are flying out there. They're pretty vociferous about that. And really telling people "Do not believe everything you're seeing on the internet." A lot of it is false.
S: But you can't blame the public for curiosity. People struggle to make sense of something.
R: And particularly, when mainstream news reports things, you give them a certain amount of respect. Unfortunately. And if they don't do their fact checking, then it's pretty easy for rumors to spread from there.
B: Hey, guys. What's your take on this angle that I found a little bit intriguing? There was a quote attributed to Morgan Freeman on Facebook, which turned out to be false, he never said this. Somebody just posted it and it just took on a life of its own, was attributed to Morgan. But the basic gist is that the media, he was just, the person who wrote it was just horrified at the way the media was reporting this and similar disasters in that they basically, you know, they hold up this, the guy who perpetrated this act, focusing on him, his name, his image over and over and over and his point was that because you're turning this person into some sort of, not a hero, but just sort of this figure that will never be forgotten, the image and his name. He says it makes the next person want, maybe step a little closer to pulling off a similar or more dramatic act because he realizes, oh boy, I can be this infamous if I do something similar to this.
E: Copycat, copycat actions.
B: So, right. The suggestion was that maybe, at the very least, you could talk about it, everyone's curious, obviously, but do we really need to post this guy's picture and name over and over and over. Can we just do it without at least making him, you know, something that we focus so much, specifically his name and image. And not the victims. I mean, people can name the killers in Columbine, but can anyone name one victim, type of thing.
R: Morgan Freeman may not have said that, but Roger Ebert had a great quote right after Columbine. A reporter was fishing for a story, and trying to get him to say something along the lines of violent films like Basketball Diaries contributed to this. And Ebert's response was to say "Events like this, if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song. These two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country. If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory." And Ebert says that somehow that quote never ended up making it into an actual news story.
B: Yeah, right?
E: Um hmm.
R: Wasn't really what she was looking for.
B: Obviously, something like this happening is, it has many, many different causes. You can't say "this is what happened." But this is one thing that I think can be addressed, and you know I got, I don't watch CNN that much, but I got new respect for CNN last night watching it, and, Anderson Cooper said "We haven't mentioned this guy's name for three days" and they make a point of not specifically addressing who it was or showing his image and they still talk about it plenty but they make an effort not to focus on the person and making him that other people might want to try and emulate. And I thought that was an interesting way to deal with it and one of the many things that can be done to try to minimize this from happening again, there's lots of different things that can be done and that's one thing that could be done that I think we should try, people should try, to do.
S: So one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this news story was to cover that angle a little bit, the notion that when big events like this happen, there seems to be a feeding frenzy of speculation about what the cause is. And suggesting therefore there needs to be some remedy for this cause of that event. Around this latest shooting, the themes have been, the media is one, gun control or lack thereof being another, our lack of proper treatment of mental illness, and, for some reason, violent video games has been raised by multiple people as a contributor to this.
R: And there have been several commentators, unfortunately, who have suggested that because God is not allowed in schools this has happened. And not just the nuttiest of them, but people like Mike Huckabee.
E: Yeah, that's right. You're right, they did say that.
S: It's like everyone picks their favorite boogey man or cause and attaches it to this event.
E: Well, we like to think that there are simple answers to things that are very complex and I would say that this is an extremely complex issue. On all facets.
S: So I did a lot of reading, trying to see what literature there is out there that would even address some of these questions. The only real consensus I've found was that these kind of school shootings or even spree killings are too rare to do any kind of meaningful analysis of cause and effect. You know, there is more variables than there are data points, and so you just can't in any way do a meaningful analysis. So we just don't know. We just don't know what are, the important influences are, and what policies might reduce the risk of this happening in the future. Of course, nobody wants something like this to happen again. And attention will be paid to certain issues, but we have to just accept the fact that we're doing this without really knowing what the effect of these policies are in reducing the probability that this kind of thing will happen again.
E: It's good that we don't have enough data, if you think about it, right? I mean, if we had more data on this, a lot more people would be dead, so, I'm not disheartened by that.
S: Yeah, we just have to acknowledge that that's the case. Nobody has the answer. It's like these events are caused by this type of person in this situation or that trigger. We just don't, we can't make those statements.
B: Yeah, that level of competence is just not warranted.
R: It seems insufficient to me though, to say that, because there are tons of rare events that we can analyze and at least get some hypotheses about, like, do these more and more in certain, in one country more than other countries? You know, we can look at how the data matches up to, for instance, gun control laws, or mental health standards. Like, for instance, there have been studies that have looked at that. I was just reading about one, though, that showed that there didn't seem to be any connection between mental health standards and mass shootings like this. But there was a correlation with gun control laws. So I mean, that's by no means definitive. But it is a data point that we can add. So just because these things are rare doesn't mean we can't analyze them.
S: No, there is data, there absolutely is data looking at certain variables. But again, but not enough to really make the kind of statements we'd like to make about cause and effect. So then the data is kind of all over the place. For example, you bring up mental illness. There is a study which, a few studies actually, which looked at the, just the percentage of these kinds of major violent crimes that are perpetrated by people with mental illness and the figure is 15%. That's what they found. Fifteen percent of these kinds of crimes are committed by people with mental illness.
