Mass Murder

Mass murder is a form of multiple homicide in which four or more victims are slain during a single episode. In December 2000, for example, Michael McDermott, a 42-year-old employee of Edgewater Technology in Wakefield, Massachusetts, opened fire on his coworkers, killing seven of them. In June 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five children in Houston, Texas.

We can derive some sense of the prevalence of mass killing from the FBI Supplementary Homicide Reports (see Fox, 2000), an incident level database of more than 92% of the murders committed in the United States each year. For the years 1976 through 1999, an estimated 497,030 people were murdered in the United States. Of these, 3,956 were slain in incidents claiming four or more victims. Still, many of these mass killings involve circumstances in which the homicide may not have been intentional, most notably arson resulting in the deaths of large numbers of people. Although occasionally mass killers specifically use fire as their weapon of choice, most of these cases entail unplanned fatalities and should arguably be eliminated from consideration. After this exclusion, the 24-year period yields 599 mass killings, involving 2,800 victims and 826 killers.

On average, then, two incidents of mass murder occur per month in the United States, claiming more than 100 victims annually. Most incidents, of course, are not as widely publicized as the horrific slaughters of 14 postal workers in an Oklahoma post office in 1986 or of 23 customers in a Texas restaurant in 1991. Still, the phenomenon of the massacre or mass murder, although hardly of epidemic proportions, is not the rare occurrence that it is sometimes assumed to be.

Also based on these FBI homicide data, we have determined that the popular image of mass murder differs in significant ways from the reality of it. Although the most heavily publicized type of mass murder involves the indiscriminate shooting of strangers in a public place by a lone gunman, other kinds of mass killing are actually far more common. [Page 297]Included within this scope are, for example, the disgruntled employee who kills his boss and coworkers after being fired, the estranged husband/father who massacres his entire family and then kills himself, the band of armed robbers who slaughter a roomful of witnesses to their crime, and the racist hatemonger who sprays a schoolyard of immigrant children with gunfire. Thus, the motivations for mass murder can range from revenge to hatred and from loyalty to greed; the victims can be selected individually, as members of a particular category or group or, least often, on a purely random basis.

The location of mass murder differs sharply from that of homicides in which a single victim is slain. First, mass murders do not tend to cluster in large cities as do single-victim crimes, but are more likely to occur in small-town or rural settings. Moreover, while the South (the Deep South in particular) is known for high rates of murder, this does not hold for mass murder. In comparison to single-victim murder, which is highly concentrated in urban areas populated by poor blacks, and in the Deep South, where arguments are often settled through gunfire, mass murder more or less reflects the geographic distribution of the general population.

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