Has the world gone mad?

March 2, 2008 3:51 PM

At least once a week, I read about a mall shooting or something similar. Today's story is about a 16 year old girl who murdered her parents and siblings. What gives?

All of a sudden, these insane news stories have become weekly occurrences. My question: has the incidence of these things truly skyrocketed (as it seems), or have they just been getting more attention? And if the incidence has gone way up, can anyone offer credible evidence for why? Is this a uniquely American problem?

posted by fogster to society & culture (44 answers total)

These things have always been happening. You just have more access to information.
posted by dobbs at 3:53 PM on March 2, 2008 [5 favorites]

Over the years of conversations about this----the most popular comment I see over and over again is that its NOT happening more often, but its just getting reported more widely, so it SEEMS like its happening more often.

I suppose there is some truth to that (especially in this modern age of overkill reporting and "lets keep everyone afraid by reporting the worst news possible" trend)

Personally.. .I think the rise of school shootings is due in large part to 2 main factors:

1.) Poor parenting:
The trend towards kinder, gentler parenting (no discipline), a poor educational system and to much TV (negative influences of shallow pop culture )

2.) over-prescribed anti-depressants
We are a lazy pill-addicted culture looking for any "fast fix", instead of actually doing the REAL hard work of looking inward and changing our lifestyles for the better healthier option.

But thats just my opinion.
posted by jmnugent at 3:57 PM on March 2, 2008

While generally agreeing with dobbs I think you have to factor in that the very fact of one incident makes the idea available to minds which might not otherwise considered it.

I'm not saying "watch TV news -> go out and shoot someone" but I do think when any event occurs it allows people to consider that course of action as a possible course they might themselves take.
posted by southof40 at 4:02 PM on March 2, 2008 [2 favorites]

Too many guns.

Too many oblivious family members.

Far quicker and more widespread reporting of these sad incidents these days.
posted by imjustsaying at 4:02 PM on March 2, 2008

dobbs is absolutely right. jmnugent is absolutely, amazingly, offensively wrong.

(Bath school disaster, 1927)
posted by drjimmy11 at 4:03 PM on March 2, 2008 [2 favorites]

"lets keep everyone afraid by reporting the worst news possible" trend.

It's not a trend and nobody is trying to frighten you: it has always been that way.
Nobody is interested in "nothing bad happened" news.
posted by bru at 4:09 PM on March 2, 2008

drjimmy11:
"jmnugent is absolutely, amazingly, offensively wrong."

I'm not saying these events didnt happen in the past. What I'm saying is that (I believe) the increase in violence in modern culture has SOME roots in societal breakdown (poor parenting and over-prescription of pills).

Seems like an overly-strong statement to say that 1 event in 1927 means I am "amazingly and offensively wrong".

I have an open mind.. and one of my favorite things is to be proven wrong (because that means I'm learning new viewpoints). So if you have cite any studies or data points over the past 100 years or so on school shootings.. I'd happily read them. (seriously, I would )
posted by jmnugent at 4:13 PM on March 2, 2008

It depends on how you define "these things". You're drawing a line between school shootings and a domestic thing, when they really have no connection at all. It's almost like confirmation bias, except that you are subtly enlarging the class of items in order to include more, rather than just seeing more.
posted by smackfu at 4:14 PM on March 2, 2008

What I'm saying is that (I believe) the increase in violence in modern culture has SOME roots in societal breakdown

What makes you think that there is more violence now than in the past? That's dead wrong. If you insist that there is more violence now, could you provide some cites?
posted by Justinian at 4:14 PM on March 2, 2008

"If it bleeds, it leads" predated electronic media and satellite technology. Remember Lizzie Borden?
posted by BitterOldPunk at 4:16 PM on March 2, 2008 [1 favorite]

I spent a summer researching crime reporting in nineteenth-century London papers. It's amazing what people could do, and did do with alarming frequency, with knives, blunt instruments, and their bare hands.
posted by bibliowench at 4:18 PM on March 2, 2008

Since I suspect you won't do that, actually, here is some actual evidence:

US Department of Justice Serious Crime Levels

Violent crime has fallen by more than half in the last 15 years. So jmnugent is, in fact, absolutely, amazingly, offensively wrong.
posted by Justinian at 4:19 PM on March 2, 2008

Justinian:
"What makes you think that there is more violence now than in the past? That's dead wrong. If you insist that there is more violence now, could you provide some cites?"

