The Link Between Community Mobbing and Mass Shootings

Original publication date:  April 10, 2013

This website is dedicated to analyzing WHY there has been a dramatic rise in rampage murders on the college campus, in the workplace, and elsewhere.

While the scope of the problem has been identified by the mainstream media, its analysis is largely superficial:

“Of the 12 deadliest shootings in U.S. history, six have taken place since 2007…David Brooks highlighted this discrepancy back in July. For much of the 20th century there were, on average, a handful of mass killings per decade. But that number spiked in 1980, and kept rising thereafter. This has happened even as the nation’s overall violent crime and homicide rates have been dropping.”

(Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/12/14/why-are-mass-shootings-becoming-more-frequent/)

The NYPD Active Shooter Manual found 271 active shooter cases between 1966 and December 21, 2012. The NYPD study reveals that more than half, or 153 of the active shooter events, happened since 2000. See page 9, Table C and page 11, Table D of the NYPD Active Shooter Manual linked below:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/counterterrorism/ActiveShooter2012Edition.pdf

Mass Shoooting Tracker is a web site deicated to tracking mass shooting events in the U.S. It has been cited by MSM, including CNN and MSNBC, and counts mass shootings in which 4 or more people are injured by gunfire (unlike the bogus FBI definition created arbitrarily in 2013 defining a mass shooting as one with 4 or more deaths resulting). The site reports more than one shooting per day, on average, for every year since 2013:

http://shootingtracker.com/wiki/Main_Page

“Most of the people who go postal, however, in academic as in other workplaces, have been mobbed there in preceding months or years.”-Dr. Kenneth Westhues

http://www.kwesthues.com/vtmassacre.htm

The mobbing which Dr. Westhues has described has found its way to our communities and can be linked to the dramatic increase in mass shootings.  Dr. Westhues confirms this fact in his communications with Keith Labella, Esq., as recounted below.

Dr. Kenneth Westhues on Mobbing and Mass Shootings

Doctor Kenneth Westhues, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Waterloo in Canada, is also a notable author, published in over a dozen languages.  Westhues has written numerous books and articles on the subject of workplace and academic mobbing. He has proven a direct link between mobbing and mass shootings. 

From Wikipedia:

Mobbing in the context of human beings means bullying of an individual by a group in any context, such as a family, school, workplace, neighborhood, or community.

When it occurs as emotional abuse in the workplace, such as “ganging up” by co-workers, subordinates or superiors, to force someone out of the workplace through rumor, innuendo, intimidation, humiliation, discrediting, and isolation, it is also referred to as malicious, nonsexual, nonracial, general harassment.

^{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobbing}

In the following email correspondence with a licensed attorney from New York, Dr. Westhues clearly states his opinion that community mobbing (also known as gang stalking) is responsible, in his opinion, for about ONE-THIRD, or HALF, of all mass shootings!

Mobbing represents a significant public health and safety risk, and is currently being systematically ignored by our elected officials, law enforcement, and the media.

Email Exchanges between Dr. Westhues and Keith Labella, Esq.

In the following series of email exchanges between Dr. Westhues and Keith Labella, Esq., Westhues specifically acknowledges his awareness of gang stalking. Westhues also opines that Christopher Dorner was likely a victim of mobbing. Here are the Westhues’ emails relating to community mobbing a.k.a. gang stalking:

Please note that in each of the following four email exchanges, Dr. Westhues’ response is first, followed by Keith Labella, Esq.’s initiating e-mail.

First e-mail exchange:

-----Original Message-----
From: Kenneth Westhues <kwesthues@uwaterloo.ca>
To: Keith <klabellaesq@yahoo.com>
Sent: Sun, Jan 6, 2013 5:48 pm
Subject: RE: Mobbing and Mass Shootings

Dear Mr. Labella: Thank you for your email. I appreciate your 
encouragement in the research on mobbing. I believe the evidence 
supports your contention of a link between mobbing (whether in 
workplace, community, church, or wherever else) and rampage murders -- 
not in all cases of such violent outbursts, so far as I can see, but in 
maybe a third or a half of cases. And, of course, it is only in a tiny 
minority of mobbing cases that the target lashes back violently. I plan 
to write more about this link as soon as I find time, and I'm grateful 
to be prodded toward that end by your email. All the best in the new 
year. Respect and regards, Kenneth Westhues
________________________________________
From: Keith [klabellaesq@yahoo.com]
Sent: 05 January 2013 10:51
To: Kenneth Westhues
Subject: Mobbing and Mass Shootings

