One real beginning to real understanding of murderer/suicides
If we can escape the tangled web of gun control for a whle, there are some common factors among these people who murder at random with the intent of ending their own lives at the end.
One of those factors is their choice of venue. Dr. Susanna Hupp, the Texas state representative whose parents were murdered before her eyes in Luby's Restaurant pointed out that this kind of murderer/suicide
never chooses to explode at NRA conventions, meetings of gun clubs, gun stores, or shooting ranges. There are suicides at gun ranges and there are attempted gun store robberies and burglaries during the course of which the criminal is killed.
Those robberies and burglaries are not the kinds of incidents that concern us here because those criminals expect to profit by their crimes, aren't motivated by the desire for a high body count, and anticipate a successful outcome that does not include their own deaths. The gun range suicides, of course, are focused only on ending their own lives. They are not our concern either, although they might be able to provide insights into our murderer/suicides.
The murderer/suicides who do concern us invariably
choose a venue in which there are many potential victims of a homogenous kind peculiar to that venue at that time, the victims are not likely to expect an attack and have reason to feel secure, and the murderer/suicide does not expect resistance and has reason to feel safe in launching an attack that will produce multiple deaths before he is stopped and the incident ends with his own death.
Among the venues that fit that bill are schools, colleges, churches, malls, and shopping centers. And those places are mainly where these murderer/suicide incidents are launched.
From the victims' viewpoint these are "safe" places. They
feel safe in them because they are preoccupied with activities associated with safety: learning, prayer, and shopping. Their attacker knows that because he has shared their feeling of being in a safe place
there. These always are familiar places to the attacker.
From the attacker's viewpoint these are places in which he
has been assured a large enough pool of potential victims who cannot resist his superior force. All are the typical Gun Free Zones. What the victims see from the inside as a safe haven, their attackers see from the outside as a target rich environment in which there can be no effective resistance, at least not until the police arrive to stop him with equal or greater force.
When analysts focus on the gun as the demon and on gun control as the rescuing angel they ignore--perhaps intentionally--that murderer/suicide incidents take place in other such venues. The term "going postal" entered our vocabulary because there was a rash of such incidents in which postal workers were the murderer/suicides. Sure enough, every U.S. post office has a sign warning people against bringing guns.
Now that gun control advocates seem to have been successful in lobbying employers to ban firearms from their employee parking lots and business premises, I anticipate the eventual spread of murderer/suicide incidents to those places. Disaffected employees past and present will know soon enough that they can expect rich harvests.
Age is not a common factor. When people look for something they find it. People insecure about guns or opposed to them look for teenage murderer/suicide incidents and focus on them. The media looks for them because they make good stories: our children are enticed by demon guns, they say. It is true that children are fascinated by symbols of power including but not exclusively guns. They act out many fantasies in their maturation progress. The process seems essential. But generations of children have acted out cops-and-robbers, cowboys-and-indians, and other play involving guns (often with realistic toy guns) without going on murder sprees that end in their own deaths. Even in this generation such sprees are relatively rare and not all children who play with toy guns or draw them on paper become murderer/suicides.
What's striking is that they are common enough in
this generation to be noticeable but not in previous generations. This generation has made a significant contribution to warping its children into murderer/suicides. Look at the first factor for a likely reason: this generation demonizes guns and stakes out Gun Free Zones that had not existed previously. It seems reasonable to suspect that the "Gun Free Schools Act of 1994" is
directly responsible for many of these incidents.
But the murderer/suicides are
not all teenagers. In fact their lineal ancestor was 25-year-old Charles Whitman, an adult who set the pattern. On August 1, 1966 he murdered his mother and his wife, assembled provisions, clothing, materials, and weapons he had prepared in advance, rented a dolly to transport them to the University of Texas, and went with them to a tower from which he murdered 14 people and wounded 31 others before two police officers and a hastily deputized citizen were able to kill him and stop the massacre.
Before he started Whitman
knew he knew the episode would end with his death and he planned for it. He also knew that he had snapped. Whitman left behind suicide notes to his brothers including the request that "If my life insurance policy is valid please pay off my debts...donate the rest anonymously to a mental health foundation."
Other adult murderer/suicides abound. Teenagers who kill with guns make better stories. People who look for them find them. And--evidently--those people also help to create them by promising them posthumous fame if only they will murder a lot of people and then kill themselves.
It's a cheap bargain, attractive and compelling to the most vulnerable in our society: the immature, the unstable, and the emotional cripples. They are made to serve the cause not only of gun control advocates but also of those who have been taught to fear guns. These murderer/suicide incidents gratify them by validating their own aspirations and fears. Look for it, find it, popularize it, and in turn create more of it.
There is another element often overlooked. Demon guns are the perfect excuse for bad parenting and other social defects. When guns are demonized they become all powerful, incapable of being resisted by mere mortals, despite the fact that previous generations used guns without the guns using them for their own ends. Incompetent parents and failed social agendas need not be exposed when attention can be focused on objects. The devil, in other words, is responsible. To paraphrase something said recently by someone, he doesn't know how to control the real causes of murderer/suicide incidents but he does know how to control guns. Indeed.
The murderer/suicide feels deeply hurt, shamed, or humiliated. So do most of us at times in our lives. But we don't all run amok nor do we effect the ends of our lives. We work through such episodes and, for many of us, they turn out to be valuable stages in our growth.
What many people never seem to realize is that failure is
essential to the growth of strong, healthy people. The few among us who never or rarely fail are stunted in their development. Because they never fail they never develop the strength needed to overcome failure and miss developing the sense that they have such strength. They can't
count on
themselves because they have never had to
count on
themselves.
But the murderer/suicide does not have the resources to overcome hurt, shame, or humiliation. We need to understand why and we need to identify the resources denied to such people. Look for it and find it. ...
* * * * *
But I have reached the end of what I am willing to do here and now. My intent here and now was to suggest the kind of exploration of murderer/suicides that would be profitable if people only looked beyond the objects used in these incidents and looked instead at those who perform them.
Look for it and find it.