I'm looking (thanks for keeping me honest and forcing me to research).

Although I think data points (on both sides of this argument) are going to be hard to come by. Going back decade by decade, cross referential-statistics are going to be harder and harder to come by (meaning, you might find data about shootings, or drug use, or societal influence, but tying them all together is going to be near impossible the further you go back in time).

Obviously a very touchy topic.
posted by jmnugent at 4:19 PM on March 2, 2008

This is a side effect of the "global village". News reporting of the overt facts of cases like this is so efficient now that those of us who are web-news-junkies hear about essentially every such case that happens anywhere in our village -- only our village is more than 300 million people.

With that many people in our village, it's inevitable that it's going to happen a fair number of times per year.

The perception that it has somehow become more common is mostly a result of misleading vividness to get your attention, followed by confirmation bias, further compounded by "if it bleeds, it leads" selection bias by the news media themselves.

In the book "How to Lie with Statistics", the author mentions an example of a crime wave in New York City at the end of the 19th Century. Suddenly there were huge numbers of reports in the newspapers of murders, muggings, and other kinds of violent crimes. The voters started to get restive.

It turns out that the rate of those crimes hadn't changed, but the rate of high profile reporting had. A couple of reporters had gotten into a competition to see who could turn up and report the largest number of them. The police commissioner, Teddy Roosevelt, ended the "crime wave" by asking the editors of those newspapers to knock it off.
posted by Class Goat at 4:27 PM on March 2, 2008 [3 favorites]

Justinian:
"US Department of Justice Serious Crime Levels (data points : 1973 to 2005)"

With all due respect, I dont see how citing data from 1973 to now tells us anything we dont already know. (Television and drugs were well embedded into modern american culture by the 1970's.)

In order to actually get data we could really rely on.. wouldnt we need to know accurate violence reports from prior to atleast the widespread use of TV and modern drugs ?

I'm not trying to be argumentative.. I genuinely want to know.
posted by jmnugent at 4:28 PM on March 2, 2008

I have to disagree with jmnugent. It is not poor parenting, it is totally smothering parenting. Kids are not allowed to play competitive games, fight, play army, or cowboys and indians. It is not too much TV it is too much time in front of the TV. Kids don't socialize and don't learn their place in the pecking order. kids are not allowed to figure out their emotions at an early age, and they have no other outlet than to pull out a gun and settle the score.
posted by Gungho at 4:30 PM on March 2, 2008

With all due respect, I dont see how citing data from 1973 to now tells us anything we dont already know.

I think I misunderstood. You believe that violence is greater now than it was a long time ago? Like last century? Or what?

I'm not trying to be argumentative either. When, precisely, are you saying violence was significantly less than it is now and for how long do you think it stayed that way? Because my understanding is that violence was absolutely ubiquitous - at levels we would find astonishing - up until the beginning of this century. There was a dip in the middle of the century, a rise to a peak in the late 80's and very early 90's, and now a trough down to half that level.

There may be a period of 30 years or whatever in the middle of this century when violence was less than it is now, but looking at 30 years over a span of millenia is, shall we say, cherry picking.
posted by Justinian at 4:34 PM on March 2, 2008

All of a sudden, these insane news stories have become weekly occurrences. My question: has the incidence of these things truly skyrocketed (as it seems), or have they just been getting more attention?

In case I haven't been explicit enough, obviously I think it is clear that the incidence of these things hasn't skyrocketed, that they are rare occurences, and that they are simply getting far more attention now; if it bleeds, it leads.
posted by Justinian at 4:35 PM on March 2, 2008

jmnugent: 2.) over-prescribed anti-depressants

I think your comment proves that the inability of so many to understand mental illness is a big part of the problem.
posted by dhammond at 4:47 PM on March 2, 2008 [2 favorites]

jmnugent, I would like to propose to you that the topic would be a heckuva lot less touchier if you hadn't equated kind parenting with bad parenting and suggested that people who are on pills for psychological disorders are lazy. Dare I point out to you that the vague golden age past society you're hearkening back to with these ideas had much higher rates of unreported child and spousal abuse, undiagnosed/untreated depression and pretty horrendous treatment of those who were diagnosed as mentally unfit and carted away? Good lord, man.
posted by bettafish at 4:48 PM on March 2, 2008

Justinian:
"When, precisely, are you saying violence was significantly less than it is now and for how long do you think it stayed that way?"

