It’s those lazy millennials. They just don’t have the patience or dedication.
Who has the money or the leave to travel around, book hotels, go on lots of dates and buy power tools,
Most serial killers had their own vehicle and house, and were able to keep those despite most killers not being able to hold down a job once they started the murders.
Try doing that today. You can’t methodically kill people if you’re freezing to death on the streets.
These greedy corporations are just saving us from serial killers by making it impossible to become one without financial ruin.
Plot twist. The serial killers still have all that time, but they realized the could kill way more people by becoming billionaires and exploiting them to death.
Or massive amounts of lead poisoning
Nah. It’s an industrialized, mass-produced economy now. Before the 90s, killing people was a bespoke trade. Mass murder was a one-on-one kind of transaction, each murder personally crafted for the victim by a specialist. The really industrial scale deaths at the time were the stuff of nation-states.
The transition of mass murders to the private sector as heralded by Atlanta, Waco, Columbine and Oklahoma City coincided¹ with the Clinton admin and the advent of NAFTA, which promoted mass industrialization of heretofore domestic industries².
Ever since, it’s been death dealt on an ever expanding scale on an j cident-by-incident basis. A sort of Moore’s Law of death and disillusionment.
I hate myself for even penning this diatribe, but the situation is so bleak it feels like no depth of dark humor will reallybshock anyone anymore.
–
- Correlation does not imply causation
- This is such a badly formed argument even for satire, I’m embarrassed
I thought it amusing! Keep on keepin’ on OP.
Millennials owning their murder house in this economy?
Millennials will try anything once, one kill and that’s enough. They don’t stick with things
No one wants to ritualistically murder anymore
Be the change you want to see in the world. Go out and kill your entire neighborhood, it’s the patriotic thing to do.
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Lead poisoning is still the prevalent theory, I think. It fucks up brain development in ways that make kids tend to sociopathic personalities.
I’m always glad to hear more people know about lead poisoning. It makes a lot of sense.
I’m curious, you got anything light reading you can recommend to ease into the topic, please pm me. I’d appreciate, if it wasn’t another post which basically recites the content of another post, and so on - far too much out there these days)
No. It’s not possible to find light reading about lead.
Badum Tss
It’s called The Lead-Crime Hypothesis, and you can find vetted info on it, here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis?wprov=sfti1).
Here’s a recent meta-analysis: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046222000667
Society has not yet realized how important it is to clean up this issue. But we’re getting there.
Society has not yet realized how important it is to clean up this issue.
If you’re talking about removing lead from our society, it seems the progress made over the past 40 years has been incredibly dramatic
If you have 15 minutes this Veritasium is well done and explains the history that led to the problem.
Here are a few. Most people think it’s just in the water or lead paint. This first link is about the air.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/07/violent-crime-lead-poisoning-british-export
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-20961241
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6068756/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/08/lead-poisoning-crisis-us-children
If you’ve got Disney+ Cosmos has an entire episode about the history of the discovery of how bad leaded gasoline was
What is the excuse for mass shootings then?
Availability of weapons mixed with infrastructure development that atomizes communities to the point that the only places some people can find any social activity is nihilistic message boards full of psychopaths that actively encourage terroristic attacks on society but in the oblique way that dodges accountability for it when someone actually goes and does it.
- Easy access to guns
- The rise of easy access fascist media
- The dissolution of public institutions
It’s simply too easy to grab a gun by anyone. Military grade equipment is available to pretty much anyone with a credit card. Then you combine that with a CONSTANT beating drum from people like Alex Jones talking about how much they want crush, destroy, kill their enemies and how corrupt everything is. Then also talking about how people need to rise up and do “something”. While also in the same breath telling people to go off their meds and how any sort of treatment for mental disorders is actually poison. Then pair that with the fact that there’s pretty much no public infrastructure around public health (thanks Reagan). That means if you are having some sort of mental break down, depression, whatever, if you can’t afford the $100s/$1000s of dollars to get regular psychiatric treatment you are basically just going to be untreated. There is also pretty much no safe place to recoup for someone in distress but not at risk of suicide. But even if there were, even if you could afford it, fascists and preachers know that mentally healthy people are harder to grift so they spend all their time demonizing the very help you’d need.
