From 200 Years Ago, a Lesson About Mass Killings
The Second Amendment complicates any attempt to confiscate the arsenal of even a man known to be deranged,
and the First Amendment makes it virtually impossible to stop news organizations from writing extensively about a mass killer — and possibly creating copycats in the process.
But the speaker, Geoffrey Robinson, a professor of Southeast Asian history
and politics at the University of California, Los Angeles, was instead offering a glimpse of what life was sometimes like two centuries ago in lands that are the modern Malaysia and Indonesia.
Someone snaps, for whatever reason, and sets off on an "aggressive, homicidal, frenzied attack." In short order, "a lot of people lie dead,
and there’s blood everywhere." Those words could have readily applied to the American cascade of shooting rampages.
Retro Report, led by Kyra Darnton, is a nonprofit video news organization that aims to provide a thoughtful counterweight to today’s 24/7 news cycle.
Robinson said that He would become part of the story of that village and the story of his family,
For Professor Robinson, there are unmistakable parallels between those long-ago "amokers"
and today’s mass killers in the United States, and also possible lessons to be learned.