Mass murder

Posted on December 17, The senselessness alone would have been sufficient.

He has no escape planned and expects to be killed during the incident. Research suggests that the pseudocommando is driven by strong feelings of anger and resentment, flowing from beliefs about being persecuted or grossly mistreated.

He views himself as carrying out a highly personal agenda of payback. Some mass murderers take special steps to send a final communication to the public or news media; these communications, to date, have received little detailed analysis.

Part I of this article reviews the research on the pseudocommando, as well as the psychology of revenge, with special attention to revenge fantasies. American Political Science Association, annual meeting paper.

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Accessed through Social Science Research Network. These stories may attribute causes to controllable components, such as individual choice, or uncontrollable components, such as systematic forces in the environment.

Here we employ motivated reasoning and attribution theory to understand causal attributions to the Virginia Tech shootings, the Fort Hood shootings, and the Tucson, Arizona shootings.

We argue that causal attributions stem from individual reasoning that is primarily motivated by existing dispositions and accuracy motives. Both motivations are present for attributions about these mass shootings and we seek to understand their significance and whether dispositional motives condition accuracy drives.

We are able to test several hypotheses using individual level survey data from several national surveys to explain attributions about the shootings. Our findings suggest a substantial partisan divide on the causes of the tragedies and considerable differences between the least and most educated respondents.

However, our analyses also reveal that while education has virtually no influence on the attributions made by Republicans, it heightens the differences among Democrats. Journal of Police Crisis Negotiations,Vol. Given that school shootings are generally rare, and many perpetrators are killed during their crimes, the availability of school shooters for research is obviously limited.

Not surprisingly, initial profiles of school shooters were arguably of limited value.

Mass murder | Gun Deaths in the United States

Although school shooting incidents, particularly by minors, have declined, some evidence has emerged to elucidate the psychological elements of school shooting incidents. School shooting incidents may follow extreme versions of etiological pathways seen for less extreme youth violence, and youthful school shooters appear more similar than different to adult perpetrators of mass shootings.

The quest to understanding school shootings has led to several wrong turns, most notably the quixotic desire by politicians, advocates, and some scholars to link both school shootings and less extreme youth violence to playing violent video games, despite considerable and increasing evidence to the contrary.

Behavioral Sciences and the Law,22 3: This article focuses on massacres where the perpetrators indiscriminately kill people in pursuit of a highly personal agenda arising from their own specific social situation and psychopathology. Five cases are presented of this type of autogenic self-generated massacre, all of whom survived and were assessed by the author.

Not only do these massacres follow an almost stereotypical course, but the perpetrators tend to share common social and psychological disabilities. They are isolates, often bullied in childhood, who have rarely established themselves in effective work roles as adults.

They have personalities marked by suspiciousness, obsessional traits, and grandiosity. They often harbor persecutory beliefs, which may occasionally verge on the delusional.

The autogenic massacre is essentially murder suicide, in which the perpetrators intend first to kill as many people as they can and then kill themselves. The script for this particular form of suicide has established itself in western society and is continuing to spread, and to diversify.

Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies.

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More than just arbitrary, using this minimum body count — as opposed to a two- or three-victim threshold suggested by others e. Moreover, by restricting our attention to acts committed by one or a few offenders, our working definition of multiple homicide also excludes highly organized or institutionalized killings e.

Although state-sponsored killings are important in their own right, they may be better explained through the theories and methods of political science than criminology. JuneVolume 14, Number 6: But dangerousness is not always the result of mental illness. Individuals who commit violent or aggressive acts often do so for reasons unrelated to mental illness….

The absolute risk of violence among the mentally ill as a group is still very small and … only a small proportion of the violence in our society can be attributed to persons who are mentally ill.

Potential to do harm is not a symptom or a sign of mental illness, rather it must be the central consideration when assessing future dangerousness.

Journal of Personality Assessment,Vol.According to an Idaho historian and commentator, events like the recent mass shootings in Texas and Las Vegas and the massacre at a Charleston, S.C., church belong to a litany of similar.

mass murderer n. 1. a.

A person who kills several or numerous victims in a single incident. b. A serial killer. 2. A person, especially a political or military leader, who is responsible for the deaths of many individuals.

mass murder n. ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend: Switch to new thesaurus Noun 1. mass murder - the savage and excessive. Oct 09,  · Robert Denerstein For 27 years, I was the film critic at The Rocky Mountain News, a Denver daily that has now vanished from the publishing scene.

Mass murder definition: Mass murder is the deliberate illegal killing of a large number of people by a person or | Meaning, pronunciation, translations and examples. Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human caninariojana.com instances of such crimes of genocide have occurred, when racial, religious, political and other groups have been destroyed, entirely or in part.

The teen gunman accused of opening fire with a semi-automatic rifle at his former high school in Parkland, Florida, has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder, officials said Thursday.