What makes a mass killer? Turns out many fit the profile
A sobering assessment: ‘We can’t round up all the people who scare us’
They have become one of the most notorious and alarming stripes of evil. People who, when you think back, seemed off. Didn’t dress right. Kept to themselves. Were nursing a bitterness that smoldered inside of them. And then they picked up guns and went out and killed as many as they could.
In the aftermath, the same questions arise: Why didn’t everyone know? Why weren’t they stopped?
Now those questions are being asked about Christopher Harper-Mercer, who for reasons yet to be deciphered slaughtered nine people at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore., on Thursday. They’ve been asked about the man who killed nine people in a church in Charleston, S.C. The man who killed six people in Isla Vista, Calif., last year. The man who killed a dozen people at the Washington Navy Yard in 2013.
And so forth.
What seems telling about the killers, however, is not how much they have in common but how much they look and seem like so many others who don’t inflict harm.
Weaving a profile of the public mass murderer, drawing on threads that have been identified, can reveal the broad contours of a certain type of individual. But those contours are indistinct enough to apply to countless others — the recluse next door with poor hygiene who never speaks — who will never pick up a gun and go out and murder.
“The big problem is that the kind of pattern that describes them describes tens of thousands of Americans — even people who write awful things on Facebook or the Internet,”
said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has studied and written about mass murderers. “We can’t round up all the people who scare us.”
While the mass public killings that have drawn intense public attention seem to be recurring in daunting frequency, their quantity is actually relatively small, at least compared with other kinds of mass murders.
Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections, has studied more than 1,300 mass murders that took place between 1900 and 2013. Of them, he classifies 160 as mass public shootings, ones in which at least four people were shot and killed in a concentrated period, excluding those in family settings or involving other crimes.
There were few before the 1960s. The incident, Duwe said, that is viewed by some academics as having “introduced the nation to the idea of mass murder in a public space” happened in 1966, when Charles Whitman climbed a tower at the University of Texas at Austin and killed 16 people.
Using data compiled by Duwe, the Congressional Research Service released a report this year that charted an increase in these shootings since then, from 1.1 per year during the 1970s to 4.1 in the 2000s and a slight uptick in the last few years. The figures, however, are subject to intense debate, mainly over how to properly define the shootings.
Those who study these types of mass murderers have found that they are almost always male (all but two of the 160 cases isolated by Duwe). Many are single, separated or divorced. The majority are white. With the exception of student shooters at high schools or lower schools, they are usually older than the typical murderer, often in their 30s or 40s.
They vary in ideology. They generally have bought their guns legally. Many had evidence of mental illness, particularly those who carried out random mass killings. But others did not, and most people with mental illness are not violent.
“They’re depressed,” Fox said. “They’re not out of touch with reality. They don’t hear voices. They don’t think the people they’re shooting are gophers.”
‘In social isolation’
They don’t fit in. Their most comfortable companion is themselves. According to Fox, mass killers tend to be “people in social isolation with a lack of support systems to help them through hard times and give them a reality check.”
“They have a history of frustration,” he went on. “They externalize blame. Nothing is ever their fault. They blame other people even if other people aren’t to blame. They see themselves as good guys mistreated by others.”
Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Duke University School of Medicine, said these individuals often feel they don’t belong, yet frequently live in “smaller town settings where belonging really matters.”
Harper-Mercer showed signs of such isolation and despair. Like others, he appeared smitten by past mass killers.
“They see them as heroes,” Fox said. “Someone who wins one for the little guy.”
Elliot O. Rodger, a 22-year-old California college student, had not had any friends since grade school. What little interactions he had seemed to be online, while playing the video game “World of Warcraft.” Many mass killers gravitate to violent video games, as do many young men in general, though this could be more a symptom of their isolation than a cause of their violence.
A parent of an elementary school classmate said her husband refused to allow their son to spend the night with Rodger, who would hide in their home when he would visit. Simon Astaire, who served as the family spokesman, said at the time, “He was as withdrawn as any person I ever met in my life.”
As a teenager, he received a diagnosis of a developmental disorder identified in part by a difficulty interacting with others.
At Santa Barbara City College, Rodger clashed with his roommates and lived a life online. He stopped attending classes, and he posted videos about being rejected by women.
Not long before he acted, he posted a video to YouTube. It showed him sitting behind the steering wheel of his BMW, ranting about his isolation, the women who had shown no interest in him, and his disappointment at being a virgin. He complained, as well, about all the sexually active men who were enjoying life more than he was.
“It all has to come to this,” Rodger said in the video. “Tomorrow is the day of retribution. The day I will have my retribution against humanity. Against all of you.”
On May 23, 2014, he stabbed three men to death in his apartment, then drove off and shot three others from his car in the crowded streets of Isla Vista. After two shootouts with sheriff ’s deputies, he killed himself.
Pedro Alberto Vargas was another solitary man; he lived with his elderly mother in an apartment complex in Hialeah, Fla., and rarely spoke with anyone. One of the few people he talked to — an acquaintance at the gym — told reporters that Vargas exercised as a way to release his anger, and that he had had bad experiences with women.
He had a checkered employment history. A graphic designer, Vargas clashed with a supervisor at Miami Dade College, his alma mater, who had written that Vargas “lacks social skills” and that “it is hard for him to accept change.”
When the college discovered in 2008 that he had downloaded inappropriate files from the Internet, including some related to violence and sex, he was forced to resign. That pattern continued at his next two jobs, with Vargas getting fired after brief stints.
On July 26, 2013, Vargas, 42, brought a gasoline can into his apartment. He poured the gasoline over a stack of money on the floor and lit a match. The building managers, a married couple, rushed to the apartment, and Vargas fatally shot them. He left the apartment and continued shooting, killing four more people before being killed by police.
So many of the murderers end up dead. It is not possible to ask them why they killed.
The majority of mass shooters, experts believe, target specific people for specific reasons. Explicit writings or social media postings sometimes reveal their motivation. A grudge against their boss and co-workers. Or whoever happens to be at their place of employment, as was true with the rash of postal shootings. Their wives and children.