Another Mass Murder

Another mass murder, this time in Pennsylvania. A man who had trouble getting girlfriends went into a fitness center and randomly shot twelve women, three of whom died, before turning the gun on himself. After a couple of days the story subsided. Ho hum, just another day in what passes for normal in the U.S.A.

I was interested to know how common this kind of thing is around the world. I mean, not counting war and terroristic murders perpetrated for some political end, are other societies having this kind of problem with homicidal individuals going over the edge and the American press just isn't reporting about it here, or what?

I googled the issue and it seems we really are in a class by ourselves in terms of serial and mass killers. The United States has 76% of these kinds of murders. We have 4.6% of the world's population but 76% of the world's deaths at the hands of maniacal murderers. Does that sound healthy to you? No, not to me either.

There seems to be precious little discussion about it. Some of the facts we know are that 90% of the killers are men and 68% of the victims female. Bob Herbert of the New York Times wrote an op-ed August 8 attributing much of the carnage to misogyny.

There is some evidence the problem is getting worse. Mark Kopta, psychology chair at the University of Evansville in Indiana, presented a paper on the topic at the recent Midwestern Psychological Association meeting in Chicago. Defining a mass killing as causing "the deaths of at least five people," including the killer's suicide when that is part of the toll he found only three such incidents from 1930 to 1970, three in the 1970s, ten in the 1980s, seventeen in the 1990s and 25 in the 2000s, which still have a year and a half to go. Six occurred in 2008 alone, and eight in a little over half a year so far in 2009.

You would think there would be a lot of interest in determining the cause or causes of such a development, but such does not appear to be the case. Economic and racial explanations do not seem to hold up. The mass killing rate was not high in the 1930s, for instance. It went up both in the 1990s when the economy was good and the 2000s when it was bad. In terms of race, 84% of the killers and 89% of their victims have been white.

Misogyny could be a factor. So could the ease with which mentally ill individuals can get their hands on weapons capable of killing many people. What about the prevalence of violence and the sexual exploitation of women in the entertainment media, including music, film, advertising and video gaming? Two common elements in the phenomenon are rage and firearms. As Dr. Kopta says, "Anger is the most seductive emotion of all. When people get angry, they don't want to stop being angry."

We as a society really ought to be talking about this. Behavior like this is extremely sick. Other societies are not experiencing it. That tends to indicate there is something seriously amiss here. Are there ways to better prevent such antisocial attitudes from developing and to identify individuals who are exhibiting the telltale signs, to get them the psychological help they need or to protect the rest of us from them? Or do we just shrug and accept is as the new normal? The answer to this question will say a lot about the state of American society these days.