[eskwontp] Mass shootings within sports

It's surprising that there aren't more mass shootings among sports players targeting each other.  Within sports are a disproportionately high number of people who are very competitive, "jacked up", "win at any cost".  Some of those people might have reasons (even valid reasons) to come to believe that "the system" of the sport is institutionally stacked against against them: compare this to similar motivations articulated by other mass shooters, e.g., upset that the courtship system is stacked against them.

The combination of factors leading to mass murder won't all occur all that frequently, but if they do occur, it seems they should occur more frequently among sports players than in society at large, because ultracompetitive.  But this seems not occuring.  Why not?

We hypothesize a mechanism:

Participation in sports is voluntary.  Therefore, mass shooters are preferentially volunteering not to play or volunteering to stop playing a sport long before their mass shooting tendencies kick in.  What is the mechanism of exclusion?  Who else is it excluding?  Do we see the mechanism elsewhere?

Sports are physically and mentally taxing.  They are especially psychologically taxing at the beginning because you also spend a lot of time losing.  To survive these challenges and not choose to "voluntarily" leave, one needs mental fortitude, i.e., high self-qi.  We put "voluntarily" in scare quotes because, under this model, your fate was predetermined by your self-qi level at the start; there was only an illusion of free will in your voluntary decision to leave.

These barriers, this process, eliminates early the mass shooters, who are characterized by low self-qi.  Only with low self-qi does frustration boil over into destructive action, though we haven't elaborated very much on this mechanism.

One more aspect of sports:  If you show up, you have to participate, so become subjected to its mental and physical demands.  You can't be a sports player without playing.  This idea is also seen and articulated in one of the Principles of Burning Man, and in Fight Club.

What other activities have this pattern?  Easy to voluntarily leave, or choose to not show up.  Participation required.  Mentally or psychologically taxing, especially toward the beginning, but it doesn't ever completely let up.  This culls away the mass shooters before they start shooting.

We notice the pattern in social partner dancing.  We may elaborate more on this in a future post.