Is April the Cruelest Month?

Or is it March?

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Talking about the news with a scientist friend the other night, I said, "yep, it's that time of the year where people go crazy. I wonder why all the nut jobs come out in March and April?"

He logically asked if there are data showing that all the nut jobs come out in March and April.

"I don't need data, it's obvious: Oklahoma City, Columbine, Virginia Tech...the list goes on and on," I said.

He said "yeah, and there's that thing that happened in September. Look, if you have a cool hypothesis, go prove it."

"I don't need to prove it, it's *obvious*" I said.

"That's why you're in *policy* and not *science,* he huffed.

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So I did something terribly scientific, I went to google and found a timeline of school shootings from 1996 to present (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0777958.html). I marked down the distribution of events from each month and found the following:

Jan -4
Feb-8
Mar-11
Apr-7
May-4
June-1
July -0
Aug-1
Sept-7
Oct -4
Nov-5
Dec-4

I also went to the wikipedia entry for "events named massacres" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_events_named_massacres)and found:

Jan -4
Feb-3
Mar-9
Apr-7
May-6
June-2
July -4
Aug-5
Sept-7
Oct -3
Nov-4
Dec-5

Not every event had a month and I didn't look each one up to check, but again note that March is the highest month. This time, March/April/May is the 3 month window with the most carnage.

I started wading through "terrorism" but it's riddled with assassinations of individuals and detailed strikes against property, which, while certainly crazy, isn't the same craziness I'm talking about. And I'm not talking about straight up everyday crime such as individual murders, rapes, theft. If you've ever lived in a city, you know that stuff spikes when the weather gets warmer and/or the economy sucks.

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So why do sick people do gruesome things like shoot up nursing homes, bomb day care centers and kill their classmates this time of year?

For Christians who observe Lent, it's a pretty dark and contemplative time (don't forget Jesus got whacked in March too, sort of the opposite of one person killing many people, but rather many people killing one person) Might the Easter story itself trigger a violence button in the insane brain? Consider the religious overtones of the Virginia Tech and Columbine shooters and their similar lines of justification that they were "persecuted."

Consider that Lent's origins probably had little to do with religion and more to do with trying to extend food supplies:

"The Lenten semi-fast may have originated for practical reasons: during the era of subsistence agriculture in the West as food stored away in the previous autumn was running out or had to be used before it went bad in store, and little or no new food-crop was expected soon (compare the period in Spring which British gardeners call the "hungry gap" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lent)

Christian-dominated governments forcing people to give up meat and alcohol and to fast on certain days probably helped extend the communal food stores for an extra few crucial weeks.

Do people go crazy because there is some part of their lizard brain that thinks they will go hungry?

Do kids just hate being asked "So what will you do after graduation?" every spring? Pollen Allergies?!?!?

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I am very curious about this. If you have a thought, post it! If you want to tell me wrong and find more precise numbers, crunch 'em!