Bag's Rants

Narrowing the field

Well it seems the results are out for the Virginia Tech Shooting. The police response didn't go down too well because they were so slow. Read here. No biggie. They are not there to protect people anyway. It has long been recognised that there is no right to protection so this will not make one bit of difference. Excuses will be forthcoming people will be publicly disciplined and then promoted. The sheep will continue to believe a sign offers protection against lunatics. Life goes on. Well for some anyway.

Then there is the statement that the perpetrator fits the profile of campus killers. Read here.

Well duh!, He went berserk and killed people on campus. So far all campus killers have done that. So well done that team of investigators. I suppose we should be lucky that they only spent six months on it.

Of course the analysis goes deeper that that but the profile generated still succeeds in pulling in a large proportion of the population. Too much for them to be really practical. By the time they have identified all the precursors there must be very few people in the population who don't actually fit some of them. Most people can have the precursors all their lives and never kill anyone. As it is usually a trigger that causes them to go over the edge, how can they factor that in? How can anyone predict the loss of a girlfriend, wife, child or job?

So it's all well and good analysing these people after the event. It has to be done just in case it could lead to a improved process, and who knows, it could lead to a way of predicting who actually will go off on a rampage. However at the moment it does not seem to be doing too well. Personally I think it will never be accurate enough in my lifetime to make a process that balances out those that have hit a few bad spots and those that get tipped over the edge. Our lot of course would be happy with just sticking the innocents in jail. For the better good you know. However, there is precedents, when the west was free, we were once, the USSR was not. They had a society where people were imprisoned because they fit profiles. They still had their share of serial killers and nutters. Do you think our lot of useless politicians will learn from that?

Finally,is it me or have these random killings increased over the last few decades? I'm sure this sort of thing didn't happen as often prior to the 80's or do I simply have rose coloured glasses on looking back at when we were free?

posted by Bag @ 4:10 pm