Yellowstone National Park officials say a gunman killed by park rangers as he fired a semiautomatic rifle at the entrance of a dining facility with 200 people inside had told a woman he planned to carry out a mass shooting
Yellowstone National Park officials say a gunman killed by park rangers as he fired a semiautomatic rifle at the entrance of a dining facility with 200 people inside had told a woman he planned to carry out a mass shooting
The warning from a woman in Yellowstone National Park came in just after midnight on July Fourth: She'd just been held at gunpoint by a man who said he planned to carry out a mass shooting — a random attack common in the U.S. these days but not in the Yellowstone region, let alone the park itself.
Rangers spent the next several hours trying to find the gunman before he showed up outside a dining area with 200 people inside. He shot a barrage of bullets with a semi-automatic rifle at a service entrance.
The rangers — including one who was wounded — shot back. Their rounds hit the attacker, Samson Lucas Bariah Fussner, 28, of Milton, Florida, who died at the scene in the busy Canyon Village tourist lodge area near the scenic Grand Canyon of Yellowstone.
"Stand On Zanzibar" by John Brunner won the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of 1969.
The story is set in the early 21st century; one of the problems caused by the rapid changes of the times is 'muckers.' A mucker is someone who has 'run amok' and is out to kill as many people as possible. In the book the preferred weapons were knives and swords.
Brunner based his novel on the works of sociologist Alvin Toffler, who coined the phrase 'future shock'
The only shock from the future is how hard someone has to work to survive. Not thrive, not live, but just get by. The shock is learning that this hardship is caused by 4700 people on the planet who have more money than they can spend in their lifetime and want to ensure the system that grants them privilege at our expense. The shock is learning that the entire societal system is rigged against anyone and almost everyone.
The shock isn't the future itself. It's the state of the present.
In this case, 'future shock' meant that there would be people who couldn't/wouldn't adapt to the shift from the Industrial Age to the Digital Era. People who were fine with Tom Hanks wearing drag in his TV show lose their minds over drag forty years later. People who grew up getting vaccines in school suddenly decide that all vaccines are poison.
That was basically Orwell's 1984 though. The Proles worked hard all their lives just to scrape by and the Inner Party lived like kings and the Proles weren't able to stop them even if they wanted to, which they didn't because they were brainwashed into maintaining the status quo through control of the media.
"Amok", incidentally, is a Malay word referring to a seemingly random killing spree that would take young men sometimes. Americans occupying the Philippines would sometimes be attacked by Muslim swordsmen insurgents in a berserker state, which led to the concept of "stopping power" and the development of the Colt 45