Because they can.
Plus any of the very good reasons above.
Point taken.
Although, of course, the imam who said the death penalty for gays would be “compassionate” hasn’t, so far as we know, taken it on himself to start murdering gays, or even to condone it. And the man who has taken it on himself to murder gays hasn’t, so far as we know, ever expressed the view that this is a “compassionate” thing to do. We don’t even know if he is aware that such a view exists.
If, as I say, he was already feeling murderous towards gays then, if he heard the “compassionate” remark, he might seize on it as one more element to be utilised to bolster and support his murderous rage. If he hadn’t heard it, I see no reason to be confident that his murderous rage would have dissipated. We’d need to ask ourselves why such a murderous rage had was developing in the first place and as I’ve already said I think that probably has more to do with psychology than with ideology.
In short, there’s a huge gap between (a) thinking that sentencing particular people to death would be a kindness to them, and (b) actually murdering them. I have heard people express the view that the death penalty is a kindness to people who would otherwise face life in prison; it has never occurred to me that anyone expressing such a view would go on and seek to kill lifers themselves. I have also heard people expressing the view that people suffering from profound disability or painful and debilitating conditions would be better off dead; again, I have never expected people expressing such a view to embark on a killing spree. And if they do, I think we’re likely looking at a personality disorder or similar as the explanation for the course they have taken.
Of course, there have been mass murderers who targeted the old and the sick, and perhaps some of them have rationalized their actions with a “compassion” argument of this kind. And I know of one case of a man who, having killed the a single mother, went on to kill her infant, because “what kind of a life would he face without a mother”?
But, again, in such cases I think we need to look for a psychological explanation of why these offenders became murderers. I think the “compassion” argument will prove to be rationalisation; nothing more.
The latter options still basically boil down to mental health – at least in the case of a lone shooter/bomber, as a holy war probably is a result of evolution rather than mental disorganization.
The exact path by which the person is lead to a position where they want to kill people is going to vary, person by person. Most people who get death into their head kill themselves. There’s a good negative correlation between the amount of lithium in the water and incidences of suicide. And if you give people a lot of lithium, it turns their world into a gray nothing, devoid of joy, sadness, anger, etc. So, the indication would seem to be that suicide is a result of excess emotions. And one can reasonably posit that the desire to murder comes from an excess of anger, fear, or other emotions. I would be willing to be that you could find a negative correlation between lithium in the water and murder rates.
And actually, that does appear to be the case.
I have heard that the most dangerous position for a police officer to find himself in is dealing with a domestic disturbance. People who are angry, fighting each other, are completely irrational and one cannot anticipate what they will do. One of them might seem calm and reasonable, just to suddenly try and cave your head in with a frying pan.
So, emotions certainly seem to be one aspect of it.
From what I have read about child molestation, the three ingredients of someone going ahead with it are stress, opportunity, and interest. (Of course, some cases of molestation are simply down to sociopathy, so those aren’t relevant in those cases.)
But we can infer from this that there’s probably a similar triangle at work for spree killers.
Rage or fear probably fill in for stress.
They need a “logical” argument that they can use to convince themselves that murder is a moral action (people, inherently, do not want to view themselves as “bad”). Religion serves as a good basis for this, but people have used everything from The Highlander to macroeconomics to find a justification. It just depends on what is present in their daily life, appeals to their interests, and how disordered their logic is.
And then the greater the opportunity, the more likely they are to offend. And to a large extent, in humans, this just means having the intelligence to figure out how to kill a bunch of people, more than it means access to weapons or whatever (at least, this is what the data shows), having the bravery to actually face down a bunch of people, and probably the narcissistic tendencies to think that you’re the special snowflake designated to show mankind that they’re in the wrong. But probably if you’re a bus driver, you’re going to drive a bus off the edge of a cliff. If you’re a guy who is unhappy at his job, you’re going to kill everyone at work. If you’re unhappy at school, you’re going to shoot up the school. Etc. For spree killers, “opportunity” seems to behave a lot differently than we would generally think it. And, unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a good way to remove it, since almost anything can serve as an opportunity. (Where, for child molestors, being a teacher, a priest, etc. is really necessary for them to offend in the large.)
The best thing we could probably do is increase lithium in the water supply, just as we may have improved our crime rates by removing lead from the air, and continue to work on our abilities to diagnose and treat mental illness. Humans are resourceful critters and humans are pretty easy to kill (despite our belief to the contrary). It’s not very hard to poison a bunch of people, drive a truck through a window into a crowd of people, set up an array of laser pointers in front of an airport, or whatever. People are going to kill people, so long as they’re crazy. Minus the ability to detect and help crazy people, there’s not much we can do to defend ourselves.
