No More Monkey Business - I Promise!

Thanks to Old Dog for tracking down that bogus monkey theory. I never said that I believed it, you know, just that I remembered reading something about it a long time ago. And now, back to our story:

The more I think about it, I don't think that riot psychology is applicable to those mass shooters. Riots are crowd affairs, and those shooters are mostly loners. Then again, they usually target crowds, but that's probably just because they want to maximize the body count. Rioters are under the spell of mass hysteria, if you can disperse the crowd, the spell is broken and the riot is over. The shooters are under the spell of something, but I don't think it's hysteria, because that is usually a temporary condition. These guys plan their operations in great detail and they seem to know exactly what they're doing. They frequently kill themselves at the end, so that must be part of their plan from the beginning. Too bad they don't kill themselves at the beginning and save everybody a lot of trouble.

I always considered range target shooting as practice for hunting, but there are people who like to shoot who don't even hunt. I can understand that, it's a skill like a lot of other things, and there is satisfaction to be derived from mastering a skill. I might do more of it myself if I had the time. Shortly after we moved here, I built my own private rifle range alongside the garage. It's only 50 yards, but that's the distance at which I see most of my deer. I really should practice more than I do.....maybe this year.

I have heard that people can become addicted to running and other forms of exercise, so I suppose it's possible to become addicted to shooting, but I don't know if a shooting addiction could lead to a desire to kill people. It seems that it would be easier and safer to just keep shooting targets. Even hunting doesn't provide as much opportunity to shoot as range shooting, and it seems like shooting people wouldn't be an improvement in that respect. Then, with your own death or incarceration as a likely consequence, your shooting days would be over. What fun would that be?

As far as I know, the Unicorn Hunters to which I referred are not into kinky sex. Well, they are college students, so you never know, but that's not the point. They get together once a year to ban words and phrases from the English language for "misuse, overuse, and downright uselessness". People submit nominations, and these guys decide which ones make the final cut. Our local newspaper usually prints the top ten or so, but I think the whole list is longer than that. I usually have never heard of about half of that top ten list, so I find it hard to believe that these terms are in general circulation. Like I said, these guys are associated with some university, I think it's Lake Superior State, which is in the Upper Peninsula, so maybe they speak a dialect all their own.