For the last few days I've been tracking down information on an old crime – a tragedy comparable to the familicides we hear of all too often these days. The story of what happened afterwards is unusual enough that I want to use it as the basis of a novel.
As I was researching events from seventy years ago, I heard about the California shooting which took the lives of Santa Barbara college students. Because we hear about these sad affairs so often, I wondered about the frequency mass killings. An article in December, 2012 in the "Daily News" reported the following:
Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has written a history of mass murders in America, said that while mass shootings rose between the 1960s and the 1990s, they actually dropped in the 2000s. And mass killings actually reached their peak in 1929, according to his data. He estimates that there were 32 in the 1980s, 42 in the 1990s and 26 in the first decade of the century.
I have been surprised to learn the episodes haven't skyrocketed in the21st century. On the other hand, "Decoded Science" in January of this year stated "One obvious trend is that the frequency of such incidents has risen in the past decade; more accurately, in the past 8.5 years. When teen suicides grew substantially during the 1980's, the media all but stopped reporting on them due to the copycat phenomenon and guidelines issues by the Centers for Disease Control. My husband—who is a psychologist—cringes anytime a mass murderer is shown over and over on television, making his face and name famous, or infamous. He fears other troubled souls are noticing how mass violence creates celebrity and will follow with their own quest to be remembered. I've thought for a long time the birth of the twenty-four hour television news channels has produced an overexposure to negative events. How many times did you watch the planes crash into the twin towers in
2001? It's depressing every time. With so many stations and so many journalists all looking to "scoop" the others, the detailed coverage given to every horrific episode is overwhelming. If a guy didn't know how to go about unleashing his pent-up grievances, he has only to watch the news.
For the victims, it's too awful to publicize. For the viewer, it's horribly depressing. I think I'll watch cartoons instead.
Amendment. In case this historical reference has faded in your memory along with the words to the Gilligan's Island theme song, this is the amendment that prohibits restricting voting rights based on gender. The Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote in 1920, by the way, fifty years after all males had been legally granted that privilege. An hour after reading about the struggles of Alice Paul 
and other women's suffrage leaders, I saw a news clip speculating about Hillary Clinton's probable presidential campaign, and the two items started me thinking. How is it women are still so poorly represented in congress? After the 2012 election, we had seventeen female senators, one of the largest numbers in history, but nowhere near equal. After 100 years (almost) of having the vote, we still don't elect ourselves equal representation. I mean, doesn't it make sense to have the feminine viewpoint represented more strongly in government? Do we women really believe men know better about every issue? Let's face it, when a United States senator refers to women as a "host" to a fetus, or a congressman states women can prevent pregnancy during rape, you have to conclude a female opinion might be needed here and there. Worst of all is how we women do this to ourselves. According to Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D, who wrote Woman's Inhumanity to Woman, we women are sexists. We hold our fellow women to a higher standard, expecting them to dress a certain way, balance their personal and public lives, to be neither too masculine nor too feminine, and on and on. We're half the population. We work and pay taxes. We have good brains. We have our rights, and we ought to use them more effectively. 
That's my opinion anyway, but then what do I know? I'm only a woman, right? 
