NEWTOWN, Conn. — The gunman forced his way into the school and unleashed a rain of bullets from a semiautomatic rifle, striking each of his 6- and 7-year-old victims more than once, in an attack that lasted just a few minutes.
The six adults also killed Friday morning in the Sandy Hook Elementary School were also each shot multiple times in a massacre of innocents that has deeply shocked a nation sadly familiar with mass shootings.
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I'm wondering what part, if any, games like "single Person Shooter" may have had in all of this. Did the killer play such games?
No, but the mother was a big gun fan who loved to take her children target shooting.
There is something decidedly lacking on the Globe coverage of this event. I do not expect this paper to out - do the NYT or the Hartford Courrant but what I saw in today's edition was warmed over and second rate. I somehow expected more.
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The police say they don't know the motive. Let me offer a suggestion. The motive for these deranged losers is publicity, fame, notoriety, whatever you want to call it and it's the same for all mass murderers. Look at the non-stop news coverage on all media.
Future mass murderers, and we all know they're out there, are looking at the coverage of Newtown and thinking to themselves, "Wow! I could be world famous, too, if I could only kill more than Adam."
What we need is a total news blackout after the initial report, which should be primarily statistical. No names. No pictures. Nothing. the motivation for the president's visit to Newtown admirable and genuine, but it's exactly the wrong thing to do.
While I agree that there's some copycat elements in these incidents, simplistic prognosticating on the why's is probably a waste of time for laymen. Humans are extremely complex animals and we understand very little about the workings of the brain. All mass murders having a publicity obsession is very unlikely, especially since most don't survive to enjoy it. No all mass murderers kill themselves, though.
It would be just as easy to speculate that some of these people want to end their lives and seek revenge by taking a lot of other people with them. Some kill people they know. Some kill strangers. And, as I mentioned, so don't kill themselves.
I have an avocation of reading about criminal behavior and there's no concensus on what causes thrill killers, serial killers or mass murders to do what they do. Their personalities vary widely.
In a free and open society, news blackouts are highly undesireable, regardless of the probably ineffective motivation. They would also be constitutionally unenforcable.