Within any given population, you will always get some crazy people.....

psychopaths, sociopaths, spree killers, socialists and so forth

it is the down side of people freely mixing their genes together

What we would best do is use the energy of these people to wipe out enemies (or in the case of socialists, wipe out budget surpluses)

or

we could reintroduce hanging for heinous crimes and employ the crazies as hang men.

However, "what we would best do" does rarely happen (problem doing things through elected politicians)

So we are left with a splattering of crazy people - splattering uncrazy people.....

but dont worry it could be worse.....

If the politics of the day were to set up a government department which vetted people for the probability of producing crazy people we would probably find the outcomes worse than random chance

but at least, seeing the way government operates, we would then need to employ all the crazies we could get to work for the inspectorate of procreation, who validated who was to be allowed to have children and who was not.

It is useless and pretentious article. Sam Vaknin must be getting paid by the column inch, regardless of the quality.

While there is some good psycho-analysing in the article, it attempts too far to try to abstract the killers from the social circumstances surrounding their rampages. Blaming it on a "Culture of Narcissism" (which is a good book btw) fails to understand the motivations of killers. Not only that, it fails to account for the thousands of wars and murders in the past, (as the culture of narcissism is a recent phenomena). In reality, whether a culture of narcissism or a culture of community prevails, the human instinct to dominate an "other" will always be present. The only difference is the form of enemies taken.

Its interesting and unusual that the killer concocted a dissertation to make himself look thoughtful and cause-oriented instead of a whanker who harms others to get worldwide publicity.

The quality of the publicity package he prepared reveals what he was really after.

The world's media are a force multiplier for terrorists and mass murderers. To reduce crimes like this we have to convince the distorted minds who do them, that they dont really work. Activists and journalists however form partnerships thathelp them succeed.

Media guidelines to reduce suicide are effective; when they are flouted (Charmaine Dragun) they trigger many more deaths, and responsible editors act accordingly. Not so for mass shootings and terrorism.

After the 1997 gun laws 'there were no more mass shootings'; yet 'the Monash mass killer (7 victims, not all deaths) is used as though it were. Where did the killer get the idea?Lee Rhiannon and the Australian Broadcasting Commission from 1999 partnered in shrill attacks on legal handgun ownership. Big publicity for the Rhiannon's agenda showed a foreign student nutcase how to own guns, and in the same articles gave him the power to do another massacre. Plant the idea, offer a reward of millions of dollars publicity.

Journalists and activists - they are why terrorists are effective. And just today we found out that the violence and terrorism of the sixties and seventies was enabled by the Stasi, whose agent in the West German Police shot a student at a protest. Ultimately they triggered more terrorist attacks by the Baader-Meinhof, Brigate Rossi and others - who themselves in some cases linked via the Stasi to the same paymasters who set the line of the Communist Party of Australia.

Violent ideology exploits the payoffs in media and activism - whether money and career for the journalist or self-righteous glow for the activist. Time to disable the circuit by thoughtful changes to public discourse.