R: We should mention that at the time of this recording, there's no evidence one way or the other to say whether or not this person had a mental illness.
S: We know nothing about that, so, yeah, this is all generically speaking. However, if you look it at the other way, what's the risk of committing these crimes if you have any kind of mental illness and certain kinds, like paranoid schizophrenia or paranoid schizophrenia plus alcoholism, and the risk does go significantly higher. There are correlations there. Not necessarily, so now we're looking more at all violent crime, not these specific kinds of spree killings, so just to clarify further, Rebecca, thinking a lot of the statistics you're quoting have to do more with violent crimes.
R: Actually, yeah, you're probably right.
S: If you're looking at just these spree killings really are rare, like
R: Well, what counts as a spree killing, though, out of curiosity, because there have been, in the past week, there have been several in the news. I've read at least four happening. Not necessarily as quote unquote successful as this one. Like for instance, there was one in a hospital just a couple, two days ago, I think. Someone opened fire in a hospital. I guess it depends on what your definition is of spree killing.
E: I'm also curious as to how many of these otherwise sprees that were plotted out and going to take place were thwarted in some capacity. Either someone got a tip and they actually stopped the person before they were able to go through with it, or actually some people who have been on, started a spree have been, you know, taken down by other people who are carrying guns.
R: Yeah, that's what happened in the hospital. The person shot two people before a security guard, I think, shot the gunman.
S: Having armed security certainly seems like a good idea, but it's still, you know, have to be in the right place at the right time. Some other data points, you know, so you brought up gun control. That's, the data there is really tricky. So, for example, in Australia they passed an anti-assault rifle ban, and after
E: 1997.
S: Yeah, in the years after that, there actually was a fairly dramatic decrease in gun-related homicides, compared to the, the numbers were already decreasing but they, the decrease accelerated after the ban. But it's one, still one data point, one country, and don't necessarily know if we can extrapolate that to the U.S., but then again I found another study and it's actually a systematic review that looked at all the data, looking at the state firearm regulations, and essentially concluded that there is no correlation between any of the types of state restrictions on gun ownership and violent crimes. So the data that we have; but they also said that we don't really have the best data, but the data that exists it's hard, you can't make any statistically significant correlation. But then you could argue that, okay, within the United States there's not enough difference among the regulations to make a difference.
R: And you can easily travel from state to state, with a gun, things like that. And that could make a difference, too.
S: Right. There's also, yeah, there's the gun regulations, there's the culture, the quote unquote gun culture, the availability of illegal guns. There's lots of variables. It makes it difficult to say, if we pass this one law, it would have this effect. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't be considering such laws. I think there are some low-hanging fruit, you know, that should be considered, and these tend to come up every time there's a high-profile case like this. For example, the shooter in this case had a military-style assault rifle, a Bushmaster, which is a civilian version of the M16, and he had magazines with 30 rounds in them. So that raises the debate, do civilians, for target shooting, hunting or even personal security, need military-style assault rifles with large volume magazines?
E: Yeah. This is military equipment.
S: Yeah, exactly.
B: They're weapons of war, and that's definitely something that needs to be considered. We don't, even for home defense, even, well, except maybe for a zombie apocalypse, but all bets are off when that happens.
S: Of course, gun proponents argue that the assault rifle ban in the United States in the 1990s, and this studied specifically, had no effect on violent crime, these kind of killing sprees, or even gun-related deaths. But then the other side says, well, that's because there's already hundreds of millions of guns in the United States and guns are in operation for a very long time, so a ban now isn't going to have an effect. The guns are already out there.
B: Oooo. Really.
S: So the data is really messy, so of course, what that means is you could support any position you want, any political position, you could cherry pick or spin what information is out there to support your side and it doesn't mean that we should not act or that we should not consider, yeah, you know, maybe there should receptor sites for people who have mental illness. Are we really optimally providing services for people who are isolated and maybe struggling, in that very vulnerable age category, et cetera, et cetera. Do we really need to let private citizens own military grade assault rifles? These I think are questions worth addressing and I think they should be evidence-based as much as possible but we need to acknowledge that evidence is messy.
E: Agreed.
China Stabbing (24:22)
AVN To Change Name (27:56)
Megalapteryx Foot (30:44)
Invisibility Cloak (38:03)
Special Report - The Hobbit and High Frame Rate (48:19)
Who's That Noisy? (57:07)
- Last Week's Puzzle: There are three boxes. One is labeled "CARROTS" another is labeled "CELERY". The last one is labeled "CARROTS AND CELERY". You know that each is labeled incorrectly. You may ask me to pick one vegetable from one box which you choose. How can you label the boxes correctly?
Science or Fiction (1:00:35)
Item number one: New research indicates that Alzheimer's disease may be a prion disease similar to mad cow disease. Item number two: Scientists have created a new form of DNA based upon 8 nucleic acids, rather than 4, with potential applications in DNA computing. And item number three: A new study finds that the ovaries of adult women contain stem cells that are able to generate new oocytes right up to menopause.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:14:19)
There is not to be found, in all history, any miracle attested by a sufficient number of men, of such unquestioned good sense, education and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in themselves.
David Hume
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