There's definitely something going on, and I'm sure there is research out there. The mass shooting cases vary, but on the spectrum of murder, the perpetrators skew toward legally insane relative to the more common "cold-blooded" killings that occur in context of poverty or gang activity. I mentioned serial killers in my response to your other comment, almost all of whom are white.
In any case, I'm not inclined to give Sharrod Small the credit needed to conclude that he was attempting to bring awareness to an "interesting sociological" phenomenon, but maybe that's just me. I've heard the argument so many times before as a deflection of criticism, and the notion circulates widely in the form of online memes. We clearly both agree that these mass murders, though horrendous, represent a small percentage of all homicides, the majority of which can be attributed to black-on-black violence, and that the latter doesn't get the scrutiny it deserves. That's where I think the morality play comes in: we are meant to understand that somehow when white people kill, it is much worse, or that poor blacks shouldn't be held to same standards of humanity.
There's definitely something going on, and I'm sure there is research out there. The mass shooting cases vary, but on the spectrum of murder, the perpetrators skew toward legally insane relative to the more common "cold-blooded" killings that occur in context of poverty or gang activity. I mentioned serial killers in my response to your other comment, almost all of whom are white.
In any case, I'm not inclined to give Sharrod Small the credit needed to conclude that he was attempting to bring awareness to an "interesting sociological" phenomenon, but maybe that's just me. I've heard the argument so many times before as a deflection of criticism, and the notion circulates widely in the form of online memes. We clearly both agree that these mass murders, though horrendous, represent a small percentage of all homicides, the majority of which can be attributed to black-on-black violence, and that the latter doesn't get the scrutiny it deserves. That's where I think the morality play comes in: we are meant to understand that somehow when white people kill, it is much worse, or that poor blacks shouldn't be held to same standards of humanity.