17 January 2011

Rollin, rollin, rollin'...keep that blogroll rollin'...

Kronology earns a seat on my Blogroll Bus with the very first post.

Does anything in terms of type really separate Jared Lee Loughner from Mark David Chapman, killer of John Lennon? Both were approximately the same age when they went off the rails, both had a history of suicidal thoughts, both experimented with drugs, both had trouble holding jobs, both had difficulty with the opposite sex. In a word, the shooters are “misfits”–they can’t connect successfully to society through conventional social norms and like grown children express their frustration with personal failure through a final, violent attempt to make the world take notice of their alienation.

To my knowledge, no one ever expressed the idea that Chapman was motivated by politics. Or musical criticism, for that matter. Neither did a political motivation ever draw consideration in the cases of Charles Whitman, Seung-Hui Cho, or even John HinckleyJr. With Loughner, however, the press opted to ignore Occam’s razor and assign blame for the Arizona shooting on heated political rhetoric…and Sarah Palin.
Great stuff, and I'm looking forward to more!

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