Compilation of Planet Waves Mass Shooting Articles

Dear Friend and Reader:

I've pulled together a survey of Planet Waves articles on mass shootings since 2007. This is not exactly light or entertaining reading, though if you're concerned about these issues, you will get some new perspectives.

These articles are all responses to some form of crisis, the global emergency, the national emergency — offering a reflection, and a quest for understanding.

It seems the first one was the incident at Virginia Tech that year. That was one event where I attempted an analysis of the chart of the shooter; in the Gender Rage piece set in Tucson, I compare the chart of the shooter with one of the victims (a really interesting analysis). From there, I moved on to incident charts.

	Illustration from Here at the Edge of the World -- an article that took me 10 years to pull together, about all the weird stuff going on in the 21st century so far. This is one of the foundational articles in the Planet Waves repertoire, encompassing many seemingly separate events.

Though it is arguably out of place, I've included my best article on the 9/11 incident, as it is part of the mass casualty problem in the U.S. here in the 21st century.

These articles are mainly commentaries on the violence problem in our society, as well as analysis of the gun problem. As the years go on, I am looking more at the total environment of the United States and the influence of the internet.

I just watched Pres. Trump's comments, and I'm listening to chatter on MSNBC. It seems that the discussion is leaning toward the internet as a vector, but it's a content analysis, not a structural one. I've included one article from the Minor Planet Series of late 2017 as it touches on this subject, as does this article on the internet. This is essential background, as is my current article on invisible environments.

A piece called Here at the Edge of the World addresses many of the larger issues affecting our society at this time, taking a meta view.

The interesting pattern of these pieces is that many touch on the major transit events of their era — for example, the the Uranus-Pluto square, the Mayan Calendar turnover of 2012, the Uranus-Eris conjunction of 2016-2017, and the current Saturn-Pluto conjunction.

While this is not a pleasant subject area, I have done my best to bring humanity to the discussion, and to leave the politics out.

Readers are welcome to share, post, archive, print, etc., this page, or these articles. Please put them to good use; many, many people worked to pull them together. Thanks to all of you who were involved.

Planet Waves — all of this coverage — is paid for by your subscriptions, membership fees and donations. Please do your part. Thank you.

With love,
PS — These links lead to the original pages that were emailed out at the time. There are no links back to the list in this post. You may open the page on the web and then bookmark if you want to keep hold of it.

Cho Seung-Hui: Broken Mirror, 2007 As astrology students, we naturally want to know about what kind of planetary configuration would be behind somebody who could kill 32 people, then himself. But that is to presume he is in some way special. Who knows, he might be, but murder-suicide happens pretty often, and given the availability of guns in the United States and elsewhere, given how frustrated and hopeless so many people are, and given the way that casual violence is sanctioned, the real wonder is that crimes of this nature don't happen more often.

History, Turning on a Phrase, 2010 In the nine years since the 9/11 incident, the October 2010 Libra New Moon was the closest New Moon to the chart's ascendant, and the only one occupying that degree, and it was close. My impression is that we have a rare moment of transparency around an event that shaped our lives, changed the world and, more significantly, reaffirmed something about human nature.

Beneath the Guns and Politics, Gender Rage, 2011 The fantasy of defending oneself against an intruder requires the notion of someone against whom to defend. Until it actually manifests (which it does not, usually), that is a projection of power and aggression onto an imaginary other, which in the fantasy puts one in the position of powerlessness (without the weapon), and thus justifies the weapon. Most of these people need therapy, not target practice.

We're About to Go Off the Map, 2012 The shooting at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, was one of the most appalling ever, killing mostly kids six and seven years old, and it demanded an explanation. Bob Geldof's line, "And he can see no reasons 'cause there are no reasons" was no longer good enough. Nothing happens for no reason. For every effect there is a cause -- which I believe is the spiritual lesson that we in the United States need to learn more than any other. So, I went looking for the cause.

Identity, Violence and the Global Village, 2016 The question is, what function does violence serve? People complain about violence, and then blockbuster films based on death and destruction succeed wildly. The vast majority of people — Republicans and Democrats — favor stricter (as in actual) background checks and a ban on military-grade weapons for civilians. Yet they keep re-electing politicians who do nothing.

The Next Battle in a War on the People, 2017 Once again, we're being confronted with a mass casualty incident involving firearms. This is on the heels of every other kind of disaster, or the threat of one, in rapid sequence since the Aug. 21 eclipse. By now every American has heard the story: someone set up a position on the 32nd floor of a resort hotel in Las Vegas, and opened fire on a country music festival across the street. According to the police, and press reports, there were more than 500 casualties, including 59 dead.

Small Wheel Turns by the Fire and Rod, Big Wheel turns by the Grace of God, 2017 The BP oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico and the multiple meltdowns and nuclear plant explosions at Fukushima were two irrevocable incidents that changed the world, damaged the environment, and set the tone for the era that was to come. In those years, we also experienced Arab Spring, the Wisconsin labor protests (please let's never forget these), the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

A Moment of Awakening, 2018 The Parkland, Florida, shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School took place the day before a solar eclipse, and any event around an eclipse can be a turning point. This eclipse, though, had a special quality: it was conjunct the Moon in the United States natal chart, which is conjunct the asteroid Pallas Athene.

The Singularity Point, 2019 There is no looking to astrology to explain two mass shootings in 24 hours, or the 36 of them in the United States so far this year. Or the 100 or so really nasty ones since 1966 (which seem to be concentrating in our era). There's also no denying that our nation needs to change — and that nobody seems to know how to do it, or how to agree on what the problem is, or might be.

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