Why is it always young men? Is testosterone poisoning a problem?

[Mimosa]

91. Everybody's discussed it. Each time a mass killing happens.

Actually if you want to delve deeper, you might try to figure out what drives men to warfare which is 'authorised and approved' killing. That governments can send men (and now women) to war has been an organising principle of nation states.

Warfare is what men do and how they grab the stuff for the rest of their tribe.

Mass murders are not unique to the United States. One happened in China not so long ago. Here is a link to a particularly insightful article:

http://www.chinapost.com.tw/life/2009/04/08/203464/Loss-revenge.htm

Excerpt:

Mass murder is nothing new, and the invention of repeating guns only made it easier. But even experts who study the phenomenon have been stunned by the recent rash — seven in the past month, three in the past week alone. The string of shootings in the U.S. in the last month has claimed the lives of at least 53 people.

“Boy, this is a lot,” said Safarik, now a partner with Forensic Behavioral Services International.

Criminologist Jack Levin was not surprised to learn that the man who shot up a Binghamton, New York, immigrant center on Friday had recently been laid off from his job at a vacuum cleaner factory. What puzzled him at first was why Jiverly Wong chose his target.

“If it was only the job loss, why didn't he go back to the work site and kill his manager and his co-workers?” the Northeastern University professor asked himself. “Because that's what we're used to seeing when someone is set off by a termination at work. But he didn't do that.”

Then he learned that the 41-year-old Wong — an ethnic Chinese man raised in Vietnam — had taken English classes at the American Civic Association, and that he blamed his inability to find and keep work, in part, on his poor language skills. That's when the massacre began to make sense — or as much sense as any such tragedy can.

Wong's personal failures meant that he had “lost the respect in the eyes of others of the immigrant community,” said Levin, co-author of the book “Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass Murder.”