Looking back through my comments, I dont see anywhere where I stated anything llike this. In fact, I even said the opposite in my very first comment:

"but its just getting reported more widely, so it SEEMS like its happening more often. I suppose there is some truth to that ..."

I dont believe that poor parenting and medicated culture have led to "skyrocketing violence". But to say that those things have NO correlative effect on violent urges/behaviors is just silly. Normal healthy human beings dont just decide randomly one day to go shoot up schools. Something causes them to do it - I dont have any hard reliable evidence to support my theory that its poor parenting and medication, but those things surely dont help.
posted by jmnugent at 4:52 PM on March 2, 2008

I'm generally of the opinion that dobbs' explanation is the right one here, but I'm not sure whether the data backs me up. Because I couldn't find old stats for the US, I looked for England, and came up with this (warning: pdf) particularly page 14 which indicates a decreasing trend in homicides per capita over the 1st half of the 20th century, but a much larger increasing trend over the 2nd half. They stipulate that this refers only to reported crime, which is not necessarily equivalent to actual crime.
posted by agentofselection at 4:58 PM on March 2, 2008

If anything, psychotropic medications prevent school shootings, because when used properly they STOP antisocial behaviors like, er, shooting your classmates in the head. Given that there are a couple of antidepressants that can cause suicidality when not used under close supervision (it sounds backwards, but the idea is that you are feeling too depressed to actually go through with killing yourself, and then the meds make you feel better - but only better enough to go through with it), I would not be surprised if there are some psychotropics which can cause some bizarre antisocial side effects, but nothing like that has ever been linked to a school shooting or major homicide case that I know of. When I have heard of psychotropics being linked to murders or suicides in the news, it's usually in the context of someone having gone off their meds in an uncontrolled, medically unsupervised fashion. Blaming said murders or suicides on the medication is like saying we shouldn't have heart surgery ever because some people die on the operating table.

Point being, jmnugent's theory about medication ---> violence contravenes everything about how these medications actually work. I won't even touch the parenting thing.
posted by bettafish at 5:06 PM on March 2, 2008 [1 favorite]

Bettafish:

"if you hadn't equated kind parenting with bad parenting"

I can see how that could have been misconstrued. My apologies to good parents everywhere.

"suggested that people who are on pills for psychological disorders are lazy."

I didnt mean to imply that the people TAKING the medication were lazy or stupid. I was calling attention to the trend of parents to simply want to medicate their kids problems away, instead of actually working/communicate with their kids in healthy ways to rectify or change things in thier kids lives to help them.

I have no illusions of "hearkening back to a better time" (see my reply to Justinian). I completely agree that previous decades (back to 1900's and before) were probably as violent (or in some cases more violent). All I'm trying to point out is that there are modern factors (not present in previous decades) that we have to consider as possible influences towards violence. To leave these factors out and say 100% that they "arent at all related" is as "amazingly offensive" as my comments were judged to be.

Thank you all for the great discussion though.. this is the reason I come to Metafilter. I'd rather be "schooled" by a variety of thoughtful intelligent passionate people than waste my time on other websites. Huzzah.
posted by jmnugent at 5:07 PM on March 2, 2008

I agree with dobbs. And jmnugent, here's a clue: what's "absolutely, amazingly, offensively wrong" is not your theory that violence has increased; that's wrong, but you get no demerits for believing it. What's absolutely, amazingly, offensively wrong is your equation of poor parenting with "kinder, gentler parenting." I won't suggest that your idea of good parenting is a good whipping to keep 'em in line, but I will point out that if you're going to hand out crap like that, you've got to expect some negative feedback.
posted by languagehat at 5:12 PM on March 2, 2008

On non-preview:

My apologies to good parents everywhere.

OK, that was graceful. Snark withdrawn.
posted by languagehat at 5:13 PM on March 2, 2008

I came in here only to see how a "What gives with the world?" askme managed to get a best answer.

But on reading, I have to agree Dobbs nailed with answer #1.
posted by rokusan at 5:14 PM on March 2, 2008

I agree with southof40 that the idea of the mass shooting is somehow in the air at this moment in history. It's a meme. In previous eras there were different memes, for instance poisoning seems to have been a Victorian-era crime which you rarely hear about now.

Gladwell makes a point about teen suicide in "The Tipping Point" that simply having the information out there in people's consciousness -- the fact that someone killed themselves, the method they used, etc., -- seems to make it more likely to happen to someone else.

