Re: How to avoid shootings

Posted by Arlo Barnes on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/How-to-avoid-shootings-tp7581063p7581122.html

To add on to that, the original values-hating email was not a contradiction - Lee did not claim he did not have values, just that he hated them. In fact, perhaps someone would care less about values one way or the other if they did not have them.
From my perspective, because values seemingly cannot be avoided, it is fine to have them as long as they are set by an algorithm that makes sense in context. So "I hate puppies for no reason" is not a useful value (it contributes no information to a decision) but "I hate the fact that puppies ruin my new shoes, because I need those shoes to win a marathon with" is an analogue to an observation (expensive shoes and puppies are co-anathemae). Really, it is a superfluous system to simply methodically observing the world, because it becomes that system plus obfuscated terminology like right/wrong which are really true/false. (I consider morals the same as values, but values is a better word because it conjures up the sense of variables that can be set to a quantitative or qualitative amount).
So in the context of shootings one could try to analyze motive in this way: did the perpetrator commit the crime out of [misplaced or overblown] revenge (as it seems in the case of the deadliest school massacre [but not the deadliest school shooting <which goes to Virginia Tech> as it involved explosives instead] around the turn of the 20th century; a farmer blows up a school that would have received money from the foreclosure of his farm, despite the fact that he could have paid off the mortgage with the value of the materials he bought to plan the revenge), a disproportionate sense of self-defense, et cetera? Then we can try to see the error in judgement the perpetrator made that lead to them considering slaughter a necessary step in their goal to whatever. This seems to be a good way to go about it - but because it is analysis-intensive and slow, insensitive measures lie gun-control might be used as a stopgap measure.
Just assorted thoughts,
-Arlo James Barnes

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