     I have read some of the work that you and your colleagues have
written exposing the nexus between community mobbing and rampage
shootings. I wonder why, given the quality of the work exposing this
link, you and your colleagues have not made a media statement regarding
the alarming increase in violent mass shootings. It seems that some of
your books are being priced out of the market in the U.S. I also
understand that the media is largely controlled, and, that it is no
accident that the causal connection between mobbing and violence is
being "missed" by the MSM. However, you could comment about the trend
on your webpage, and, also publish an open letter about it. Sandy Hook
captured the attention of the U.S. and the world. I believe that your
work is too important for you not to weigh in promptly on these events.
You would be deserving of a Nobel Prize if the attention you brought to
the issue stopped one future massacre.

Respectfully,

Keith S. Labella, Esq. (licensed in New York).

Second Exchange:

-----Original Message-----
From: Kenneth Westhues <kwesthues@uwaterloo.ca>
To: Keith <klabellaesq@yahoo.com>
Sent: Tue, Jan 15, 2013 8:47 pm
Subject: RE:

Mr. Labella: Yes, I did have a chance to look at several of the links, 
and I thank you for sending them to me. I'm hoping to write something 
about gang stalking in the next few weeks, and I'll plan to send it to 
you if and when I get it done. With best wishes, Ken Westhues
________________________________________
From: Keith [klabellaesq@yahoo.com]
Sent: 15 January 2013 09:28
To: Kenneth Westhues
Cc: Kenneth Westhues
Subject:

      Did you get a chance to look at any of the links I sent to you? Do
you have any impressions or opinions about community-based harassment
networks a.k.a. gang stalking?

Thanks again,

Keith Labella

Third Exchange:

-----Original Message-----
From: Kenneth Westhues <kwesthues@uwaterloo.ca>
To: Keith <klabellaesq@yahoo.com>
Sent: Thu, Feb 7, 2013 8:48 pm
Subject: RE:

Mr. Labella: I appreciate your drawing this news to my attention. I've 
now read Dorner's manifesto, as well as the report of the house 
tribunal that adjudicated his complaint against his fellow officer. To 
judge by his account of the tribunal, this would indeed appear to be a 
case of workplace mobbing, or more specifically, administrative 
mobbing, and one of those very rare cases in which the target 
retaliates violently. Dorner is an obviously bright and perceptive 
fellow, and much of his manifesto is compelling. On the other hand, as 
Dorner admits, and as his murderous intentions and alleged actual 
murders demonstrate, he is a deeply disturbed person. However bright he 
is, he is obviously not thinking straight: killing innocent people is 
not a way to recover one's good name. Hence I'm not willing, without 
further investigation and review of evidence, to take Dorner's word for 
what happened to him in the LAPD, or to call it a case of mobbing. He 
urges journalists to investigate, and I hope some first-rate 
journalists will do exactly that. This is for sure a tragedy. Let's 
hope he is caught before he kills still more people. With every good 
wish, Kenneth Westhues
________________________________________
From: Keith [klabellaesq@yahoo.com]
Sent: 07 February 2013 15:57
To: Kenneth Westhues
Cc: Kenneth Westhues
Subject:

      A former LA police officer, who also held a Top Secret Security
Clearance in the Naval reserve, has gone postal. He has killed several
officers in separate, ambush attacks, and, is now on the loose. His
Manifesto, linked below, spells out programmatic workplace mobbing.
This seems to be a textbook case based on your own case studies and
mobbing checklist:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/07/christopher-dorner-manhunt-los-angeles_n_2638023.html

Link to the Dorner Manifesto:

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a14_1360255583

Fourth Exchange:

-----Original Message-----
From: Kenneth Westhues <kwesthues@uwaterloo.ca>
To: Keith <klabellaesq@yahoo.com>
Sent: Fri, Feb 8, 2013 9:22 pm
Subject: RE: RE:

Yes, thanks, as soon as I get to it. I put a little piece of writing on 
my website (like this one: 
http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/regiftedxmas12.html), it gets tens 
of thousands of hits, and I spend the next two weeks answering emails 
in response to it. With every good wish.
________________________________________
From: Keith [klabellaesq@yahoo.com]
Sent: 08 February 2013 10:07
To: Kenneth Westhues
Subject: RE:

      Thanks for taking the time to write me back. As you and Amelia
Howard have pointed out, there is never an excuse for retaliatory
violence in cases of mobbing. I agree with this wholeheartedly.
However, even without justification, there can be an explanation for
the victim lashing back. If Dorner's claims of mobbing are validated,
and, I suspect that a thorough and independent investigation will
validate many of them, then he would be another mobbing victim gone
postal. Similar to Cho, and other cases that have been studied, there
is clearly indicia of psychological pathology as relates to the
shooter. This does not, in my opinion, repudiate the fact that mobbing
is a toxic societal issue and represents a type of group pathology.

   p.s.   Are you still planning to write something on the subject of
gang stalking?

