From 200 Years Ago, a Lesson About Mass Killings<br />The Second Amendment complicates any attempt to confiscate the arsenal of even a man known to be deranged,<br />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.<br />But the speaker, Geoffrey Robinson, a professor of Southeast Asian history<br />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.<br />Someone snaps, for whatever reason, and sets off on an "aggressive, homicidal, frenzied attack." In short order, "a lot of people lie dead,<br />and there’s blood everywhere." Those words could have readily applied to the American cascade of shooting rampages.<br />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.<br />Robinson said that He would become part of the story of that village and the story of his family,<br />For Professor Robinson, there are unmistakable parallels between those long-ago "amokers"<br />and today’s mass killers in the United States, and also possible lessons to be learned.
