[briandg]

Nanuk, would it be safe to pretty much divide these things into two major divisions?

What I see is that we have a group of people who have been mentally unbalanced and went after groups of people for the sake of destroying as many (usually) random victims that they feel deserve to be made dead. Not always logical or rational. Las vegas, columbine, Aurora, luby's and the various mall shootings... The goal is disorganized and even though they are planned, they are somewhat like improv night. We plan, fantasize for hours, write a script, set a date and time and place, then go to town. Maybe the general target will be ethnic, religious, or even the general police population such as the donut shop massacre many years ago. But even so, some of these people are harboring such viciousness and anger and determination that the instinct for survival and determination to complete the mission will make it so all consuming that the shooter would walk through fire just to kill one more time.

Offhand at this time, Luby's has always been stuck in my thoughts as a truly different one. He blamed the city and the population, years of anger and hate simmering, and one day he just went all dill pickles in the head and walked into a restaurant and started shooting those random people who he blamed for every problem in his life. He would have killed the whole city if he could have. Every shot he took seemed to be something personal, rather than a different kind of nut who just killed whoever he could see because he was on a rampage. I don't think that he would have stopped until he was stopped and would have fought everyone to the end. Otherwise, I think that this situation may have been ended quickly if armed citizens had been there, he seemed to be unfocused on the whole and tunneling in on the one in front of him.

Did the guy in aurora really seem to be consumed by hate and revenge? Did he really have a deep grudge against all of humanity, with thousands of people who deserved to die, or was he just wanting to kill a bunch of people? The guy from luby's was seeing the face of his boss, the guy at the bank, the cop who gave him a ticket, wives, girlfriends, every face that had ever looked at his and did him wrong.

Then there are a number of mass killings that are more similar, IMO, to mass assassinations. The guy who goes and kills his entire family, kills off his coworkers in an office, so forth. Not always so thoroughly planned, sometimes impromptu, and could have done it just as well with gasoline but wanted to see the faces.

This pa and some other stories like the la or miami shootout don't really fit that. It was a reaction. Not planned. In this case especially, the instinct for survival is a whole lot more powerful, in this case, instinct for self preservation is what triggered what may have been an unplanned killing spree. I can't quite think of any others right now, but there have been many mass and spree killings that had a specific trigger that weren't as much of a long term exercise in aberrant thinking and actions.


There is a perfectly human desire to compartmentalize everything into as few boxes as possible. We have well over 100.000 words in the dictionary that are currently used, but just about every person out there would prefer to keep things simple. Police psychologists probably have a dozen or more categories that they group these people into, such as "crazy, disorganized revenge shooter" and "deliberate, organized, thrill shooter". It's easy for the people to say "oh, there was another mass shooting. I'll bet that he used a gun, we need to ban them."