End of e-mail exchanges

Dr. Kenneth Westhues on the tragedy at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007:

MOBBING AND THE VIRGINIA TECH MASSACRE

by Kenneth Westhues, Professor of Sociology, University of Waterloo

November 2007

On April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho, a fourth-year student in the English Department at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, murdered 32 professors and students and injured a further 25, then took his own life. This webpage points toward an explanation of the tragedy.

http://arts.uwaterloo.ca/~kwesthue/vtmassacre.htm

EXCERPTS:

A common way mobbings play out is that one or a handful of voluntary participants, who typically have strong feelings about the target, call down on the target a debilitating bureaucracy, an organized array of social-control specialists who take aggressive action not from ill-will or deep conviction, but as routine performance of their job responsibilities. This was very much the case in the mobbing of Cho in the student residence, which compounded the effect of the mobbing in Cho’s home department.

From information that has so far come to light, Cho appears to have been the target of an uncommon but distinct and devastating social process called workplace mobbing. It is the impassioned ganging up of managers and/or peers against a targeted worker, the object being the target’s absolute humiliation and elimination from respectable company. It is a matter of turning a person who is different or troublesome into a nonperson, rubbing his or her nose in dirt. For more on this workplace pathology, click here or here.

Mobbing… rarely results in the target going postal: that is, retaliating in a violent rampage, openly and indiscriminately murdering co-workers (sometimes singling out specific mobbers), then committing suicide or being killed or captured by police. Most mobbing targets simply quit their jobs. Others become chronically ill or depressed. Some commit suicide. Some knuckle under. Only a tiny fraction lash back.

Nor do all workers who go postal have a history of being mobbed at work. Charles Whitman gunned down 45 people at the University of Texas on August 1, 1966, before police shot and killed him. Kimveer Gill killed or injured 20 people at Dawson College in Montreal on September 13, 2006, before taking his own life. Neither Whitman nor Gill had been mobbed on the campuses they shot up. Their crimes have other origins.

Most of the people who go postal, however, in academic as in other workplaces, have been mobbed there in preceding months or years.

…

An adequate explanation of the Virginia Tech massacre requires becoming conscious of the scapegoating mechanism, transcending it, and then calmly picking through all relevant evidence, toward a factual, reasoned account of what happened and why. It requires accepting the awful truth of what John Donne wrote, that no man is an island, that every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main, that every man’s death diminishes me.

This does not mean trying to excuse Cho’s inexcusable crimes. Nor does it mean trying to shift blame and scapegoat somebody else. It means trying to get at the truth of what happened: empirical identification of the sequence of events, what led to what. Sound scientific explanation honors those who wrongly and unnecessarily lost their lives or suffered injury at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, and gives promise of preventing repetition of the tragedy.

End of excerpts

BULLYING VICTIMS 31X MORE LIKELY TO BRING A GUN TO SCHOOL!:

http://www.medicaldaily.com/bullying-victims-taking-matters-their-own-hands-31-times-more-likely-bring-weapon-school-280178

THE GUN OWNERSHIP RATE FOR AMERICAN FAMILIES HAS DROPPED FROM ONE IN TWO FAMILIES IN 1970, TO ABOUT ONE IN THREE FAMILIES IN THE U.S. IN THE POST 2000 ERA, ACCORDING TO THE NEW YORK TIMES:

“The household gun ownership rate has fallen from an average of 50 percent in the 1970s to 49 percent in the 1980s, 43 percent in the 1990s and 35 percent in the 2000s, according to the survey data, analyzed by The New York Times.”

So, if there are LESS guns in the U.S., in fact, as gun ownership has decreased more than population has increased, how can we blame the “availability of guns”? Also, as indicated by studies like the NYPD Active Shooter Study, most of the guns used by active shooters are obtained legally. How can we blame gun regulation, or, gun ownership on this societal ill?

Also, as noted by academics, why is there such a disproportionate murder-suicide rate in the U.S. and Canada, if this is a gun ownership issue and not a sociological issue?

http://memoryholeblog.com/2014/12/01/murdersuicide-an-american-phenomenon/