However, not everyone that does this is mentally unwell. Some are just hateful fascists that believe killing gets their hate filled messages into the world. It’s why it is irresponsible for any media outlet to publish the name or manifestos of these assholes. Having notorious killers encourages more notorious killers.
As to that first point, you know we had AR-15s in the 70s, right? (No one gave a shit. They weren’t “cool” until the Assault Weapons Ban. Yeah, that didn’t work out so well…)
You know guns were far easier to get back then? LOL, I got an old Mossberg 500 (think classic 12-gauge pump) that was branded Revelation. They sold those at Western Auto stores.
It was no thing to see a dude with a loaded gun rack in his pickup. Point being, access is not the thing that changed.
And the rest of your post? On. The. Money.
As to that first point, you know we had AR-15s in the 70s, right?
The other 2 factors are important along with the internet. There may have been less legal barriers to getting an AR-15, that does not mean accomplishing such a task was easy to do. It’s not like there were AR-15 ads on TV or in newspapers (well, there may have been, but that would have been highly regional). It’s not like every city had an “AR-15” guy in the yellow pages. Legal access hasn’t changed, but general access has (particularly to assault rifles).
Regardless, my advocacy is first just starting with laws I think most everyone can agree with, red flag laws. Take away or don’t allow the purchase of guns by a domestic abusers or someone with a history of violence. Heck, you could even put a time limit on that stuff like “within the last 7 years”.
A ton of these cases are fairly young men (<20). So it would be enough to say “hey, if you are under 25 and your school teachers say ‘Do not let this kid in particular have a gun’” then you don’t get a gun until you turn 25. Or even an outright ban on ownership for people less than 25 (though that’d be much less popular).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/971544/number-k-12-school-shootings-us-age-shooter/
Current gun laws are pretty restricted compared to things that used to be allowed. The big one is mail order guns, you could just send a money order and get pretty much any semi-auto gun you wanted delivered to your house with no background check at all.
Full auto gums required a tax stamp since the 30s, and weren’t banned until 86.
Great explanation. All things we can solve, but choose not too.
Weapons availability and the mental health crisis. In countries without easy access to guns, mass killings are conducted with knives or cars (runovers). And in countries with socialized healthcare that includes mental health, mass killings don’t happen, at all, or very rarely if ever. Socioeconomic inequality is usually the third element, like in the fire triad, mix the three and you get mass shootings.
Shit life syndrome. The difference is they turn their misery outwards instead of committing suicide.
too many scared assholes who love their guns more than anything else… highly sensitive momma’s boys in love with their guns, always ready to lose their shit…
No… Actually they switched to killing homeless and drug addicts and the police don’t actually investigate them.
… and Indigenous and Black women, who just run away for no reason so aren’t really missing.
But they were existing, menacingly! 😨
I do research and writing for a crime docuseries, and the amount of times sex workers go missing and cops/news don’t care until there’s multiple bodies or a more well known disappearance occurs, is DISGUSTING.
The Poughkeepsie Killer was killing sex workers in broad daylight and was keeping their corpses in his hoarder house attic. The families of Wendy Meyers and Gina Barone went to the press and were told that the cases “weren’t the kind the public cared about”.
Police had the suspect but didn’t pursue the case until 5 women went missing. Why do their lives matter less just because they do a different kind of physical labor for work? Each was someone’s daughter.
This is the truth.
Cops don’t do anything about it around here because they see it as some kind of Dexter situation, it “reduces their workload,” and whatnot.
Way back in my homeless/drug addict days I was chilling with this bigger time cartel dealer guy. Everyone knew that he was definitely a serial killer but his target was always heroin addict girls and I am neither of those. We’re driving around and cops just swarm us. After some questions, they ended up giving him back his gun (he’s a felon) and telling him that their agreement was that he is not to ever leave the more ghetto area of town. They then openly gang stalked us until we went back to that area.
I’m fairly certain that police commonly know exactly who the serial killers are in their area and I think they often times have agreements with them.
Canadian cops from Vancouver ignored Robert Pickton’s serial killing for over 20 years 'cause he targeted prostitutes from the DTES (downtown east side). He fed their bodies to his pigs and finally confessed to 49, convicted of 6 murders.
