Psychological Aspects of Mass Killing

 

PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF MASS KILLINGS

Christopher Ebbe, Ph.D.     12-12

ABSTRACT:  Various “reasons” for mass killings are explored, including the motives, feelings, and state of mind of the shooters.  Possibilities for prevention are addressed.

KEY WORDS:  mass shootings, mass killings, violence, mental illness, school violence

INITIAL REACTIONS

As the nation mourns the deaths of 26 people (20 of them young children) in the Newtown, Connecticut school shooting earlier this month, there is naturally discussion of how to prevent such occurrences in the future.  These discussions center, as they have after previous such events, on restricting availability of guns, on mental illness, and on violent video games.  The guns discussion focuses on whether having fewer guns in society and making it harder to obtain guns would reduce the number of gun deaths, and various presentations of the imperfect data on such violence claim that gun deaths would be reduced or that they would not.  One side claims that there is no good reason not to ban assault weapons (or even automatic weapons), while some on the other side, in addition to whatever arguments are offered regarding hobbies or collecting, feel deep down that citizens having guns is an essential counterbalance to the coercive power of government.  (Our heritage as a nation is imbued with this suspicion and distrust of all governments, including our own.)

The mental illness discussion involves disbelief about how any sane or “normal” person could commit such destructive actions and calls for more available mental health care.  It is true that, in the interest of saving money, there are now more mentally ill persons in our communities, rather than in long-term hospital care.  It is also true that funding for mental health care in general is very low on governmental priority lists and is always subject to early cuts when funds run low.  (We always complain after a natural disaster about our lack of preparedness, but spending for non-medical prevention, whether that is preparing better for hurricanes or preventing crime, is always hard to come by, since we human beings place much greater value on the immediate and the concrete than on the possible.)

The problems with depending on more mental health care to prevent violence are that (1) the field admits to being quite poor at predicting violence in patients and (2) as a society we dislike the idea of coercive treatment (legally forcing certain patients to be medicated and to “report” frequently to some authority).  In court proceedings, for instance, practitioners are not held accountable for being wrong in predicting violence but only for not predicting it if most of their colleagues would have done so.  Various evaluation schemes, as well as clinical predictions, can predict violence with better than chance results but not at a level to give us any sense of security in depending on them for actually reducing violence.  These predictions are difficult, of course, partly because the rate of violence of all types among the mentally ill is at most only marginally higher than the rate in the overall population.  (Available data indicate that it is either not different from the population as a whole or is marginally higher.) 

As a society we are not ready to incarcerate or to pay for coercive outpatient treatment for patients that we have insufficient reason to believe will be violent, and if we were to rope into coercive treatment all patients who are more likely than others to be in some way violent, including hitting a caretaker once, for example, this group of patients would be rather large, and no doubt funding would be denied, or made so meager that the prevention effort would be spotty and ultimately ineffective.

It is reasonable to suppose that if we had twice as many mental health clinics and if the stigma of mental illness could be lessened in our society that the number of incidents of gun violence by the mentally ill could be reduced, but given that the number of such incidents is already low, even cutting it in half would still mean that we would continue to have some of these sensational occurrences.  As a psychologist, I would certainly like to see twice as many mental health clinics available to the public, as long as this would also mean more adequate funding.  Reductions in mental health funding for years across the country has resulted in most “treatment” being medications (which assuage but do not cure) and “case management” (helping with housing, encouraging patients to actually take their medications, etc.).  Psychotherapy is not even offered to adults in many public mental health settings currently, and even if it is offered, it is not offered in sufficient amounts to make any difference in a patient’s emotional life.

Opinion is divided regarding the contribution of violent video games to overt violence.  Psychological research trends toward demonstrating that a significant amount of experience with these games, in which the participant shoots others with guns, does result in those participants viewing gun violence as more “normal” and acceptable than they would if they had not used the games.  Despite this, though, the vast majority of persons who have a significant amount of experience playing violent video games will never shoot anyone in real life.  A few might, but most won’t.  This is similar to the predictive problem with mental illness.  The vast majority of persons with mental illness will never harm anyone else, but a few will.  As a society we are reluctant to ban violent video games in return for the tiny impact this would make on mass shootings, since we value our freedoms to do what we enjoy, including playing violent video games.

