Profiling, Mass Murderer

Organized Mass Murder

Organized, institutionalized, political genocide and mass murder are driven by racial, ethnic, religious, and intragroup conflicts. Examples include the Turkish genocide of Armenians in 1915–1917; the mass murder of Jews by Germans and their collaborators during World War II; the murder of intellectuals and potential dissidents by the Khmer Rouge communist regime of Cambodia in the 1970s, and currently the Sudan government and its allied militias in Darfur. These mass murders are orchestrated by organized factions and driven by political and ideological motivations. Systematic political genocide by governments or other factions include executions, starvation, mass rapes, and death camps. Racial and ethnic hatreds contribute greatly to this systemized murder of another culture. Terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda commit acts of mass murder to further a religious and political agenda, and they often use techniques such as remote explosions and suicide attacks.

The Mass-Murdering Individual

The mass-murdering individual also often commits suicide afterward, which is one reason why it is difficult to collect primary data about their motivations. Several motivations for the mass murderer have been offered by various scholars. These models include perverted love, revenge, sexual homicides, psychosis, and politically motivated hate. Other scholars have focused on school shooters, family annihilators, and revenge-driven disgruntled types such as workplace killers.

[Page 665]Perverted love murderers and family annihilated commit familicides based on their own ego-centrism, inability to perceive their family members as distinct people, and need for control. Like other mass murderers, they are almost always men and usually White. Revenge murderers, akin to the disgruntled types, harbor resentment and seek a sense of payback against others for real or perceived wrongs done to them. One type of revenge mass killer is the workplace murderer, who tends to also be male and older than other murderers. Workplace murderers are driven by work-related issues and social isolation, as well as the deperson-alization of the victims, who come to symbolize the work environment. These typologies may overlap, and it is important to remember that mass murder is a complex phenomenon involving multiple factors.

...