Word: killers
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...scares and other threats closed schools in seven states. As the news cycle surrendered to round-the-clock coverage, finding meaning in the mayhem was a performance art: Dr. Phil was warning about the dangers of a violent popular culture before anyone knew which culture had produced this particular killer. Bill O'Reilly whacked "America haters" and knee-jerk gun controllers before declaring his support for more "sensible" gun-control laws than those of the Commonwealth of Virginia, which allowed a suicidal kid with a history of mental illness to get multiple weapons without any trouble...
...Seung-Hui, the 23-year-old student responsible for the Virginia Tech bloodbath, walking the halls of the school, selecting lives to extinguish and then ... extinguishing them. It is perhaps a measure of our humanity that we could sooner imagine ourselves as the killed than as the killer, and find it easier to conjure up what it would feel like to plead for our lives than to take someone else...
...people who are in a position to observe a Dahmer at work survive to talk about it, but plenty of people present at shootings like those at Virginia Tech or Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in 1999 make it out alive. And what they describe about the killer's mien as the shooting is taking place sounds nothing like a person who's thrilled by - or even much enjoying - what he's doing. There is, survivors report, a cold joylessness to the proceedings, something that in its own way is a lot harder to parse than the perverse pleasure...
...Mass murder, in short, is not a random act. There are things that explain it. Psychosis, for one, can never be ruled out. Russell Weston, a 41-year-old killer who went on a shooting spree in the Capitol Building in Washington in 1998, was a paranoid schizophrenic. Brain injury in an otherwise healthy person can lead to similar violence. Damage to the frontal region of the brain, which regulates what psychologists call the observing ego, or the limbic region, which controls violence, reflection and defensive behavior, can shut down internal governors and trigger all manner of unregulated behavior. "Somebody...
...everything we know so far, however, Cho was suffering from none of these things. Any wounds that he carried were deeper, psychic ones - and in all likelihood, he shared them with most of the mass shooters who have gone before him. In many ways, the profile of the mass killer looks a lot like the profile of the clinical narcissist, and that's a very bad thing. Never mind the disorder's name, narcissism is a condition defined mostly by disablingly low self-esteem, requiring the sufferer to seek almost constant recognition and reward. When the world and the people...