THE SHOOTERS

We should note that mass shootings are not carried out by criminals for gain but rather are done for emotional reasons.  There are two primary types of individuals who shoot multiple other people because of their emotions.  One group shoots to rectify a situationally-related sense of unfairness.  Something has been “done to” them by another (or by a group) that seems so egregiously unfair that, on top of whatever other stresses the person is undergoing, it seems as if fighting back with violence is the only option left.  Occasionally this is in response to a service that the individual is dissatisfied with, such as medical services, but we see this most often in workplace shootings after a person has been terminated or disciplined in what he or she perceives as a terribly unfair or catastrophically impactful way.  These individuals usually are not seen by others as having serious emotional problems or mental illnesses, but many probably have character traits or issues that have prevented them from being able to cope better with the various stresses and insults that they (and all of us) have faced recently.  (Here we have the same problem as predicting violence in the mentally ill—that we could pick out workers who are odd or seem to have “problems,” but the percent of those who would eventually engage in violence is so low that we would unfairly label and be suspicious of a very large number of persons who do not “deserve” that suspicion.)  We can readily understand the violence of these situationally-suffering persons, since it is clear that something serious has been done to them by someone else who becomes the focus of revenge.

The second group of shooters are more difficult for us to understand, since they are responding to a more general sense of unfairness with regard to their entire lives.  These individuals feel lonely, alienated, and rejected in general by everyone, and they both lose hope finally that their lives can be any better and feel angry enough at those who have rejected them that they consider violent action.  These individuals are usually young and often have chronic emotional problems.  Some of these problems are diagnosable mental disorders, but some of these individuals are simply unhappy and suffering but not symptomatic enough to be considered to have a mental disorder.

The key characteristic of persons in both of these groups is that they are feeling what comes to be perceived as intolerable emotional pain.  Those around them tend to ignore any signs of this pain, partly because we believe that people should manage their own pain and partly because we do not want to involve ourselves with these persons.  Our belief that people should manage their own pain, plus the stigma of seeking mental health treatment, results in both situationally-suffering and lifelong-suffering individuals being reluctant to seek help (or believing that no one would care or listen anyway).  The fact that this pain goes unrecognized and unacknowledged is the main factor and the simplest factor that results in mass shootings.

Those who object to this analysis might question whether an individual “should” be feeling such pain, whether they should blame others for that pain, and why they would consider violence even if they are feeling such pain.  People in our society are reluctant to acknowledge and talk about their feelings, including the pain of rejection, unfairness, and failure that the lifelong sufferers live with every day.  We also believe that people “should” respond to pain and problems by gathering strength themselves and doing something about the pain and problems—by “toughing it out” and doing what is needed to get what they need.

Persons who live with being chronically ignored, rejected, and not included usually make some efforts to be socially included while growing up, but if these are rebuffed, they feel ashamed and retreat from their efforts and may simply give up trying after some years of attempting to figure out how to be included. Being accepted as part of the group (family, peer group, etc.) is one of the strongest needs of human beings, since being excluded means isolation, low status, fewer gratifications, or even death.  It is also the human need that brings the most emotional pain if not met.  Try to imagine the shame, disappointment, and hopelessness of a teenager who is belittled, taunted, or even bullied by his peers for years.  Imagine that he has tried to be friends and be respected by others in the school but that the only ones who will talk with him and not look at him “funny” are other outcasts.  The company of other outcasts is better than nothing, but he is still aware, every day, of being an outcast.  Perhaps you can imagine how much this hurts by extension from your own few experiences of rejection.  Keep in mind that this rejection is not just by one other person (girlfriend, boyfriend, etc.) but by the whole school (or the whole town, etc.)—at least that is what it feels like when everyone ignores you and looks down on you.