Toronto cops ignored outcries from the LGBTQI+ community for almost 7 years because Bruce McArthur’s victims were almost all immigrants. The landscaper was finally convicted of 8 murders, hiding the body pieces in large planters on his client’s properties.
lot of comments in here talking about how they’re just doing their kills some other way: cops, mass shootings, not getting caught (this one is the most braindead). But everyone is ignoring how we’ve largely eliminated regular lead exposure that used to be the norm. that shit makes you go fucking insane.
I don’t like the way policing has turned many first world countries into semi-police states … being a person of colour (like me) automatically makes you questionable with the law no matter what you’re doing. I know from experience.
But after saying all that, mass murderers and killers are probably lesser now because of better policing, mass surveillance, intercommunications, mass data collection, profiling, forensic science and monitoring. It’s a lot harder now than in was in the 60s, 70s or 80s for a random stranger to wander from place to place committing murders and not getting caught. It doesn’t mean it’s not possible … it’s just that in our day in age of technology, it’s a lot harder.
Clair Cameron Patterson should be on the dollar bill.
In the book Freakonomics they made the argument that the sudden decline in crime in the late 90’s appeared to be tied to Roe v. Wade. I wonder if this is similar.
I thought you were being sarcastic but there is a book called Freakonomics and it does suggest as you said. Check the “Criticism” section for details.
It’s the same quality of scholarship as a Malcolm Gladwell book - namely, none. On the one hand it’s a shame these kinds of books are bestsellers, but I guess it’s good that people are reading books at all. Most of the people I know stopped reading in their mid-20s except for poorly written “news” articles online that can be completed in a couple minutes or less.
Weird most people I know read fiction for fun.
Maybe most written content is written in jest and we just missed the memo? One can dream.
A large percentage of serial killers suffered from childhood abuse and trauma. Kids in the foster system are often abused and traumatized. I can see it.
Seems to have been debunked: https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/03/21/why-freakonomics-failed-to-transform-economics
Later researchers found a coding error and pointed out that Mr Levitt had used the total number of arrests, which depends on the size of a population, and not the arrest rate, which does not. Others pointed out that the fall in homicide started among women. No-fault divorce, rather than legalised abortion, may have played a bigger role.
Western society was unclear of whether or not making them executives was a good idea to begin with.
I think the lead poisoning theory is a bit overblown, personally. There’s something to it, but “all the serial killers were just brain damaged” is I think trying to put a very neat little bow around a complex package.
I think a lot of it is simply that it’s harder to get away with murder now. I mean not to make it sound too easy but in 1982 there were a lot of ways to kill someone that basically could not be tracked back to you as long as you weren’t literally seen doing it. People aren’t stupid, they know this, and they change their patterns around it.
Additionally, I’m sure that (potentially as a result of this) we have more spree/mass killings now, and a decent deal of spree killings have a component of sexual frustration to them as many serial killers had.
I’ve heard this theory as well and it makes a lot of sense. Forensics has improved to the point where evidence is always left behind. If someone is caught after their 2nd murder they don’t spend the next decade escalating, amassing bodies in their crawlspaces.
I figure it’s mostly the electronics angle. Your phone, if you have it with you it’s really obvious if you travel to the area crimes happen. Heck, even not using your phone or other connected electronics can indicate something. Your car seen on surveillance cameras which are everywhere, from private home’s doorbells to commercial cameras to municipal roadway cameras. Your internet search history of maybe the victim or the location. Automatic toll payments. You’d have to live an almost completely disconnected life and take serious measures to avoid detection, and even then it’s not a sure thing.
Yep. The Moscow Murders seem to be a good example of this. College student seemingly took a lot of precaution to stab 4 people to death in their rental home, left almost nothing behind, turned his cell phone off during the crime - but he’s still dinged because earlier records show him basically scoping out the house in days prior based off his cell phone location.
I should say it’s not yet stated in a court of law whether this student actually did the killings, and courts do get those decisions wrong - but even still it’s a good example of how technology can track you essentially all the time
Agreed. There was a would-be serial killer that popped up in Stockton a year or two ago. Dude would just pop up and shoot someone from out of the shadows. He made it to victim number four before a camera caught him and the cops caught up to him. In 1980, this dude would have been a national fucking terror, but he barely made the local news in 2023.
