State Of The Union

My friend recommended looking into and analyzing the news as a source of topic for this blog, and I have to admit that I was a bit opposed. In my personal opinion, terror would not be a business without publication. But in the spirit of terror I would look at analyzing mass shootings which seem random and have occurred more than daily this year. A mass shooting according to news sources are categorized by having four or more casualties excluding the gunman and only account for two percent of gun deaths annually. The leading three are suicide, murder and gun accidents in that order. When I started to reflect on this it seemed that without an underlying cause or pattern for these attacks, it would only follow logically that they weren’t attacks in a military sense and maybe that two percent actually fell under suicide. Suicide by cop as the movies call it. Which is probably an obvious observation in retrospect seeing as a lot of the earlier mass shooters ended up committing suicide when they weren’t confronted by force anyways. Through the eyes of the media they would seem as though the work of famed serial killers or terrorists among us though, and I fear have been investigated as such. Now while suicide by cop at the expense of others is just a theory and a rough one at that, I think the solution is a simple one if by some miracle I am correct. While I have no place in my heart for the people who have taken innocent lives with them to the grave, the solution to decreasing these events is to recognize signs in behavior that would lead up to such an event and to get a would be shooter help before such incident took place. If my theory is correct, a lot of the same signs you’d see in a suicide victim would correlate with a mass shooters mentality, which simplifies and complicates things at the same time. While suicide victims often isolate themselves, depression is often expressed very differently person to person, so identifying may be a little complicated. The good news is anyone can identify someone who is suffering, and if you are brave enough a little kindness may be the answer. But this is just a theory, and you should always use caution when dealing with people who you suspect are unbalanced. But I believe professionals in, and promotion of mental health could be a solution.