As to whom to blame for this general rejection, the whole non-accepting group is reasonably blamed.  Many of them have directly rejected, teased, taunted, bullied, or simply made fun of the individual, at least to others if not to the person himself or herself.  We might object that we did none of these things ourselves, but did we not accept and support the group’s general rejection of the individual by not speaking up and opposing it and by not taking the step ourselves to communicate some trace of acceptance to the person?  We participated by being an indistinguishable part of the rejecting group.  We can still object that it is not fair to be blamed ourselves as simply part of the group, but think of it from the point of view of the rejected person.  All he sees is a group of people, all allied against him, and in the pain of the group rejection, he may not stop to sort people into “those who hurt me directly” and those who simply stood by.

A huge majority of outcasts do not fight back with violence but instead continue through life dealing with or numbing their pain with whatever means they can find (computers, video games, drugs, medications).  (Some outcasts with technology skills can now earn a good living in the computer and software industries, but some of these still feel the pain of rejection so strongly that they become outlaws within society by becoming hackers.)  The reason that a few turn to violence—particularly gun violence--may have to do with familiarity to guns, access to guns, and the degree to which they view gun violence as a relatively acceptable method of revenge or of redressing inequities.  A person who knows how to shoot and is familiar with guns is more likely to use guns for revenge than someone who has no such familiarity, and a person who has a gun is more likely to use it for revenge than someone who does not have a gun.  Of course, this does not imply that anyone who knows guns and has a gun is a danger to others.  We are agreed that the number of those who will use guns for mass shootings is extremely small.

This country has a history of gun ownership and use of guns for self-protection and for protecting our freedoms, but in the last fifty years, the exposure of everyone in the culture to the use of guns has increased dramatically.  This has been through the media and the increasing amount of time that we have been spending watching movies and television and playing video games that involve violence.  A staggering number of movies, TV shows, and video games portray the use of guns against other people in a positive light.  “Entertainment” quite frequently portrays people protecting themselves, “leveling the playing field,” gaining justified revenge, and getting what they want through the use of guns.  This frequent exposure to gun use in the media has tended to make the use of guns more “normal” to us than it used to seem.  We are for the most part unaware of this change in our perceptions, because human beings automatically view everything against the context of their total experience, and “entertainment” plays a larger part in our experience of the world than it used to.  It makes little difference if we can consciously “tell the difference between reality and entertainment” if asked to do so, since changes in these assumptions and conclusions are largely unconscious for most people.  The media exposure counts significantly in the totality of experience that determines our expectations and attitudes.

If you doubt this, consider your expectation that the U.S. always wins wars.  In actual fact, we do not (1812?, Vietnam?, Afghanistan?), and we often enter conflicts without understanding what they will be like (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan).  The media portrayals of courageous U.S. soldiers killing others and always coming out on top has given us this assumption that we always win.  Since media portrays what will make money for it, we see no movies about U.S. soldiers doing wrong or losing, so that is not part of our experience, and we do not think that it is even part of reality.

Consider also the perception of many who watch regional TV news that there is much more crime than there actually is.  Since the news shows as much as they can of the crime that occurs in the area (to attract viewers) we naturally assume unconsciously that this accurately represents the risk of crime in every neighborhood, which it does not.  The same applies to our perceptions that stem from watching movies.  Since so many movies are about crime, we conclude that there is more crime than there actually is, since we assume that the number and proportion of these movies accurately portrays reality.

Movies that describe historical events tend to be believed by viewers, even if they change some important details.  Moviegoers will afterward say and believe that how the movie portrayed things is what actually happened.  The recent flap over the movie “Zero Dark Thirty”’s portrayal that information extracted by torture was important in finding Osama Bin Laden illustrates this.  Some members of the government who were involved have objected strenuously that this was not the case, but most of us who see the movie will afterward believe without question that torture was involved, because we “saw it happen.”

