Why do school shootings happen?

onelongsong wrote:

this is what's wrong with society today. some people do deserve it. i wish those who think someone doesn't deserve it would be the ones supporting these people. i heard somewhere that it costs $80,000 to support charles manson alone. if people don't deserve to be punished for their crimes; then we need to get rid of the laws. you collect a paycheck because you deserve your compensation you exchanged for your time. i was born dirt poor yet i worked and made something of myself. i deserve my life of lesiure. i worked for it so no; the poor don't deserve a slice of my pie. if they can't find work it's because they don't want to. and if a man kills another man without good reason; he deserves to die too.

Ahnimus wrote:

The death penalty may have been a detterant to commiting murder in Texas, but he still would have commited murder, regardless if every state had the death penalty. Dahmer wanted to be caught, he knew it was a compulsion, so being caught commiting a crime where the penalty was minimal makes sense, it doesn't mean in any way, that it would have stopped him from commiting murder.

Yea, that's right, it's all illegals. Non-Americans are vile, evil, inhuman creatures, especially those nasty mexicans right?

Put some thought into it dude.

Ahnimus wrote:

I'm really starting to dislike this word "deserve".

I apologize if your intention was humor, but this line of reasoning is far too common.

I would accept that "he deserved it" is a valid argument, if the parameters and rationale behind "deserving" something was ever made clear and concise without valid opposition to it.

It appears that what one "deserves" is a matter of values. A common logical fallacy, known as the naturalistic fallacy, suggests that what is natural is moral, and by this the merits of indivudals is determined. For example:

Owners of financially successful companies are more successful than poor people in the competition for wealth, power and social status. Therefore, these owners are morally better than poor people, and the poor deserve to be poor.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/f/fallacy.htm

Many people should disagree with this. It does not follow from the way things are or 'Is', the way things should or 'Ought' to be, as David Hume expressed in An Enquiry of Human Understanding. In-fact, if one is naturally constrained by the laws of reality in their ability to succeed in modern socially constructed economics and law, then it more likely follows that they do not "deserve" to be poor, since as natural law states, success is beyond their grasp.

Anyway, this is an example, where what a person "deserves" must be derived from some other principles which should be contestable, and in every case, opposition will rear it's head. So it's not sufficient to simply say one is deserving without grounding it in reason.

Ahnimus wrote:

Well, the first question is: What are the causal conditionals for a behavior?

I think it's pretty well undeniable that a behavior, or an action is the result of motor functions. Since no actions can be taken without the contraction of muscles. Muscles are operated by motor neurons which receive instructions from the spinal cord, which sends and receives information from the brain via the Brain stem, which consists of the Pons, Medulla, Thalamus and Hippocampus, which leads into the Hypothalamus, Third Ventricle, Optic Nerve, and the Neo Cortex, which consists of two hemispheres, seperated by left and right and connected by the Corpus Collasum. The two hemispheres of the cortex can be divided into four lobes, Temporal, Occipital, Pareital and Frontal. What causes this brain? Evolution.

We needn't go any further, because for our purposes, we've already identified the brain as the source of actions within the human. We can get into external causes when explaining why certain behaviors are performed.

Each of the regions I mentioned perform specific functions in the brain. This is demonstrated through clinical case studies of patients with brain damage. For example, a well known case. A man, most would call "Decent", a loving father, husband and respected co-worker, begins to obsess over pornography, child pornography and wherever he goes, finds himself womanizing and sexually harassing women. He was charged and was due to be sentenced when he walked into the emergency room of a hospital, he complained about his situation, but the doctors initially ignored it, thinking he was trying to get out of going to jail. But during his short stay in the hospital he sexually assaulted a number of nurses and the doctors decided to scan his brain with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they found a tumor in his frontal lobe. The frontal lobe is an inhibitor for the old brain. The old brain, as it is called, is the portion of brain that we share with most mammalian species, the frontal lobe is really what sets us apart, it gives us the ability to inhibit "animal" drives. It's the reason humans don't behave like chimpanzees. So, in this man, the tumor had messed up his frontal lobe and he wasn't able to control his primative drives, once the tumor was removed he was returned to normal.

This link between brain and behavior is pretty much accepted universally, except among philosophically perverse individuals. It is currently a very productive line of research. But, to actually imagine what it's like to have a frontal lobe tumor, or temporal lobe epilepsy or synesthesia, I don't think it's possible, since all of our sense impressions, thoughts, feelings and perspectives is a result of the organization of neurons and the weights of our 100 trillion synapses.