“After these episodes, everyone becomes a psychologist, looking back for warning signs,” says Jack Levin, a forensic psychologist at Northeastern University
Over 90 percent of killers are male, and the same holds for mass murderers—“I can’t think of a single case where a woman has done this,” says Schlesinger—partly because men tend to have more access to guns, which are usually the weapons of choice. The killers are usually somewhere between the ages of 25 and 35. They generally do not have previous histories of breaking the law in any serious way, says Levin. And they are not, on the whole, psychopaths, although they are often identified in the media as such. “A psychopath is someone with little conscience, little interpersonal bonding, someone who’s smooth and manipulative," says Schlesinger. "That personality has nothing, zero, to do with mass murder."
Indeed, the personality type most often associated with mass murder is in some ways the opposite of a psychopath. He is far from cool-headed; instead, he is aggrieved, hurt, and above all paranoid. Some mass murderers may be trying to exercise power over a world that they feel has left them powerless. "These people often feel some great injustice has been done to them. They're angry and they want to take it out on the world," says Schlesinger. "Then they develop the idea that committing murder will be the solution to whatever their problem is, and they fixate on it. Eventually they come to feel that there's no other solution."
"You don't just get a D on your report card and then open fire on 30 people," says Levin. "It takes a prolonged series of frustrations. These people are chronically depressed and miserable."
“Almost always [in school shootings], the perpetrator is a student who seeks revenge,” says Levin. As for Cho and whatever had upset him, Levin says, "It was murder by proxy. I think he was trying to kill the college."
And Levin says Cho, who was of Korean descent, may have been influenced by a mass shooting in at Dawson College in Montreal last September. That shooter was also a male, Asian student in his 20s. "The inspiration, if there is one, usually comes from someone who shares important characteristics with the killer," says Levin. "I'd venture a guess that that's what happened here."
Many of the warning signs—a near-daily loss of temper, vandalism, increased alcohol and drug use, overreacting to slight setbacks—are characteristic of depression in general. "These are warning signs that a person is in trouble, not that he's going to kill 30 people," says Levin.
"There are hundreds of thousands of people who have led lives of frustration, who blame others for their problems, and who are socially isolated, but guess what? They never kill anyone."
Peter Sheras, a clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia, says one key to recognizing serious warning signs is learning which ones seem likely to play out in real life. "People need to distinguish between transient threats—things that pass in a moment of anger that get cleared up—versus serious threats where there's a likelihood that it's going to be carried out," he says. "You can't completely know,
but if the person is depressed or despondent or suicidal, we should take that more seriously."
"By the time they've reached a point where they have a plan to kill somebody, their life is not of value to them anymore," Martin says. "Their goal is to hurt someone or become famous in some way, and they don't, at that point, want to stop themselves from accomplishing that."
"They may think, 'I may never amount to much, but I'm going to die amounting to something. This is my final mark on the world, my final statement,'" says Martin. "It's a fantasy that they will have the ultimate last word, even if they don't live to see it."
Re: Virginia Tech shooting
Originally Posted by KukriKhan
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