This is the fourth and last installment in this series. To tell the truth, I will be glad to be done with it because shooting rampages is an inherently depressing subject, in more ways than one. However, it is also an important one. Today I need to review the alternative explanations

Hello Peter, I’ve read the blog post and think it’s an interesting and well-presented idea. But before the evolutionary-ecologist/criminologist/historian in me could accept this as plausible, I’d want to account for three sets of causal forces. Here they are, in roug

Yesterday’s blog explained that the seemingly ‘senseless,’ ‘random’ nature of most shooting rampages is not senseless at all. Instead, the shooter is motivated by the logic of ‘social substitutability.’ In other words, random mass shootings are a variety of suicide terrorism. The aim

We now  know the identity of the killer in the Sandy Hook School Massacre but are still in the dark about why he did it. Police said that they had found “very good evidence” which would answer questions about the motives of the gunman, but they haven’t yet released this ev

This morning a horrible tragedy shook Newtown, a small town in Connecticut just 70 miles from where I live. An as yet unidentified gunman (there are conflicting reports of his identity) went on shooting rampage at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, killing nearly thirty people, most of