I should begin with the disclaimer that this is not an attempt to explain the underlying cause for the killer instinct. The frenzy of mass killings at home and abroad just deserve a discussion.
To begin at the home front, we can easily profile the perpetrators of mass shootings in the U.S., they are mostly young Caucasian men, with frustrations of sorts and mental illnesses which surface before and after the crime.
This profile serves to exculpate personal responsibility and falls back on the excuse of mental illness and potential racial profiling for a heinous act. Due to our discomfort with the fact that people can kill, the mental health system is suddenly on trial for failure to prevent murder. Its important to mention that there are a proportion of crimes that are committed due to mental disease or defect, but to exonerate all killers based on their mental profile is a crime in itself.
In this day and age when senseless crimes are rampant, it's fashionable to appease our sensitivities by maligning the mentally ill by categorizing them as potential killers. However, this excuse is not translated to a solution. In the name of self-preservation against a fictitious militia open access to weapons remains a ubiquitous right.
On these same lines, I also came across a show on young killers and I wondered if there were any shared traits that could explain the path these young people took. The show invited a panel of experts who commented on their underdeveloped brains, their emotional irrationality and the gang mentality rampant in children and teens to explicate their murderous tendencies. It was fascinating to see that there could be so many excuses for murder. It makes you wonder why all of us don't commit at least one murder in our lives from the sheer consequence of our human anatomy. This analysis belies the possibility that our complacency with violence and resignation to base human instincts maybe the real issue at play. In reality, reasoning out murder only adds validation to an atrocity. It is important to reform attitudes to include personal responsibility as a factor in order to reduce the entitled approach to murder that we see these days.
Moving on to a global scale, we have entire nations and political factions that commit aggression at an alarming scale with similar depravity and with more bravado. The destruction they wreak has caused political, economic and social upheaval but there is a certain propensity to implicate the victims as deserving of their fate or possibly label them as unfortunate statistics in order to mitigate the situation. Frightening as it may seem, yet mass murder makes it easy to dehumanize. The killers also cling to false religious and patriotic claims while the mass media also propagate their agenda by endorsing their delusions and leading to a cycle of violence and hatred. This media endorsement is merely another avenue to generate more excuses for killing.
This unnamed illness that kills without discrimination has become too ingrained on a national level and the lack of responsibility is becoming the crutch of global society. Until a resolution is achieved there has to be means to preserve life without arms and still stay true to the second amendment of self-preservation by actually preserving lives. True allegiance to freedom means safety and protection for everyone by controlling access and implementing broader prevention.
I would conclude on the note that as many a religion and even more people wait for an apocalypse, I can only wonder if there would be anyone left for Mother Nature to kill.