Comments 10

枪击犯思维剖析

Oct 3, 2017 Raj Persaud , Adrian Furnham

伦敦—这个周末，史蒂芬·帕多克（Stephen Paddock）在内华达州拉斯维加斯的一家饭店居高临下朝一个乡村音乐节开火，至少杀害了59人，伤及500多人。帕多克今年64岁，曾经是一名会计师，没有犯罪记录，最后他被发现在饭店房间中，已经死亡，身边有23支枪，其中包括十多支突击武器。随后警察又在帕多克家中找到了另外19支枪、炸弹和数千发子弹。但当局仍未找到他的作案动机。

随后几天，更多关于帕多克心理和目标的细节有可能会揭露。但所谓的“独狼”枪击犯——与任何运动和意识形态都没有什么关系的犯罪个体——并非新现象，这些案件为枪击犯的动机和思维过程提供了重要线索。

大部分枪击犯都不会在他们自己造成的袭击案中活下来；他们要么自杀，要么让警察击毙。但活下来的那些枪击犯，表现出一些共同特征，自恋型人格障碍和偏执型精神分裂是最常见的两个诊断。安德斯·布雷维克（Anders Breivik）就是如此，这位挪威极右翼恐怖分子在2011年引爆汽车炸弹杀死了八人，然后在一家青少年夏令营射杀69名营员。他仍然在挪威服刑。

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Raj Persaud

Writing for PS since 2017
8 Commentaries

Raj Persaud is a psychiatrist based in London, and co-author of the forthcoming book The Street-wise Guide to Getting the Best Mental Health Care.

Adrian Furnham

Writing for PS since 2017
4 Commentaries

Adrian Furnham is Professor of Psychology at University College London.

0 Comments on this paragraph, 10 in all 10 Comments on this article

Avatara Tari Oct 27, 2017

All nicely explained in this article. Not disclosed is only one, the most important topic: HOW is the sale of weapons in the United States that explicit and paranoid schizophrenics easily buy not only usual, but also automatic weapons???
Jerome Yurow Oct 15, 2017

In contrast to the author's statement: "In Paddock’s case, such quiet planning may explain the armory found in his home and hotel room, which he rented several days prior to the attack." I remember reading that Paddock was an inveterate gambler at the hotel/casino that months before the shooting had granted him "permanent residence" in his room on the 32nd floor.
Gregory Peterson Oct 13, 2017

Would it make a difference if all firearms such as the ones used by these murderers were suddenly made illegal? I don't think so. Legislation to eliminate access to rapid-fire weapons will do nothing to alleviate the big-picture problem of mass murders in American society. The dysfunctional psyche with the will to kill others is the root of the problem. Until we get a handle on how to identify and help those with the propensity to commit such violent acts, we won't see the end of mass-killings.

Gregory
- Jason H Oct 15, 2017
  
  Well it certainly worked in Australia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_(Australia)
  I live there and they were reasonably frequent throughout my youth. They just don’t happen anymore with there being little access to guns.
  
  The truth is out there if you want it, but if you keep refusing to believe it then it just sounds like your ideology trumps reality.
  
  Look at Japan, uk etc and you’ll see similar low mass killings on orders of magnitude lower than the USA. If you don’t want change and are happy with 30,000+ deaths a year by guns then just say it; but at least be honest.
Kai Kaufmann Oct 11, 2017

I find it weird to read about "lone wolf" attacks, and then hear the name Anders Breivik. Last time I checked, he is alive, originally claimed to belong to a group called "Knights Templar" and never distanced himself from them (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/9212090/Anders-Behring-Breivik-trial-the-real-Lionheart.html). Though the person who conceived the ideas Breivik took as background to the attack, did distance himself from the shooter. As concerns the underlying psychology, a few aspects may be shared among many shooters. One aspect may be humiliation as the mixing of shame and anger. Another one may be, overcompensating for the feeling of powerlessness, a superiority complex in the sense of Alfred Adler. Fyodor Dostoevsky captured it, so did Robert Pirsig and Friedrich Nietzsche, and more recently it was brought in the context of mass shootings/terror attacks by Orhan Pamuk. For example in this lucid article that he wrote a full five years before being en-NOBLE-d: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/29/afghanistan.terrorism7
Karen Williams Oct 7, 2017

"Mullen argues that the script for this particular type of suicide has become entrenched in modern culture, and continues to attract willing lead actors. If we are unable to use the knowledge we have gleaned from past experience to prevent them from taking the stage, they will continue to take aim at audiences."