Logically the same thing might be true of murder.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 5:16 PM on March 2, 2008

[PLEASE do not turn this hot button topic into a "what *I* think the problem is...." derail. Take that to metatalk or email from this point forward, thank you.]
posted by jessamyn at 5:17 PM on March 2, 2008

To give a clue, here are some of the more colorful headlines from the local paper 130 years ago on one day only:

Alleged Embezzlement
Saloon Robbed
Shocking Fratricide At A Livery Stable
Startling Reports of Indian Outrages
A Dead Man Run Over By A Railroad Train - Foul Play Feared

Each day's paper in that week/month/year gives something similar so if you think there was something magically wholesome about the past that is missing today, you might want to think twice.
posted by JJ86 at 5:40 PM on March 2, 2008

Okay, jmnugent, you win some points back on that last comment. I can stop being all cranky now.
posted by bettafish at 5:44 PM on March 2, 2008

Murder rates were much higher in medieval times; here's a graph showing the trends in Germany 1300-present; here is a news report on other studies that notes "the homicide rate in medieval England was on average 10 times that of 20th century England. A study of the university town of Oxford in the 1340's showed an extraordinarily high annual rate of about 110 per 100,000 people. Studies of London in the first half of the 14th century determined a homicide rate of 36 to 52 per 100,000 people per year. By contrast, the 1993 homicide rate in New York City was 25.9 per 100,000. The 1992 national homicide rate for the United States was 9.3 per 100,000."
A rise has been seen again in the US since the 1960s.
posted by Abiezer at 5:46 PM on March 2, 2008

(I believe) the increase in violence in modern culture has SOME roots in societal breakdown (poor parenting and over-prescription of pills).

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. The Civilizing Process is a good place to start thinking about this. There's a school of thought that says that the extraordinarily high homicide and mortality figures in pre- and early modern cities selected us for biosocial passiveness and altruistic behaviours compared to earlier cultures. But that's an extraordinary claim. In any case, I feel that because the "acceptable" level of overt, physical violence within Western societies has decreased, the background noise of occasional spectacular events becomes more prominent, and more thoroughly mediated and reproduced. I've seen some work on social fear in suburban environments, where levels of reported anxiety are inversely correlated within a broad range with actual street crime in those areas when controlled against areas with similar demographics and classes. There's a vague sigmoid curve.
posted by meehawl at 6:08 PM on March 2, 2008 [1 favorite]

My apologies to good parents everywhere.

And I apologize for my testy reply. (I regretted it as soon as I posted it, and asked the mods to delete it. Thank you, mods.)
posted by The corpse in the library at 6:09 PM on March 2, 2008

While this thread was somewhat derailed with the "parenting today..." and it is true violent crime in general has decreased - reading the paper this morning I did independently note that there seems to be a real spurt recently of "murder my whole family" crimes. I suggest a terrifying virus.
posted by mkim at 6:29 PM on March 2, 2008 [1 favorite]

Here is a fantastic video of Steven Pinker talking about violence throughout history.

Do we live in more violent times? This video – and the evidence he cites – have made me quite optimistic about our future.

Spoiler: His thesis is that "our ancestors were far more violent than we are, that violence has been in decline for long stretches of time and that today we are probably living in the most peaceable time in our species' existence."
posted by Rictic at 6:30 PM on March 2, 2008 [3 favorites]

I feel like I'm reading about parents killing small children and infants daily, and had the same reaction as you. I think perhaps sites like CNN notice that more people click on the infant being killed or horrific story link and so just serve up more stories like that.

I'm not sure if there's an epidemic or anything, but, I don't know. It's pretty weird to me.
posted by onepapertiger at 6:56 PM on March 2, 2008

Try reading "Wisconsin Death Trip" by Michael Lesy - it's chock full of stabbings, arson, raving lunatics & all sorts of goings on. These stories are taken from newspaper clippings in 19th century small town Wisconsin.

I do think that an argument can be made for psychopaths who pick up on the criminal zeitgeist of the times and feel compelled to direct their anti-social energies towards the barbarity-du-jour. A trendier transgression............
posted by readery at 7:08 PM on March 2, 2008

I agree with AmbroseChapel in that certain "theme" news stories tend to pop up over a period of time, and suddenly we have a new epidemic of tragedy. Then, just as quickly, we rarely hear of that particular problem and there's a new flavor of the month. For example, for a time during the 1980s, every other news story was about these double-bottom tankers overturning somewhere in the metro Detroit area and causing an inferno. The trucks were eventually outlawed, but it didn't happen overnight, yet the news stories seemingly disappeared just as quickly as they'd started.
posted by Oriole Adams at 7:23 PM on March 2, 2008

For another news epidemic - Avian Flu. Remember how there was this complete media frenzy making it sound like it was going to spread to the Western world from Asia and ZOMGWE'REALLGONNADIE, and then ... suddenly, the articles stopped? Funny, that.
posted by bettafish at 8:23 PM on March 2, 2008

According to this rates have gone up, almost 10% in the past 10 or so years.

