Tag Archives | Violence

The Likely Effect Of Obama’s Move To Put Armed Officers In Schools

By on January 23, 2013 in News 15

The tragedy of American mass shootings inspires terrible choices. Regarding the president’s move to encourage the further policification of schools, Unprison writes:

The 18th Executive Order signed by President Obama is to provide incentives (and funding) for schools to have police oversee the children. This will create results.

School police, known as “Resource Officers” (perhaps for easier digestion) have been key builders of the School to Prison Pipeline. The fistfights and the joint in the bathroom do not result in detention or suspension anymore: now they are imprisonment, expulsion, and an often insurmountable mountain to climb towards any “normal” adult lifestyle.

A 2011 report by Justice Police Institute [suggests] that the overall damage to a community is not justified by the vague possibility that the school is safer. In fact, there are indications that the police actually lead to increased violence in schools.

Children have been the fastest growing segment in the industry of prisoners.

… Read the rest

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Police Mortality: The Movie

By on January 18, 2013 in News 0

From art group Anti-Banality, the first segment of their new feature-length film Police Mortality. It was created by splicing together countless blockbuster action and cop movies, and tells the story lying underneath — a cop’s sudden existential crisis leads to the nation’s police turning on each other:

Police Mortality is Anti-Banality’s latest wish-fulfillment symptomology of, as one character hallucinates it, “a precisely formulated national conspiracy of police genocide.” It is a paranoid-schizophrenic blitz against police subjectivity, skimmed off nearly 200 movies by that other social superego–Hollywood.

In this opening scene, the immaculate suicide of one LAPD officer begins to reveal the contradictions of police existence to a force which, finding itself multiply irreconcilable with itself, resorts to terminal civil war, eradicating the prevailing organization of life in the process.

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A Glimpse Inside The Aurora Killer James Holmes ‘Holmies’ Fandom Community

By on January 8, 2013 in News 17

The pretrial hearing began yesterday for James Holmes, the perpetrator of the movie theater mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado this past year. Buzzfeed has a look at the dark world of so-called “Holmies,” tweens who have celebrity crushes on Holmes centered around his Manic Panic hair, supposed love of Slurpees, and disaffection from society. Presenting the evolution of sociopath and serial killer obsession in the age of Tumblr:

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Connecticut Town To Hold Mass Burning Of Violent Video Games, Films, And Music

By on January 4, 2013 in News 22

Connecticut makes progress in the war on fictional violence. The Guardian reports:

A Connecticut community is to hold an amnesty of violent video games in the wake of last month’s mass shooting in Newtown. Organizers Southington SOS plan to offer gift certificates in exchange for donated games, which will be burned. The group, a coalition of local organisations, argues that violent games and films desensitize children to “acts of violence”.

The video game amnesty will take place on 12 January in Southington, a 30-minute drive east from Newtown. The town of Southington has provided a dumpster, organisers said, where violent video games, CDs or DVDs will be collected.

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Body Pleasures and the Origins of Violence

By on January 1, 2013 in News 0

A classic article, deserving a place in the Disinfo archives. James W. Prescott outlines the link between modern child-rearing practices and their impact on development, psychological well-being and adult behavior. He covers deprivation of loving touch, sexual repression, infant neglect, and the results to the adult psyche. Joseph Chilton Pearce started this conversation and Prescott fleshes it out. The discussion of these issues is still ongoing.

Via The Origins of Peace and Violence website:

The sensory environment in which an individual grows up has a major influence upon the development and functional organization of the brain. Sensory stimulation is a nutrient that the brain must have to develop and function normally. How the brain functions determines how a person behaves. At birth a human brain is extremely immature and new brain cells develop up to the age of two years. The complexity of brain cell development continues up to about 16 years of age.

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Are Shooting Spree Killers Following A Cultural Script?

By on December 31, 2012 in News 7

Via the Public Library of Science, Daniel Lende on the need to understand horrific mass shooting as a cultural practice with underlying meaning, rather than as anomalous, randomized insanity:

Paul Mullen, the esteemed Australian forensic psychologist, invokes cultural scripts as central to understanding why young men like James Holmes, Anders Breivik, and Jared Loughnerdo what they do. It is not because they are insane, some idea that seized them from the inside. Rather, they act out something – and the young men who do so are not random members of society, but have definable characteristics.

