Yesterday, in response to commenter Cassander, I wrote:
I suspect that in the mass killings we are seeing some of the results of social dislocation that the dismantling of our national culture has wrought. The response of the "elite" shows that they regard their Americans not so much as fellow citizens but simply as subjects to be ruled.
There's a lot included in that phrase "national culture", and in it I certainly include the religious civilization of the West--and not least the understanding of Meaning In History. If you're interested, you can plunge back into the blog archives. OTOH, if you want a much quicker read and want to focus on the specific issue of the phenomenon of "mass" or "rampage" shootings, you would do well to read Christopher Chantrill at American Thinker today: Mass Shootings: Is This Ghost Shirt Time?
Chantrill starts out with the question: Who is to blame? But it's quickly apparent that he sees this question as detracting from what's really necessary: Coming to an understanding of what's behind it all. And he has a simple one sentence starting point:
When the young men in a culture feel hopeless they expend themselves in a suicide cult.
And from there he moves on to historical examples. His examples are of societies in existential crisis. Societies that, in my terms, have lost their understanding of "meaning in history". Once lost, meaning that is based in love of reality and the source of its being is very difficult to recover. With that in mind, consider Chantrill's examples (he provides detail from Wikipedia for some of his examples) as well as his comments.
