Mass  murderers  (Part 1)

 According to the FBI, (US Federal Bureau of Investigation), mass murder is defined as four or more murders occurring during a particular event with no cooling-off period between the murders. A mass murder typically occurs in a single location in which a number of victims are killed by an individual or more killers. Mass murders are committed by individuals or organizations.

 With respect to mass murder being committed by organizations, such murders are defined as the intentional and indiscriminate murder of a number of people by government agents. Examples are the shooting of unarmed protestors, the carpet bombing of cities, the lobbing of grenades into prison cells and the random execution of civilians. However for the purposes of the articles I am later submitting to you, the mass murders I will be writing about involve murderers who kill people at their schools, their employment, other places where people congregate and even on the streets. 

 Mass murderers are different from spree killers, who kill at two or more locations with almost no time break between murders and are not defined by the number of victims, and serial killers, who may kill large numbers of people over long periods of time in different locations.

 Mass murderers may fall into any of a number of categories, including killers of their families, of co-workers or ex-co-workers, of students, and of even random strangers. Their motives for murder vary however a common motivation for mass murder is revenge, but many other motivations are possible, including the need for attention or fame.

 With respect to the motive of revenge, workers and ex-workers who kill fellow employees generally do so out of revenge. These kinds of killers had been dismissed from their jobs and subsequently turned up heavily armed and killed some of their former colleagues.

 As an example, in the 1980s, when two fired postal workers carried out such massacres in separate incidents in the US, the term 'going postal' became synonymous with employees snapping and setting out on murderous rampages. The 1980s most famous ‘disgruntled worker’ cases involved computer programmer Richard Farley  who, after being fired for stalking one of his co-workers, Laura Black, returned to his former workplace and shot to death seven of his colleagues, although he failed in his attempt to kill Black herself. Sometimes these killers kill their co-workers because the killers believed that they had been bullied by their co-workers or ex-coworkers

 During the summer of 2012, it became a summer above all summers in the past where so many mass killers killed innocent people. 

 For example, an ex-marine began shooting an AK-47 at the New Jersey supermarket where he worked, killing himself and two others. This followed the previous shooting near the Empire State Building in New York, where a fired employee of an apparel importer killed a co-worker, and panicked police scattered bullets into bystanders. These two shootings were not really mass shootings because less than four people died. I only point out that the motives were revenge against co-workers in both shootings. What were mass murders was the Aurora, Colorado movie massacre, the Wisconsin Sikh temple killings, shootings near universities in Alabama and Texas, the Family Research Council shooting in Washington, D.C., this summer.

The Texas shooting rang a distant bell. In 1966, Charles Whitman began shooting from a tower at the University of Texas, killing 13 people and wounding 32, starting this hideous trend. Nowadays in the United States, it is easy for killers to obtain the guns to do the shootings.  That’s the difference between the U.S. and Canada. In the US, insane or hateful people can buy guns like they can buy donuts at Tim Hortons.

The time between the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado in April 1999 and the Gabrielle Giffords shootings in Tucson, Arizona in January 2011, as many as 200 people were shot to death in major, publicized mass killings. But this number is clearly understated and covers only the most serious events. Almost another 200 people have been shot to death in mass killings since the Tucson massacre 20 months ago, about 80 of them this year (2012) alone. That doesn’t include the slightly injured or those in critical condition, who frequently outnumber those listed as having been killed at the time of the shooting.

There are reports that there are now an average of 20 mass shootings a year in the U.S., the number having begun rising greatly since 2005. Aurora’s was the sixth in July alone.

I have always maintained that when you have one mass shooting taking place, soon after, there will be a copycat mass shooting and sure enough, this generally always happens unless the shooting deaths were family members of the shooter.

Unlike serial killers, there is rarely a sexual motive to individual mass-murderers, with the possible exception of Sylvestre Matuscha,  a Hungarian man who derive sexual pleasure  from blowing up trains with dynamite, preferably with people in them. His sexual fetish in blowing up trains claimed 22 lives before he was caught in 1931. In some rare cases mass murders have been committed during prison riots and uprisings. During the February 1980 New Mexico State Penitentiary riot, 33 inmates were killed. Most of the dead, (23) had previously been placed in the Protective Custody Unit, and were killed by other inmates using knives, axes and being burned alive with a blow torch, the crimes having been committed over a 48-hour period.

On July 22, 2011, the Norwegian home-grown terrorist Anders Behring Breivik,  killed 77 people in two separate attacks in Oslo, Norway. The first attack was a car bomb attack on the national government quarters in Oslo, killing 8 people. Behring Breivik then drove some 40 km to the island of Utøya, where a political youth camp was in progress. Dressed as a policeman, he gathered the campers and then opened fire, leading to the massacre of 69 people over the span of roughly 90 minutes. His motive was his search for fame. In my second article on mass murderers, I will later be writing about this mass killer.

There have been incidences of mass murder that has been committed by more than just one individual—mostly two killers. This generally happens less often than by a single individual but it is not uncommon. I have Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold,  the two teenage killers in the Columbine School shooting in mind.

In each of the articles that follow with respect to mass murderers, I will delve into the minds of these killers by looking into their childhood years and explain to you what motivated them to kill so many people.