Once an attitude or perception has changed for an individual or for a culture, it is hard to remember how things used to be (unless you are one of a group that has, for instance, been discriminated against in the past).  Hence we are largely unconscious of the change in our attitudes or feelings regarding guns.  This is part of our human tendencies to assume that how things are is how they used to be as well as how they will always be, which is often true and is a useful “don’t have to think about it in order to act or decide in the moment” rule, but it is, of course, not true.

A final example is our assumption that what we first hear is correct.  Listen to the arguments between people who have two different sources of information about the same event or issue.  Each will argue that what he heard was correct, even though each heard only one source and neither has any corroboration.  Again, we assume that what we hear or see represents the whole of reality accurately. 

The important point for this essay regarding our attitudes toward gun violence is that our exposure to so much gun use in entertainment has tilted the view of guns of most people toward viewing them as normal parts of life and as legitimate tools to solve some problems.  This makes their use for violence just a little easier and a little more likely for a few people, and this contributes to our mass shooting occurrences.

The same argument applies even more strongly to those who spend significant amounts of time playing video games in which they shoot others.  This familiarity and the pleasures of achieving goals through shooting others, even in fantasy, make it a little easier for these people to turn to guns in real life to solve problems and achieve goals.

It is noteworthy, though not important for this essay, that most mass shootings are by men.  The likely explanation lies with males’ evolution and socialization to be more aggressive than females in general and with females’ specific evolution and socialization to be nurturant.

Guns’ tremendous power in terms of impact and distance of effect and the personal impact satisfaction that guns bring (feeling that we are directly expressing or defending, through guns, our emotions and desires) account for their choice in mass killing.  We never hear of mass knifings, since they would be so much more difficult to effect, and mass poisoning (gases or food or water contamination) is not nearly as satisfying emotionally as shooting others.

The “whys,” then, of mass shootings consist of—

• the degree of emotional pain experienced, either situationally or life-long
• familiarity with guns
• access to guns
• the extent to which the potential shooter views guns as normal tools for solving problems and achieving goals, through the general attitude in the culture as well as through personal normalizing experience via media and games

PREVENTION

Our natural attention regarding prevention is drawn to making guns less accessible and to blaming mental illness.  In our society it is natural to try to get others to behave differently without having to do anything about problems ourselves (except pay our taxes).  We use laws and “programs” to try to change certain types of people and circumstances.  As has been pointed out above, these kinds of actions may prevent some mass shootings but will not eliminate them.

We could make guns much harder to get, but we do not want to “disarm the public,” and the vast majority of gun users will never shoot anyone else.  We could set up more “programs” for the mentally ill, including forced treatment for some, but in doing this we would infringe unnecessarily on the privacy and healthcare rights of many, many of those who in our fear we would judge to have “some potential” to harm someone else, since the vast majority will not engage in gun violence.  (Having more restrictive and robust criteria for persons on whom to force treatment would avoid the rights issues, and my wild guess is that it might prevent one shooting per decade.)  We could ban gun violence in movies or restrict it to a certain percentage of movies, but we would howl about censorship, and many of us like seeing violent movies.  We could ban violent video games or criminalize playing such games, but this would again prevent only a very few of the shootings.  (It is worth noting that our society’s notion of freedoms and responsibilities is founded on the assumption that people generally act rationally.  Mass shooting is a circumstance in which people act emotionally and justify their actions by rationalization, so it contradicts our basic assumptions about people, and this is itself upsetting to us.)

The bottom line on our discussions of preventing mass shootings is a stalemate.  We are not willing as a society (1) to give up any of the freedoms of the vast majority, (2) to pay enough to do what would be effective to prevent even half of these shootings, or (3) to deprive a defined few who we think might engage in mass violence of some of the rights that we cherish (in fear that crossing this line could make it easier for more of us to be deprived of rights in the future for whatever reason).  There is, however, one other route to preventing this violence.