I can commit mass murder. My job requires me to carry military firearms on a daily basis. I do so for months at a time, morning, noon, and night, and yet the idea that I* should *kill everyone around me never even enters my head. So what is it that makes me different from these mass murderers, who obviously find the idea of killing so tantalizing that they cannot be reasonably expected to resist?
There was an article on Cracked a few months ago on this subject. If I recall correctly, they interviewed somebody who was about to commit a mass shooting at his school, but who was stopped as he entered the building. It was interesting.
Mass murdering monsters have little, or no, empathy for their intended victims, or the families of their intended victims. And because they’re nucking futs.
Mass murdering monster have managed to justify their psychotic behavior(s). These mass murdering monsters need to be identified, and treated, BEFORE they become mass murdering monsters.
You obviously missed the Plus any of the very good reasons above part. If you were a homophobe, or seriously mentally unbalanced with poor impulse control and had your weapons with you, you had a much higher chance of killing people than if you were unarmed.
It is notable that in countries that imposed strict firearm controls, the rate of suicides sank dramatically. Seems that until finding a more troublesome way to die, the immediate urge may pass.
I haven’t investigated suicide in regard to firearm prevalence, so I don’t know whether or not the research is trustworthy or not, but I don’t think that really matters since suicide is (or should be) a basic human right. Giving people a good way to pull it off isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Unless one regrets it post factum. :smack:
Unless you know something about death that I don’t, that would be difficult.
And if you wanted to restrict people from doing things they would later regret, the list would be long.
In the UK we have just loss one of our MPs to a killer, Even though we have the worlds toughest gun laws. The MP was a socialist the killer a far right wing loner with probably a blinkered vision of the world. Most of us are wired to look at both sides of an issue and see any benefits we then look at the practicality of implementing them where this falls down in both politics and religion is dogma that causes people to be unyielding to the ideas of others, the only resort due to their ridged dogma is to destroy that that they stand against, in this example the MP who represented the political party he was opposed to, in other words she was a sacrifice to the dogma that he followed.
This is just my WAG…
Think of the person or persons who absolutely anger and disgust you most in the world. Like when you see a Trump or Clinton rally (depending on your leanings) or maybe the jerks you went to high school with. So my guess is that these people see most of the world like that. And because they are weird, isolated loners who don’t fit in, all that anger and resentment just keeps building up until it has no place to go. Since their view of the world is off, the target of their rage is something that doesn’t make sense to us like a gay bar or school full of children.
It’s a combination of things. First, and foremost, I think this sort of thing requires a degree of dehumanization. This could be because someone is a psychopath and completely unable to relate to other human beings at all, it could be because of hate, racism, or the wrath that has them see some people as different enough or subhuman so that what parts of them might be able to relate to people doesn’t or refuses to relate to them.
But I don’t think that’s enough, anger IS a big part of it. There’s actually quite a few psychopaths out there, but that’s not enough to get them killing people just because. They still have incentive not to do so if, for no other reason, fear of the consequences. I think heat of the moment anger might cause someone to kill one or two people, but that’s very different from the type of anger it takes to plan out some sort of mass killing. It’s anger that has to be fed over months or years. And I think this is where ideologies come into play. Extreme beliefs, whether religious or political, are certainly a major culprit of that, but similarly, there’s plenty of people that have very strong feelings towards people of other religions, gays, other races, etc. but that doesn’t compel them to do horrible things, at least not at that level.
There’s this sort of feedback loop that can happen with emotion, and I’m sure we’ve all had it to some extent. If you’re sad and you are focusing on sad memories or listening to sad music, there’s a strange pleasure in that. Same happens with excitement or fear or whatever. And anger works the same way, spend enough time feeding into it and it eventually becomes a vicious cycle, where it feels good to think about all the reasons one might be angry or even hate a person or group of people. And confirmation biases start to feed into that and they’re the cause of or somehow related to so many other things that make one angry or frustrated. They’re the cause of societal breakdown. They’re the reason the world is getting worse and worse.
From there, I can see how someone pretty far out on the psychopath spectrum combined with some extreme ideology and a whole lot of anger and hate and frustration as motivation, that can overwhelm any sense of self-preservation. Ironically, our culture lauds individuals who are willing to die or kill for ideas we see as virtues, a la “give me liberty or give me death”. We respect and honor soldiers who fight in wars that society sees as just, like fighting Nazis in WW2. What if a person, or a small group of people, just have some REALLY twisted ideal they hold to that same level. Wouldn’t they too see themselves as heroic for being willing to die and/or kill for that? Unfortunately, if anything, the more extreme the idea, in general, the more extreme the people are that will believe it, and so I think the more likely that are willing to do so.
The fact that you made it separate sentence implies that you were suggesting more than one option.