Rage, Revenge Spur Mass Murder

Today marks the 10-year anniversary of the Columbine High School tragedy in Littleton, Colorado during which 12 students and one teacher lost their lives at the hands of two disturbed students who killed themselves at the end of their rampage. The tragic event ended the open-door policy most schools had practiced, changed society’s view of childhood bullying, changed the way SWAT teams respond to such events, and shattered our personal sense of safety. If such horror could happen in a quiet, little town like Littleton, Columbine made us realize that catastrophic violence could touch our own lives.

While mass murder is nothing new, its increasing occurrence — seven in the past month — has shocked and troubled psychiatric experts. While there does not appear to be any common trigger that sends a mass murderer on a killing spree, experts have identified two common characteristics: a cataclysmic event that triggers a suicidal rage and a thirst for revenge.

“It’s the constellation or coming together, the perfect storm of someone’s last shot at something,” retired FBI senior profiler Mark Safarik told the Associated Press. “For them, there’s just no other way out. Or if there’s another way out, they don’t choose it, because they’re going to punish somebody.”

Safarik doesn’t think there’s any way to predict who will leap over the edge of reason. There is scant similarity in motivations, personality types, individual experiences or even choice of targets to guide behavior analysts in their efforts to predict and thereby prevent mass murders. For example, Jiverly Wong who opened fire in a Binghamton, New York immigration center had recently been laid off, but investigators do not understand why he went to the center instead of his former workplace to exact his grim revenge.

What behaviorists have discovered is that intense media coverage seems to encourage more mass murders. “I think that people that are on the edge, that are contemplating such tragic events, sometimes all it takes is that being highlighted in the media for them to go, ‘You know, I could do something like that, I’m that angry,'” Safarik said. “It’s in their face on the television, and now it’s in their thinking patterns. It becomes an option that, perhaps earlier on, wasn’t an option for them.”