April: A miserable month for mass murder…
On April 3, 13 innocents were shot dead at a Binghamton, N.Y. immigrant-services center, when Vietnamese immigrant Jiverly Wong sprayed bullets from a handgun, then killed himself. The next day, Richard Poplawski shot three police officers to death in Pittsburgh. And in the preceding month, 25 others, including two shooters, died in massacres in North Carolina, California and Alabama.
Ten years after 13 died in a massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, Binghamton is more proof that the mass shooting syndrome is not limited to high schools:
In 2008, Californian Bruce Pardo, 45, lost his job, and in a divorce, his wife got his beloved dog. On Christmas Eve, Pardo dressed as Santa Claus, and killed nine people with a semi-automatic handgun at a party hosted by his ex’s in laws. Then he set the house afire and killed himself.
In 2006, loner Kimveer Gill killed one and wounded 19 in a shooting spree at Dawson College in Quebec, Canada.
Two years ago today, Seung-Hui Cho set a record by murdering 32 at Virginia Tech University.
If murder itself is hard enough to understand, the gruesome enhancement known as “rampage” murder, defined as multiple killings that are not related to war, gangs, politics or another crime, is even less comprehensible. What drives these men (95 percent are male) to kill groups of people – often strangers? What spurs the blood-drenched competition to set new records for carnage?
Getting to why
Although rampage killings account for only about 0.1 percent of homicides in America, many people find them darkly fascinating. Yet the “why” question admits of no definitive answer. Many perpetrators die during the bloodletting they start, and the study of mass murder by individuals remains at an early stage, although the phenomenon is not: in 1966, for example, Charles Whitman killed 14 and wounded 32 others at the University of Texas.
The Why Files solicited some expert opinions, and found some divergence on the issue of why the shooters commit mass murder. Some experts cited lax gun control as a precipitating factor. And because more attention has been focused on school shooters, some of our experts were more conversant with them than with adult shooters.
Shawn Johnston, a veteran forensic psychologist now teaching at Oregon State University, says personality disorders are the key precipitating factor in adult mass murders. “It’s narcissism, they see the world as revolving around them, they are paranoid in character, think they are special, unique, that others are stealing their success or plotting against them. They are not out of touch with reality, but they have this pervasive set of beliefs. Sometimes there is an anti-social or rebellious quality, but what I have seen is not so much sociopathic as inconceivably narcissistic. These are self-centered, angry, vengeful human beings.”
Johnston says rampage murderers “tend to be young males, often white, who seem socially isolated and appear to be caught up in never-ending violent fantasies. They seem to be odd, eccentric, shunned by other kids, because they are clearly odd. The profile includes not so much a history of criminal violence as a history of a very rich fantasy life of violence. It’s not unusual for these individuals to have exhibited signs of a dangerous, extraordinary fascination with weapons or killing people. They often talk often about vengeful activities; they are twisted, warped, weirdo…”
According to Scott Thornsley, associate professor of criminal justice who teaches a course in mass murder at Mansfield University, “Serial murderers make killing their life business, while mass murderers do it as final statement of their life, and the statement is that they are frustrated, their power has been taken away.” The violence is often triggered by the loss of a job or a significant other, or “other triggering factors that make it almost intolerable to go on.”
I murder, therefore I matter
School murderers often have a twisted, yet “sadly constructive” motive,” says Katherine Newman, in the department of sociology at Princeton University and author of “Rampage” (see #1 in the bibliography). “They are looking to change the way their peers see them, trying to substitute a different kind of identity, as a more alluring anti-hero, for the identity they have, which is the social loser.”
Newman believes high-school shooters are “immature enough not to think much about the people they are going to kill. They focus on their reputation, and while they might be filled with rage at various points, their main motivation is to make themselves popular, socially acceptable in an antihero fashion.”
Adult shooters are less goal directed, Newman adds. “They are much more the angry loner who is disconnected from the social order. Their motive is revenge, explosive fury, but they often share with the high-school shooter a kind of paranoia and grandiosity: ‘I am going to show everybody.’ They both have a desire for attention, a desire to take other people out with them, and often are suicidal” as well as homicidal.
In workplace shootings and college rampages, the shooters are older and “often further along in the development of a really serious mental disorder,” Newman adds (and indeed, many rampage shooters are in their 40s and 50s, much older than the average murderer). “And because they are older and sicker, they are much less likely to be embedded in a social group.” The intense isolation of college and adult shooters has a critical implication: These loners often act undetected, and without warning, Newman says.
