The Causes of Rampage Killing

As the child of a schizophrenic and the sister of another schizophrenic, and the step-daughter of someone with MS-related psychosis, I naturally follow the news whenever someone with a mental illness commits a crazy act of violence.  My own brother scared me when he became ill, because he exhibited some of the features common to mass killers:  an interest in firearms, an interest in mass murderers who used firearms, and loss of a job.  Of course, he lost his job due to his mental illness.  After this, he no longer saw his psychiatrist because he no longer had insurance  (a bogus excuse on both of their parts imho).   And then, being unemployed with time on his hands, his thought process had no brakes on it.  I was afraid he'd shoot up his workplace, but I knew him and knew he just wasn't a vengeful person.  In all the time we were growing up he never used direct or redirected revenge against anybody that I knew of.  I feared suicide more than homicide.  He wound up doing neither, but he never got treatment and is now homeless.  You can't force treatment on someone who poses no threat to himself or others, so his crazy choice to cling to his delusions and be unemployable is his to make.

Still, I want to learn what I can from the few experts that have studied rampage killers just in case.  There is very little written for lay people, and not a lot of peer-reviewed literature either, that I could find.  The popular press tends to focus on just one case, for example Whitman in Texas.

Of course, any time something bad happens in the U.S., some evangelical nutjob will claim it's due to our degraded morality.  We can dismiss this hypothesis out of hand because the Bible doesn't say anything about mass murder happening in Sodom and Gomorrah.  God took them out himself, he didn't rely on mass murderers to punish those sinful sinners!  But I'll add this to the long, long list of hypothesized causes for mass murder:

• Irreligiosity
• Religiosity
• Media violence
• Maleness
• Gun "culture"
• Lack of gun control laws
• Government conspiracies
• Bullying
• Mental illness
• Lack of mental health treatment
• It's just plain senseless

I may have missed a few, like Big Pharma or Communist conspiracies, but I think those are the ones I've seen the most. Mass murder seems to be a kind of Rorschach test that inspires people to attribute their pet theory to a sensational event as if to say, "See?  See?  I told you the world was going to hell in a handbasket!" Fortunately, there are people who have investigated the cases themselves to find commonalities.  I'm putting some of these on my reading list.  You may find some of them interesting too:

• Mass Murder in the United States: A History
• Mass Murder in the United States
(different book) by authors named "Holmes." Spooky, no?
• Extreme Killing. I have read this book and it's just so-so. It basically just tells stories you could read on Wikipedia but it does give you some vocabulary of the way the experts talk about this, and a broad overview.
• Suicidal Mass Murderers: A Criminological Study of Why they Kill. (mainly about Virginia Tech, which would be the most comparable case to the Holmes case)
• ...and this article makes the case that mass murder is an attempt on the part of the murderer to soothe his psychological angst.
• The pseudo-commando Mass Murderer fits the description of Holmes, except that he committed his crime at night.

My pet peeve with society, at least in the treatment of the generation that's been responsible for school shootings, is that teachers were taught to give kids empty praise, just for "trying." And everyone is included and nobody gets disappointed. Besides being dishonest with children, it didn't give them enough opportunitities to learn important life lessons. Sometimes things don't go your way. Sometimes you're not as good as you think you are. During my brief college teaching career, I encountered a lot of terrified students who really didn't know whether they were any "good" at something. They knew they could get away with cheating (at that school) but even when they didn't cheat, some of them felt like frauds. I was a demanding teacher and the feedback I got from students was that I was very fair. The students who passed felt a sense of accomplishment and the ones that failed knew it was their own fault. They seemed genuinely grateful for a real challenge in which their self-perception and my feedback were totally in synch.

I was at the University of Iowa when Gang Lu shot up the Astronomy department there. He was disappointed not to have received an award he felt he was entitled to. Well, sometimes you get disappointed in life. Kids should learn about that in kindergarten so they can handle it later.

Well, that's my rant, but it's mere opinion. Next I'll be reading some of the linked material to see what the people who have actually met mass killers have to say about what drove them over the edge.