I’m reading through the grizzly attacks at Virginia Tech, and clicking on links to historical acts of terrible violence in schools. One of the things they have in common is that the gunmen always turned the guns on themselves.
This is telling in psychological terms, especially in the recent attacks where students are saying the gunman looked very calm and collected. No emotion. He could have had an entire gamut of mental illnesses contributing to his flat affect, but to me this makes the crimes even more heinous.
To me, turning the gun on ones self doesn’t make me think they didn’t want any sort of satisfaction of seeing themselves on TV, or being studied but psychologists from prison or whatever else. It makes me think they were in it for the killing, almost like a retribution type thing. But then that woulnd’t fit with certain psychological models.
What do you think? Why do they invariably turn the gun on themselves?
True but most turn tales on themselves, and contrary to being in a role of superiority, they degrade to killing themselves. I had a collegue at my old job who studied this extensively, I think he may have even consulted on some of the Columbine issues. I’ll have to peruse around and see if I can find a cite for this type of murder. Because it is premeditated, grizzly, and suspects usually are fairly in control…
Let us not falsely accuse our friends the bears, however much Stephen Colbert rails against them. The word you are searching for is “grisly” not “grizzly.”
When they found all those bodies in the woods at that Georgia funeral home the front page headline in the local paper here was “Grizzly find in Georgia”. Uh-huh.
I think the whole point is suicide. The shooter wants to die, but he doesn’t want to die unnoticed - he wants a public spectacle. So he goes on a shooting spree and kills a bunch of other people and then either kills himself or gets killed by the police. In the killer’s mind, all the victims were just props to his own death scene.
Three kids in Cincinnati were recently pulled over by the cops for a routine traffic violation. The officer smelled pot and asked them to get out of the car. The kid in the backseat wouldn’t cooperate with the cop and suddenly pulled out a gun and started shooting, wounding one officer.
The driver took off and eventually crashed a few miles south, with the cops in hot pursuit. The gunmen fired several more rounds, hitting two more officers, and then fled into a dark parking lot, where he turned the gun on himself.
The kids were about 17-19 years old and were on their way to dinner with another friend when they were pulled over. There was enough pot in the car to warrant a misdemeanor. They all came from well-to-do families and had never had any run-ins with the police.
All the injured policemen are fine, though one won’t ever see active duty again because the bullet made mincemeat of his shoulder.
It just seems to follow a murder-suicide pattern. I wonder the opposite…the ones who don’t turn the gun on themselves…why don’t they? They can’t expect to escape capture and eventually having to spend the rest of their natural lives behind bars.
These are people who feel like big failures living worthless lives. They want to be successful at something, even if it is murder/suicide. If you know you are going to kill yourself, what can anyone do to stop you from taking some other people with you?
I’d guess some of them just couldn’t turn the gun on themselves when the time came, just like some more ordinary suicidal people find themselves unable to go through with it.
Seriously, what’s left after you’ve killed 32 people in a shooting rampage beyond a protracted trial, sentencing, and either life in prison or an eventual execution in another 10-15 years?
I can’t imagine why anybody wouldn’t kill themselves after this type of rampage.
You know how, in war movies, there’s the guy who’s stuck in a hopeless situation, and he says to himself, “If I’m going down, at least I’m going to take as many of the enemy with me as possible”?
My speculation (which may be totally off base) is that people like the VT gunman have that mindset, together with the feeling that everyone around them is The Enemy. They’ve already resigned themselves to not getting out alive; they want to do as much damage as they can on their way out.
(“Grizzly attacks”? I didn’t know there were bears involved.)
OK, OK, OK - Grisly attacks…
Another chilling thing about this VT guy - he used 9mm’s. So he wasn’t spraying a classroom with bullets, he was pointing and shooting, pointing and shooting…Even more grizzz—ahem—grisly than I thought.
I think you’re right on the money there. These people generally have serious mental issues and are ostracized from society. They are often cool and calm because if you are killing “the enemy”, why should you feel remorse?
Recently, I watched a show (either discovery or discovery science) about the psychology of serial killers; I imagine there’s much correlation with a spree killer. There was literally zero response to just about any kind of input that would cause an emotional response in a “normal” person. Combine an inability to feel remorse, serious mental illness, ostracization, and a delusion cause by a serious psychosis and it’s little surprise they would lash out like that. I think, if they don’t have the ability to feel remorse and self-worth, that that’s also a large part of the reason why most of them ultimately kill themselves (either directly, or suicide-by-cop)