I mean, he was in a LOT of ways, but that general thing in concept was kinda true
Nazis and White Supremacists have been doing the same for years. Young radicals are discouraged from getting tattoos so they can join military or police and get trained up.
Someone should shut down the military until we find out what the hell is going on
"Say the line, Bart"
"The shooter was known to police..." :kitsuragi-depress:
This is why I've taken my training and joined the SRA to teach fellow comrades
When Creed wrote a song about this phenomenon back in the 90s and nothing has improved, you know it's a hell of a country.
About 7 percent of the adult population, were veterans of the U.S. Armed Forces in 2018. This means such people are statistically overrepresented among mass shooters by a factor of 5.
Or, put another way, mass shooters are 5x as likely to have been trained by the US military as the general population of adults.
"Trained" doesn't mean much of anything though.
The military doesn't train troops to walk down the street of their local neighborhood and shoot up a kindergarten.
Basic rifle marksmanship can be learned anywhere you can get a weapon, ammo, and place to burn off a few hundred rounds.
no one is saying the military is training it's soldiers to shoot up kids. the data is showing a strong, heavy correlation. if it had no correlation, the proportion of troops among mass shooters would be ~7%, like maybe anywhere between 4-10%. but it's more than 36%.
that makes the phenomenon worth investigating.
Then wouldn't a better stat to look at be the number of people who were in the US military long enough to get through at least basic training (BRM, first aid training, possibly small unit movement and tactics) and then compare that to the number that went on to do a mass shooting?
only "better" in the sense that it would be a number someone trying to avoid critiquing the psychological impact of basic training could point to and make dubious claims about to people who don't understand extremely basic statistical analysis.
so yeah, go for it. crunch those numbers out and post them in forums everywhere.
but don't be upset when someone else posts the portion of adults who didn't go through basic training and didn't do a mass shooting either, putting the phenomenon you are refusing to acknowledge on display all over again.
Okay, but, if we're worried about psychological impact of military training in "causing" mass shootings wouldn't a good stat to look at next be what I suggested? So we've got the original stat that gets the 36% of mass shootings had some kind of military training already.
Wouldn't trying to figure out the percentage of ALL people with military training that did a mass shooting of civilians in the USA be a way to check correlation/causation?
Otherwise, wouldn't it just be self selection bias?
Okay, but, if we’re worried about psychological impact of military training in “causing” mass shootings wouldn’t a good stat to look at next be what I suggested? Wouldn’t trying to figure out the percentage of ALL people with military training that did a mass shooting of civilians in the USA be a way to check correlation/causation?
no. that's just a different, and more labor intensive way to look at the correlation and ultimately yield nothing different than the results here when compared to the population at large. all you're trying to do is make what is clearly a large number appear small by reframing the population and sample size. however, that reduction is going to be meaningless when compared to the population at large. like i've said explicitly about 3 times now.
if you have a problem with the study results, you have options, but ignoring existing data isn't reasonable or scientific. you can critique the experimental design or you can find a confounding variable.
basic training may not be causative. the study didn't say it was. maybe there is something about military service that attracts mass shooters. this would still be a policy and cultural failure. either option is going to require you, the person not liking the study, to do the work of learning processes of very basic statistical analysis of populations and then conducting follow up research, developing a different hypothesis, and then doing analysis to confirm or disprove your hypothesis.
or not. you could also go to a pro-military circle jerk site and complain about this study and i'm sure "win" lots of support. just like pro-cop people hate hearing about the study showing 40% of cops admit to perpetrating in domestic violence and want to talk about NotAllCops and ask where the data is about how many great cops there are out there.
maybe there is something about military service that attracts mass shooters.
Yeah. That.
So like, if the number of mass shooters that had military training is about the same percentage as mass shooters (military trained or not) compared to the general US population wouldn't that give us something useful to think about? Like, maybe the sentence I quoted from your comment is more of a reason than having "training by the military?"
Thinking about what you said earlier about "basic training trauma", that makes me think it would be really useful to see what proportion of people with military training did/didn't go out an do a mass shooting.
Thinking about it some more, what percentage of military trained mass shooters also had associations with things like white supremacy, neo-nazi stuff, incel stuff, other reactionary stuff? I wonder if there's a correlation there that supports your idea that military service attracts mass shooters.
At least 100% of the US military are mass killers or accessories to mass killing