That’s a pretty solid take.
Now they just do mass shootings.
parallel killers
That was specifically covered in he article.
There’s almost zero overlap in motivations between mass/spree killers, and serial killers.
I tend to agree but I don’t know if we can say that for sure.
Incels who want media attention is one way you could frame both types of killers.
I’m not sure that you can safely label serial killers as incels per se. BTK was married, IIRC. Ted Bundy def. dated. John Gacy was a pedophile (more accurately a hebephile, but close enough).
Many of them were misogynistic for sure, although that’s not necessarily a motive when you have serial killers that are gay or pedophiles (Gacy, Wayne Williams–believed to have been the Atlanta Child Murderer–and Dahmer). Incels seem to be much more likely to be spree or mass murderers; the idea of an incel where all women collectively share the blame seems to be a fairly new idea. And a lot of mass murderers aren’t related to sex a all, like the people that have been trying to start racial holy wars by murdering non-white people.
Most crime has declined dramatically since the 90s. And yet right wing media is scaring the shit out of people, saying there are murderers, rapists, and terrorists behind every bush.
The world is actually becoming more empathetic and safer, but some people want us to be scared because fear keeps them in power. Don’t believe them.
It’s not just right wing media, all media does this because it drives profits.
Fuck Fox News though, they are terrible for a multitude of reasons.
Yes, that’s true, but right wing media is doing it on an exponentially larger scale than others, which is why I called them out.
I upvote while I gare angrily at NYC.
Well it is trending up again
Reduction in lead exposure plays a huge part.
The lead generation is currently running the country (that I live in). It shows.
Is there actually any scientific consensus on this, or just conjecture.
Here’s a starting point if you care https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead–crime_hypothesis
Everyone keeps saying that. I didn’t know.
Could it be that not as many potential serial killers are being born? I believe there is a link between criminality and childhood abuse. Less unwanted kids are being born. Less abuse. Less criminals of all kinds, including serial killers.
I think also it’s because it’s just people are so easily tracked now.
CSI type pop culture television has taught basically everyone on the planet that trace evidence always gets left behind and nobody can hide from DNA. Nowadays through genealogy they don’t even need a direct DNA match.
The Long Island serial killer case that broke recently is a good example, they got evidence out of pizza crust he left in a garbage can outside his office. Evil piece of shit he is.
I also hate people that don’t finish the crust.
Dude is going to turbo hell for that.
This is the answer. The logistics of staying off camera and getting around without leaving a digital signature is much more complicated. In the 70s you could buy a bus pass with cash and disappear for a few days and nobody would know and you’d never be on any list of suspects. Now you need to set up fake cell phone activity and get an alibi on camera and put on disguises in a dive bar bathroom and shit. Very difficult to get “lost” for more than a few hours if you are working alone and operating anywhere near civilization.
They have joined the military or private military companies since. they can kill as much as they like with complete impunity, in many wars like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine, Palestine and Gaza, plus it’s brown people they are killing so they feel triple the reword, society is fine with that as long as it who they view as the enemy who’s the subject of their carnal instincts.
You can’t convince me that the image of the horrors committed by the IDF in Gaza and the US military aren’t of psychopaths having a blast paid for by their own societies.
I mean. War and soldiers of fortune existed in the 80s so I don’t think that’s exactly why.
Yeah back in the day they could always fight for fucking Rhodesia if they just wanted to kill brown people in war
Be a man among men.
War on drugs shifted police focus from real crimes, to you guessed it, drugs. I bet some serial killers go under the radar due to shitty police work.
“Nah those murders aren’t related, let’s go do a no knock raid on shitty evidence. Maybe plant some drugs? That always cheers ya up Captain!” - Cops, probably
Sounds to me like there’s a serial serial killer killer on the loose!!
I always thought his fascination with blood on the scene was obscenelly erotical and creepy, but his department thought he’s just quirky.
🤔
But podcasts about them have rapidly increased
Yes and I think it’s ridiculous. Like that podcast My Favourite Murder? That’s just insulting to the victims who died terrified and alone, IMO. Might as well have a podcast called My Favourite Rape if they’re going to treat human misery as a spectator sport.