Does Mullen have any concrete suggestions for how we could prevent these actors from taking the stage? It seems to me that understanding them gets us almost nowhere towards preventing their acts of violence.

We can't lock men up just for seeming to be this type, nor can we realistically deny them access to weaponry. "You seem like an angry fellow, so no guns for you"??? Plus, all sorts of things can be used as weapons. Remember the truck on the beach?

I suppose doing a better job of teaching our kids how to constructively interact with others might be the key. Unfortunately, teaching maturity requires first attaining it oneself.
Emanuel Müller Oct 4, 2017

In Europe, we are confronted to a series of mass murders, among them mass shootings, branded "islamist" in most cases, or "white supremacist" in the case of Breivik. One banal way to look at them is to speculate that they are high intensity low frequency actions or reactions by "minorities" to their subjectively perceived mirror images, which would be low intensity high frequency actions or reactions by "majorities". For example nearly each time I put my feet in France I can observe various sub-types of low intensity racist behaviour, especially interesting when committed by public employees. Manuel Valls branded France a form of apartheid state, and could even show that french provincial hospitals practice a form of racial discrimination at the level of hiring, with the predictable transfer of diligent health services and thus life years from minorities towards the white european majority. In the Las Vegas case, the perpetrator might have sought of himself as part of an "advanced and high (32nd floor)" minority, having e.g. worked for Lockheed, and basically lashed out against a "retarded and low" majority represented by country music fans. The asymmetries and mirroring of dynamical principles seem a possibly interesting way, if not exactly soothing way to look at mass murders.
Emanuel Müller Oct 3, 2017

I wonder to which extent mass killers, especially in the US, are micro-cosmic version of the macro-cosmic actions of the nation in which they reside. For example, Germany isn't involved in many, if any, mass killings of "bad guys", be it in Irak, Syria or elsewhere, while France, Russia, the US etc... have involved themselves in many mass killings of e.g. dangerous terrorists, and possibly as a consequence, mass killings seem more common in France, Russia, the US than in say Germany, or caricaturally Switzerland. It is as if the microcosm and the macrocosm were taking the same habits, e.g. if something or someone appears very bad to you, you can kill it or him/her/him-her/no-gender, but the perception of what is bad or good is always subjective, be it at the level of the individual or the nation and violence contrary to force seems deemed to generate unintended consequences due to it's uncontrollable nature.
- Emanuel Müller Oct 7, 2017
  
  @DELIA RUHE
  Do you mean ignorance of the "other" and readiness to use violence against the "other" go hand in hand? I guess if we ignore nothing about another, he loses the status of "other", and conversely, if ignore ourself, the opposite of "know yourself" aka "γνῶθι σεαυτόν", we might be another to ourself. I can't imagine violence against the self without the self being perceived as "other", nor violence against the "other" or the "others" without their perception as being non-self. Within the body, the immune system has a lot of work to do to distinguish between self, non-self, with a lot of confusion sometimes in the form of auto-immune reactions. Seen from afar, a random guy, killing random people, that are grosso modo part of the same "self" be it ethnic, cultural or whatnot is heavily reminding me of an auto-immune reaction, the random individual self, suddenly decides that the collective self has become "other" (random hetero-aggression), or even that the self has become "other" (random auto-aggression). Ideally people should perceive the advantages of being and acting like symbionts toward each other, but the there are some difficulties to generalize that understanding, probably mostly rooted in our imperfect "know yourself" individual and collective achievements.
- Delia Ruhe Oct 6, 2017
  
  A possible “micro-cosmic version of the macro-cosmic actions of the nation” occurred to me as I read the article and your comment:
  
  “Why do they hate us” still floats to the surface occasionally, even though it’s been 16 years since the question began to be asked with respect to terrorism. By contrast, my question would be: Why are there still Americans who haven’t figured that out (and do any of them own a bunch of guns)?

http://prosyn.org/q41PmUj/zh;

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