Twelve people shot dead in northwest of England

[Libby]

https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/10214661.stm

A gunman has shot dead 12 people and injured 20+ others in Cumbria, northwest England.

We rarely have shootings that are not gang-related. This is just heartbreaking.

[Earthnut]

Yes Libby, it's very heartbreaking. We all must keep the victims and families in our hearts and prayers.

[ethsnafu]

I am absolutely stunned by this. Maybe I have to accept that times are changing but this is such an unusual thing to happen in the UK, in the Lake District no less.

As as is always the case when something horrible happens those who knew the killer have come out to describe him as a quiet man and a mild mannered man and it really brings me back to the paranoid assertions of Millennium S1 with its narrative that evil could lie behind any door and in the heart of any man. Bad people do not always have horns.

My heart goes out to all those affected by this tragedy. A sad day.

Eth

[Libby]

Times are changing in terms of the increased number of gang-related murders and domestic violence related murders, but these kinds of events are still very rare here. Although a lot of people are saying that it's "good" that he killed himself as that will save the costs of a trial and imprisonment (either in prison or a mental hospital), it doesn't help in any kind of explanation as to why he flipped, so the families of those who died and the surviving victims are denied that. As you say, Eth, so often people who commit these kinds of crime are described as quiet, mild-mannered, but is that really what they were like or was there some seething anger held under control for years until the build up of pressure gave way, like a volcano. There are rumours that he had been reported to the Inland Revenue and that he started off by targetting someone or some people who he thought were responsible for that. Those are just rumours, but these are small towns where people do tend to know each others business so maybe there's a grain of truth in that. However, it does seem that whatever sparked off his anger, simple retaliation wasn't enough for him.

Without the extant mind, there is nothing left other than the remains of the brain, and I doubt that the autopsy can reveal anything.

On another forum where I hang out, there are people who are booked to go on holiday in that area, some this weekend, and there's talk about whether to still go. It's difficult because people know that that area relies on tourism a lot, but at the same time some people are finding it difficult to think of going there now for pleasure and relaxation, and some are feeling they should stay away to let those communities have some time to grieve.

We're a small island so it's difficult to distance ourselves emotionally from something that's happened just a couple or so hours drive away or even less.

[The Old Man]

Hasn't this been truly awful. Its very difficult to fathom this sort of thing.

The poor people of Cumbria have really had their fill of bad news in the last 8 months or so, with the flooding, that awful fatal school coach crash a few weeks ago, and now this.

[ethsnafu]

I was talking about this tragic saga with a friend earlier today and I wonder if this man was a 'volcano' or whether he was a 'switch' - it's the latter that I find the most intriguing. A clinical psychologist chum once described this in much more appropriate terms than I am about to but I hope people will understand the gist of what I am reiterating.

Some individuals have impulses that slowly simmer beneath the surface for years before erupting like spewing magma but when the catastrophe happens there is usually an identifiable history of 'something being wrong' when attention is turned to the individual's online habits, diary entries, relationship history and so on.

Usually people can piece to together the point at which things began to simmer and the level of intensity of that simmer at various points in the person's life. To all intents and purposes they appear like the man next door to their associates but the inner picture is very different and these individuals usually have some degree of insight that something is wrong.

My friend described a rather more curious phenomena of some individuals for whom the crisis point appears like a switch has been flipped. Often they are blissfully unaware that they have been stockpiling psychological problems for years, they lack insight into themselves and their emerging nature, they suppress and deny parts of their personality without any conscious thought employed.

Whilst they are still simmering they are simmering in an invisible way. They do not know anything is wrong with them, they haven't found at outlet to channel emotions they don't even know exist.

I'm sure that's a terribly poor paraphrase of what my friend explained to me but his description was worrying in the sense that not all eruptions take place after years of minor tremors. For some they occur without any warning at all.

I know of two individuals who have had catastrophic breakdowns of their mental health. In both cases this happened in an instant. One was boarding a plane for a family holiday and the other was mid-shit at work. Neither individual was aware that anything was unduly wrong with them prior to the breakdown beyond the simple stresses and strains of modern life. Both individuals likened the experience to a heart attack, a sudden, catastrophic collapse signaled by intense pain (this evidently being emotional pain that manifested as a palpable physical experience during the existence).

It's shocking to think that out there there are time-bombs of the human kind who may not even know they are ticking.

Eth

[Guest SpooktalkGiGi]

I heard about this on the news, such a terrible tragedy. How sad. This is an all too common happening here in the US. We have gang realted shootings, school shootings, mall shootings, office shootings.. and it just goes on and on... it is always a tragedy and still shocks me how this can happen.. some people are a ticking time bomb like you say Eth, a lot of your serial killers look like the guy next door, look at Ted Bundy, he was very charming and handsome, who would have thought he was a monster. Take the BTK killer, he worked in the church, a boy scout leader and had a family of his own and all the while he was binding and torturing these people and killing them. You just never know anymore.

The mind is able to block so many things out until a point to where it just cant handle it anymore and you have a breakdown, sometimes something triggers it and it can be something so insignificant that you wouldn't think it would. We know so little about the brain too, who knows what all we can be dealing with.

Laura :)