Mullen compares these mass killings to the Malaysian amok, a recognized “culture-bound syndrome” often defined as a “spree of killing and destruction (as in the expression “run amok”) followed by amnesia or fatigue.” (For more references, [search] Google Scholar for “amok Malaysia”.

Mullen also counters the common explanation in the United States and elsewhere that these killers must somehow be insane or mad.

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Adam Lanza’s DNA To Be Studied In Search Of ‘Killer’ Genes

By on December 29, 2012 in News 75

If certain mutations or abnormalities are blamed for Lanza’s actions, what will we do with other individuals who possess them? The Christian Post reports on a possible preview of witch hunting in the 21st century:

An “Adam Lanza DNA study” has been given the go ahead to see if there is anything inside his genetic makeup that could have given any indication of the horrific acts he was capable of ahead of time.  The study, which is believed to be the first of its kind, is expected to delve into Lanza’s DNA in the hope of finding any kind of genetic abnormalities or mutations in his DNA.

The study has been commissioned by Connecticut Medical Examiner, H. Wayne Carver, who has reached out to geneticists at the University of Connecticut to carry out the study. It is expected that the geneticists will analyze his entire genome in huge detail to try and find any mutations.

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Pennsylvania Man Arrested For Plot To Murder Three Psychics

By on December 27, 2012 in News 3

The Scranton Times-Tribune unravels a celebrity psychic assassination plot:

Craven Vaughn sat beside the hitman in a car parked Thursday outside Wal-Mart on Route 29 in Eaton Twp. He gave the man $3,000 and the names of three psychic mediums he wanted “eliminated.”

The 32-year-old Towanda man did not want to talk about why the three mediums had to die. While Mr. Vaughn spoke about James Van Praagh, an author, television producer and self-proclaimed medium; Maureen Hancock, another TV medium with a series on the Style Channel; and David M. Baker, another professional medium who has written books, police investigators listened to the conversation, which a hidden microphone recorded.

And just moments after Mr. Vaughn got out of the car, the undercover state trooper he had just hired to kill three people on the West Coast radioed the arrest team.

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Senate Bill Proposed To Study And Possibly Crack Down On Video Game Violence

By on December 25, 2012 in News 23

Congressional Republicans poised to censor video games to ensure that a massacre at a school never happens again. In all honesty I thought kids just played Angry Birds nowadays. IGN reports:

A proposed bill could lead to a study of the role of violence in video games. In the wake of the recent shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, West Virginia senator Jay Rockefeller has proposed a bill to study “the impact of violent content, including video games and video programming, on children.”

In a statement posted to his site, Rockefeller wrote “I have long expressed concern about the impact of the violent content our kids see and interact with every day. As Chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, I have introduced legislation to direct the National Academy of Sciences to investigate the impact of violent video games and other content on children’s well-being.”

Under the bill, the National Academy of Sciences “would be directed to conduct a comprehensive study and investigation of the connection between violent video games and violent video programming and harmful effects on children.” Rockefeller also noted plans to call upon the FCC and FTC to “expand their work in this area.”

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Sandy Hook Shooter Adam Lanza’s Mother Was A Paranoid Survivalist

By on December 21, 2012 in News 59

Via the Independent, when preparation for civilization’s breakdown becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy:

The mother of Adam Lanza, the gunman who killed 20 children and six adults in one of America’s worst ever school massacres, was a “survivalist” preparing for economic and social collapse, it has emerged.

Nancy Lanza was a so-called ‘prepper’, part of the survivalist movement which urges individuals to prepare for the breakdown of society by training with weapons and hoarding food and other supplies. Mrs Lanza is thought to have trained her sons to shoot, taking them to local ranges.

Friends and family have portrayed Mrs. Lanza as a paranoid [individual] who believed the world was on the brink of violent collapse. “She prepared for the worst,” her sister-in-law Marsha Lanza told the Chicago Sun-Times, saying Nancy repeatedly talked about her preparations for the economic and social meltdown.

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