The issue that no one discusses or wants to “own” is that we ourselves don’t want to “get involved.”  Many people wonder why no one notices when these future shooters are reaching the point of doing something violent.  The reason is fairly simple—in our society no one pays attention to these individuals, and practically no one wants or tolerates contact with these individuals.  These individuals are “different” or “strange,” and the attitude of almost all of us in society is either disinterest or fear and discomfort in being around them.  Someone who “knew” them could probably know that something bad was coming, but no one wants to know them.  Even those who live with them may come to ignore them enough that they don’t really know them or notice when things get worse, since things have gotten worse many times before without anything violent happening.  Society could pay professionals or “professional friends” to keep tabs on these individuals, but we choose not to, due to cost and to the fact that only in a very few instances will keeping tabs in this way actually prevent a terrible tragedy (because there are many such patients and very few such tragedies).  “Keeping tabs” cannot be done by someone checking in at an appointment once a month, since this is how almost all “programs” work, and these contacts become routinized for both the person checking and the person being checked on.  In order to reduce the probability of violence, these contacts must be genuine human relationships, by individuals who really have some interest in their charges and can create emotional bonds with them.  This would require between at a minimum thirty minutes to an hour per week with each such individual.  It would be almost guaranteed to work (avoid all violence) for those who were willing to attend or be contacted like this.  Some would resist the contacts, though, which would mean a slow and more costly process by the professional of “making friends” with the individual in his or her own environment rather than by appointment in an office.  Some would refuse all contact, which might result in enforced contact or no contact at all, leaving the individual at risk, however small, of future violence.

An alternative approach would be for all of us to pay attention to such individuals and to help them to feel at least minimally accepted.  Schoolmates could do this by nodding to them with a slight smile in the hallways.  They could be even more helpful by not joining the put-downs of the individual that their friends engage in and by speaking up to include the individual in some activities.  This challenges our immature tendency to seek status by banding together to put others below us and would require that we be truly dedicated to the belief that fundamentally, everyone is equal (and that we ourselves are OK whether or not we have others to prop up our self-esteem by claiming to be better than certain others).  Teachers could help by treating all students as equals, expecting the same basic functioning of all students, and not accepting the social fears of some by allowing them to remain silent and unconnected.

Neighbors could help by waving, saying hello, and inquiring about “how things are going.”  Neighbors could go farther by inquiring in more detail about “how things are going,” expressing interest, and offering to counsel the individual in areas of one’s expertise, as well as insisting that one’s own children treat the individual with respect and courtesy.  These efforts would not cost very much time and could make a world of difference in the growth and attitudes of these individuals.  Of course, each of us will have limits on how much time we are willing to give, and we cannot expect everyone to truly “spend time with” these individuals, but even a little friendliness can help.

As part of these considerations, we should ask ourselves what kind of society we want.  If we want to continue to be as accepting of violence in general and gun violence in particular, then we will continue to have a societal atmosphere that “permits” mass shootings.  The more violence is tolerated and taken to be a normal (even if undesirable) response to certain social situations, the more violence we will have.  If we want to stress individual responsibility, regardless of capability or circumstance, then we will continue to ignore those we marginalize, and a few of them will continue to be motivated to “get back at us” for our callousness with gun violence. 

One indication of our ambivalence on these issues is the proposal by the National Rifle Association to put more people with guns in our schools and the actions by a few school districts to do just that, which conjures up a vision of a return to our own wild West and its shoot-outs.  This is illustrative of our American penchant for direct action on the external world to “solve problems,” while we try to bypass the difficulties of changing ourselves, by for instance changing our culture and expectations so that people have more good will toward their fellow men and therefore kill them less frequently.  Again, we are unwilling to give up something ourselves (our opportunities to be aggressive toward others in order to get what we want) in order to gain better relationships among people.

We all know individuals who feel like social failures and who feel hopelessly rejected.  You can make a difference.  Consider what you might do to brighten just a little bit the life of one of these individuals who is on the periphery of your daily activities.

 

 

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