Word: massing
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...Snapping is a misnomer," says Dr. Michael Welner, associate professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine. "These people plan to carry out a mass killing without any indication of when they will do it. Instead of snapping, imagine a cage that someone has the capacity to unhinge. They simply decide that today...
...more than 87% of the population is made up of those two races. Cho, a native of South Korea, is a rare exception. If the killers' profiles are all more or less the same, however, their crimes aren't. The best known - or at least most lurid - of the mass killers are the Ted Bundys and Jeffrey Dahmers, the serial murderers whose crimes often play out over decades. In most cases, people who commit such murders are driven by a dark, even sexual pleasure, and while remorse is often associated with the acts - which accounts for the long lapses that...
...That does not seem to be the case with a mass murderer who kills at once. Few 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...
...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...
...From 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...