
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, while the media is once again going into overdrive with the Mass Shooting incident in Odessa Texas , there is hardly a mention of Mass shooting in Mobile, Alabama where a black teen shot 10 people .
Mobile police report that A 17-year-old was arrested after 10 people were shot following a high school football game .The victims in the shooting, which happened in Mobile, ranged in age from 15 to 18. They were rushed to area hospitals, and officials said.No one died.

Deangelo Parnell, 17, has been arrested and charged with nine counts of attempted murder, Mobile Police Department spokesman Laderrick Dubose told ABC News Saturday morning.Mobile Police Chief Lawrence Battiste didn’t confirm to reporters the shooting stemmed from an altercation, but he did admonish young people for “bringing their beefs that they have with each other in their neighborhoods” into public settings and “putting people in harm’s way.”The incident “may have been a directed threat at one or two individuals and other people just happened to fall prey to their carelessness,” Battiste added.One person had a seizure and another suffered an injured hand, but it’s unclear if those individuals were among the 10 who got shot.
While back in Texas the NY Post reports that a neighbor of the Odessa, Texas, mass shooter says she reported him to police last month — after he threatened her with a rifle for leaving trash near his property — but cops couldn’t find his house on account of it having no GPS address or electricity.The woman told CNN that Seth Ator, 36, would often sit on top of his home and shoot animals at night, which he would then retrieve afterward.She said cops tried to confront Ator following her report to them last month, but his property didn’t show up on GPS and was difficult to find.
Senator Cory Booker issued the following statement:
“My heart breaks for the victims of today’s shootings in Odessa and Midland, Texas. It is perverse that we live in a society where gun violence and mass shootings continue to claim American lives with such outrageous regularity. It is unthinkable that 26 more people were shot today and lives were taken in a mass shooting — including a state trooper and a 17 month old child — because our country has not done more to stop this violence. It’s unacceptable that untold numbers of communities elsewhere were victimized by gun violence today too.
Meanwhile the Chicago murder total with greatly eclipse all mass murders in the US by a wide margin.
“We are not powerless to act. We can stop this carnage by passing commonsense laws, like gun licensing, that keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people who should not have them. I will never give up on the fight to change an unacceptable status quo protected by the corporate gun lobby and the NRA that keeps children and families across our country living in fear that they will be the next victims.”
Booker opted for the pat line blame game, the NRA did it ,relying on a basic ignorance of gun laws and gun licensing procedures . Considering that Booker was Mayor of one of New Jersey’s most dangerous cities ,his ignorance is rather shocking. This type of abject stupidity is nothing new and helps nothing . The current number of mass shootings committed by NRA members is zero.Far more are Democrats , Islamic Jihadists, radicalized racist or all stripes , fatherless boys and psychotropic drug users .
In mid August following a similar shootings Glen Rock Mayor Bruce Packer issued the following statement on his Facebook page: “Another day and sadly another shooting in Dayton. Our hearts go out to all who were impacted. If you, like me, are disgusted that the laws of our country allow an individual to own a gun that can kill 9 and injure 26 in ONE MINUTE, and you feel helpless but feel that you want to do something, a good start is to visit the site below and learn how you can get involved.
https://momsdemandaction.org/ “
In early August , after three separate mass shootings in Gilroy, El Paso and Dayton, Ohio. Jillian Peterson and James Densley released in the Los Angles Times their research on “mass shootings” ,”For two years, we’ve been studying the life histories of mass shooters in the United States for a project funded by the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice. We’ve built a database dating back to 1966 of every mass shooter who shot and killed four or more people in a public place, and every shooting incident at schools, workplaces, and places of worship since 1999. We’ve interviewed incarcerated perpetrators and their families, shooting survivors and first responders. We’ve read media and social media, manifestos, suicide notes, trial transcripts and medical records.
Our goal has been to find new, data-driven pathways for preventing such shootings. Although we haven’t found that mass shooters are all alike, our data do reveal four commonalities among the perpetrators of nearly all the mass shootings we studied.
First, the vast majority of mass shooters in our study experienced early childhood trauma and exposure to violence at a young age. The nature of their exposure included parental suicide, physical or sexual abuse, neglect, domestic violence, and/or severe bullying. The trauma was often a precursor to mental health concerns, including depression, anxiety, thought disorders or suicidal.
Second, practically every mass shooter we studied had reached an identifiable crisis point in the weeks or months leading up to the shooting. They often had become angry and despondent because of a specific grievance. For workplace shooters, a change in job status was frequently the trigger. For shooters in other contexts, relationship rejection or loss often played a role. Such crises were, in many cases, communicated to others through a marked change in behavior, an expression of suicidal thoughts or plans, or specific threats of violence.
Third, most of the shooters had studied the actions of other shooters and sought validation for their motives. People in crisis have always existed. But in the age of 24-hour rolling news and social media, there are scripts to follow that promise notoriety in death. Societal fear and fascination with mass shootings partly drives the motivation to commit them. Hence, as we have seen in the last week, mass shootings tend to come in clusters. They are socially contagious. Perpetrators study other perpetrators and model their acts after previous shootings. Many are radicalized online in their search for validation from others that their will to murder is justified.
Fourth and the overall mechanism to carry out the shootings , “the shooters all had the means to carry out their plans. Once someone decides life is no longer worth living and that murdering others would be a proper revenge, only means and opportunity stand in the way of another mass shooting. Is an appropriate shooting site accessible? Can the would-be shooter obtain firearms? In 80% of school shootings, perpetrators got their weapons from family members, according to our data. Workplace shooters tended to use handguns they legally owned. Other public shooters were more likely to acquire them illegally.” Illegal guns account for 80% of mass shootings .
Suzanne Venker of Fox News put together an interesting piece on fatherless boys in it she states, “This is destructive to both boys and girls, but each sex suffers differently. Girls who grow up deprived of their father are more likely to become depressed, more likely to self-harm, and more likely to be promiscuous. But they still have their mothers, with whom they clearly identify. Boys do not have a comparable identification and thus suffer more from father absence. They also tend to act out in a manner that’s harmful to others, which girls typically do not.”
“The root of fatherlessness rests in two things: our culture’s dismissal of men as valuable human beings who have something unique to offer, and its dismissal of marriage as an institution that’s crucial to the health and well-being of children.”
Another element that is often ignored is that nearly every mass shooting incident in the last twenty years, and multiple other instances of suicide and isolated shootings all share one thing in common, and it’s not the weapons used. The overwhelming evidence points to the signal largest common factor in all of these incidents is the fact that all of the perpetrators were either actively taking powerful psychotropic drugs or had been at some point in the immediate past before they committed their crimes.
Multiple credible scientific studies going back more than a decade, as well as internal documents , show that SSRI drugs ( Selective Serotonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors ) have well known, but unreported side effects, including but not limited to suicide and other violent behavior. One need only Google relevant keywords or phrases to see for themselves. www.ssristories.com is one popular site that has documented over 4500 “ Mainstream Media “ reported cases from around the World of aberrant or violent behavior by those taking these powerful drugs , (Prozac , Ritalin, Zoloft, Paxil , Effexor and Celexa )
The blame game is just not going to cut it and has so far solved nothing . On the flip side the un-hyped reality is that school shooting are actually down from the 1990’s, gun suicides remain a far bigger killer than mass shootings. Hammers, and clubs kill significantly more Americans than rifles every year and worse yet lawnmowers kill more Americans than mass public shootings.