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How to Make the Profile of a Mass Shooting KillerIt's impossible |
By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor
20th of April 2007, 07:45 GMT
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We may get pissed off many times by the spoiled children of rich men and their behavior, but I bet you won't take a gun and become Rambo.
Perhaps the greatest question that the infamous mass shooting at Virginia Tech left in our minds is: what was in the mind of that individual, Cho Seung-Hui, to trigger such a rage and its lethal consequence? It would be such a relief to be able to track down this kind of personality, but experts ensure that "typical school shooter" profile is impossible to be made.
"I get a little nervous when people are trying to come up with simple answers, like he was a loner," said Robert Geffner, a neuro-psychologist and president of the Institute on Violence, Abuse and Trauma at Alliant International University.
"I
think every report I've seen is focusing on 'He's a loner.' It would be nice if somebody said, 'Yes he is a loner, but most loners don't kill people.'"
Our mental stability is affected by depression, anger and resentment, low self-esteem, feelings of victimization and severe psychiatric disorders.
"These are people who often suffer from mental illness, in this case there was evidence this guy was pretty depressed; they sometimes have difficulty telling what's real and not real," said Daniel Nelson, a psychiatrist who counsels children affected by trauma at Cincinnati Children's Hospital.
But this is not a criterion.
"You can't say they have isolated themselves and they are depressed, so they are going to turn into a mass murderer. The problem is now you've labeled literally tens of thousands of people incorrectly, because most people who are depressed, isolated and can't talk, don't become mass murderers." said Nelson to LiveScience.
Social rejection, at home or school, can force a person's standing limits.
"We do know that being a victim of bullying or rejection or actually being a bully, those tend to be a common ingredient in many of the youth violence cases like Columbine," said Geffner.
Experts warn also that hindsight makes even more difficult to draft a profile.
"When you know the outcome of something, particularly when you know the tragic and deadly outcome like this, then you selectively [look at] the things that point toward that outcome and selectively forget about or de-emphasize the things that don't," said Kirk Heilbrun, a psychologist who focuses on violence in juveniles and adults at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
"Because so many kids would possess the characteristics that the profile would identify, you'd have a large number of false positives," said Joseph Gasper, a sociologist who studies the nature of school crime and juvenile violence at Johns Hopkins University.
In fact, the sum of the traits of a known school mass shooter won't reveal you another one.
"There are millions of loners who don't go out and kill people. And there are people who kill other people who are not loners." said Geffner.
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