We always want there to be an answer, except there never is. We always want there to be a solution, and there is never one of those, either.
When something like Virginia Tech happens, people want to know: Why?
Evil, that’s what some call it; mass murder, mass shootings, serial killings. The shooter in the Texas tower, Charles Manson, the Green River Killer.
People search religious texts to divine the dark mysteries of man, looking for a spiritual answer to physical violence.
Others delve into psychiatry, grasping for an answer Freud missed, something about childhood violence, sexual dysfunction and rage.
Nowadays they trace neurons through the cerebral cortex with glow-in-the-dark chemicals and talk about brain injuries and paranoid schizophrenia and thorazine drips.
All anybody has ever found, in the research of evil, is shadows and darkness, misfiring neurons and reverberating psychic pain.
Michael Welner, an associate professor of psychiatry at New York University, looking at it from the medical end, says, “There has never been a neuro-anatomical localization of mass-shooting behavior.”
Jack Levin, the director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University in Boston and the author of more than two dozen books on murder and criminology, says: “We’re still in the dark about where this comes from.”
There have been lots of books about serial killers, lots of brain research and many more mass shootings. There’s talk about high levels of dopamine and plunging levels of serotonin. There’s research into the limbic system, a primitive part of the brain that controls emotions and behavior. New medications have revolutionized care for depression.
None of the research really touches the psychology of mass murder.
“In mass shootings, the killer is often killed themselves, so we don’t really have the ability to interview and analyze them – all you can really do is work off their behavior,” says Neil Kaye, an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia.
Some of the research tells us the obvious: About 95 percent of mass killers are men, they tend to be loners, they feel alienated. They look normal on the outside and are really, really angry inside.
Mass killers tend to be rejected romantically or are sexually incompetent, are paranoid, and their resentment builds. They develop shooting fantasies for months or years, stockpiling dreams and ammunition.
The event that finally sets them off, Welner says, is usually anticlimactic – an argument, a small personal loss that magnifies a sense of catastrophic failure.
“But they don’t ‘snap,’ as you so often hear people say,” Welner says. “It’s more like a hinge swings open, and all this anger comes out.”
They plan everything about the killings, he says, except how to get away.
“It’s about suicide,” Welner says. “It’s about tying one’s masculinity to destruction.”