ATLANTA - Murder rates are on the rise in a handful of U.S. states, according to a federal study that bolsters indications the nation as a whole may be experiencing its first significant jump in violent deaths since the early 1990s.

The finding, published on Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was based on data from the first six states to take part in the federal agency's national violent-death reporting system.

The overall murder rate in these states- Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, South Carolina and Virginia- jumped 6 percent between 2000 and 2002 and another 4 percent between 2002 and 2003, to 5.49 per 100,000 people, the CDC said.

The rising murder rates were fueled by a jump in homicides among males under the age of 25, mimicking the trend of the 1980s and early 1990s, when U.S. murder rates also increased.

The suicide rate was stable in the six states between 2000 and 2002, but it rose 5 percent between 2002 and 2003, to 9.37 per 100,000. The increase was largely due to rises in self-inflicted deaths among women of all ages.

Also, domestic murder now is much more likely to focus on the woman

According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, 1,055 women and 287 men were murdered by their intimate partners in 2005. These figures are striking, because in the past, in the 1970s and earlier, the numbers of men and women so victimized were about even. In other words, there has been a significant decline in the numbers of men killed by their partners but not for women.

So yes its not all the "liberal media." Its also worth noting that we've had cable and internet at this level for a decade, so if yorue seeing an increase of something then its not just media penetration. It may be confirmation bias and it may be changes in what passes for journalism, but media hasnt suddenly exploded in size in the last 18 months as many mefites seem to suggest.

Now if you ignore murder and just focus on crime, we are actually seeing less crime since 1993. But thats because there was a major crime down in 96 and its been rising by a little in 05. I dont see any 06 or 07 data.

I did find a little 07 data and the FBI says that murder is up 5% in 07 in urban areas.

Now the problem with the crimes you mention is that they are crimes of passion by mentally ill people. So we're able to lock up regular crimimals with a history of violence but we cant indentify the guy whos going to kill his family. Usually its their first crime too.
posted by damn dirty ape at 9:29 PM on March 2, 2008

Rent a few episodes of Rome and get back to me on whether or not you think we're worse off these days.
posted by allkindsoftime at 12:01 AM on March 3, 2008

I think onepapertiger is really the closest here (although you've already marked "best" a couple of good ones). CNN and ABC are a couple of the worst offenders. They both will put a lurid story from an affiliate on the front page, at least for part of the day. So you don't just hear about the family annihilator (that's the term of art) in your town, you also hear about the one in Podunk, OK, that has suddenly had the opportunity, in this blessed age of information, to be "national news" for 15 minutes or so.

This is combined with a huge tilt toward TMZ-style right this minute celebrity news. Britney goes to the gas station! Paris in fashion faux-pas: Vote! And so forth.

The influence of YouTube is also apparent, as almost all supposed "news" sites now have tendencies to present you with the latest dumb video meme. Skateboarder wipes out! Kid kicks over sand castle!

CNN actually reduced the links to news stories on its front page last year -- formerly, each topic (Science, Politics) got three stories. Now, just two. All the action is on the sidebar, and it's heavily slanted toward video and stories that will generate viral properties. News judgement of the static, 20th-century sort has all but gone out the window.

It's all very depressing to watch -- Amusing Ourselves to Death was never more true. It's certain they do this because they want their websites to remain "sticky" and capture browsing time that people would otherwise apply to, well, TMZ and YouTube (and Digg and Reddit). The links out to affiliates are probably part of their contract, that they are obligated to do a certain number of times a month or year. It's a way of satisfying their needs, but gives you a very distorted view of the world.
posted by dhartung at 12:39 AM on March 3, 2008

Rent a few episodes of Rome and get back to me on whether or not you think we're worse off these days.

HBO's Rome is not primary source material.

The show is influenced by our current mindset, and is reflection of what the writers think will get viewers.
posted by dubold at 6:47 AM on March 3, 2008