Interesting piece on Mass Shooters - Pretty readable

[Aesop]

It might be instructive to look into the particulars of the Mumbai Massacre.

I thought they had basically set up shop to shoot it out as long as possible and keep killing peple despite the clowncar response of the local authorities.

If everyone gets used to facing down bullied adolescents, it's going to be a big shock when the pro-active active shooter response sees a couple of patrol cops run full bore into a group of whack jobs who understand small arms marksmanship and small unit tactics, including ambush kill zones.

If the North Hollywood robbers had possessed better marksmanship and/or helpfully not have popped drugs right before their last stand, the LAPD would have buried a busload of officers that day.


In any event, my takeaway on active shooters is that only headshots count, and that the contributions of sociology to the problem approach nil.

[Jered]

This also plays into survivor bias, (or in this case, revers survivorship bias) where we can only conduct forensics on the shootings which occur. That is, we cannot "see" those others who have similar traits where no shooting occured.
Here is a great article on survivor bias:
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2013/05/23/ ... ship-bias/

Wow. Thanks for that. What a really good read.

[Langenator]

The Author's mention of the reluctance to kill coincides pretty well with Grossman's similar thesis, and explains the large ammunition amounts, but the relatively modest fatality rates. It explains the presence of a blackpowder revolver at the recent Santa Monica shooting. Obsession with the device as opposed to its effectiveness. Columbine was done with handguns and pump action shotguns, not AKs or ARs which would be more effective.

Except the Columbine killers didn't really intend to be just shooters...they meant to do most of their killing with bombs in the lunchroom. The guns were mostly for herding people into the bomb kill zone, killing the odd one to ensure compliance. Lucky for everyone but Dillon and Klebold, their bombs didn't work.

[Windy Wilson]

But then we get to this, in reference to the Aurora theatre shooting:

taking advantage of the fact that groups are always emotionally stronger than individuals, if they can keep themselves together and put up an emotionally united front: they could probably have made him stop shooting.

Well, yeah, except for all those bullets flying into them, sure. And that trick worked so well for the Japanese charging a machinegun on Guadalcanal, or for Custer's men at the Little Bighorn. If only they'd been more emotionally united.

I think he's arguing for the Ghost dance cult that resulted in the Wounded Knee Massacre.
"If my medicine is strong bullets cannot hurt me."

Like I said, some technical errors

+1

The North Hollywood shootout started as a bank robbery and turned into something like the Northfield Minnesota raid by the Younger gang. The North Hollywood shooters placed too much faith in full auto.

The main flaw in this article is what Doc Russia called survivor/not survivor bias. It may be useful after the fact but has zero predictive power. It's like arguing for suspecting the husband after a wife turns up dead, vs using domestic violence as a predictor for who will wind up dead or accused of murder. There are a lot of factors here.

[Termite]

Except the Columbine killers didn't really intend to be just shooters...they meant to do most of their killing with bombs in the lunchroom. Lucky for everyone but Dillon and Klebold, their bombs didn't work.

Actually I believe their "bombs" indeed went off, but were rather poorly designed. IIRC, they used smokeless powder in PVC piping. That makes for a very poor "bomb".
Smokeless powder burns, it does not detonate. And unless it is confined so that the pressure curve increases repidly into the 1000s of psi, it doesn't burn particuliarly fast as compared to, say, blackpowder. A smokeless powder/PVC piping "bomb" will rupture before the pressure gets very high.

Had the two goblins used blackpowder inside sch 80 or heavier steel piping, the lethality of their bombs would have been far greater.

[Greg]

The main flaw in this article is what Doc Russia called survivor/not survivor bias. It may be useful after the fact but has zero predictive power. It's like arguing for suspecting the husband after a wife turns up dead, vs using domestic violence as a predictor for who will wind up dead or accused of murder. There are a lot of factors here.

No a good sign for this field as a science. In a field, it's only worth publishing something that is maybe explanatory but not predictive, when you're starting from zero and have absolutely no idea what's going on. If your explanation then turns out to have some after-the-fact correlation with other events of a similar type, maybe you might have something to work with- you might be able to go from completely clueless to "almost completely clueless but we think we've at least noticed some patterns." (The social 'sciences' only sometimes even get that far, and never much farther....)

[Langenator]

Except the Columbine killers didn't really intend to be just shooters...they meant to do most of their killing with bombs in the lunchroom. Lucky for everyone but Dillon and Klebold, their bombs didn't work.

Actually I believe their "bombs" indeed went off, but were rather poorly designed. IIRC, they used smokeless powder in PVC piping. That makes for a very poor "bomb".
Smokeless powder burns, it does not detonate. And unless it is confined so that the pressure curve increases repidly into the 1000s of psi, it doesn't burn particuliarly fast as compared to, say, blackpowder. A smokeless powder/PVC piping "bomb" will rupture before the pressure gets very high.

Had the two goblins used blackpowder inside sch 80 or heavier steel piping, the lethality of their bombs would have been far greater.

The cafeteria bombs were propane bombs, roughly 20 lbs each, IIRC, and didn't go off. They may have had other bombs that were pipe bombs.

Poor detonator construction was most likely the cause of failure.