I haven’t really considered whether murderers are all inherently mentally ill, but to me it seems from a naive perspective that not all murderers have to be mentally ill or psychopaths.
I’d appreciate any ideas.
No. I’d venture to say that not all murders are cases of mental illness, but the court system recognizes the concept of “crime of passion” or “temporary insanity.”
It looks as if this kid blew his pre PhD exam and probably knew it was going to happen. He’d spent tons of Federal Grant money and was about to make a fool out of himself.
I find it ironic that people make such a big deal out of the shooting taking place at batman. Our society does kind of glorify violence…not to mention war and the death of anonymous innocents and unknowns.
I find the oft-trumpeted concept that human nature somehow abhors murder and military recruits must be abused to turn them into killing machines ideologically driven, baseless and straight up laughable. At most, human nature may abhor murder within one’s perceived tribe, but I see no reason whatsoever to assume that murder in general is alien to us. All the contrary, I think murder is an integral part of our nature and only through civilized culture we can propagandize people into being squeamish about it. In short murderers are not, just by being murderers, mentally ill. Uneducated at most.
I am loathe to disagree with the great Merlin but on this point, I don’t agree and I think the facts are quite on the “squeamish” side of the debate. Within battle, military scholars have consistently found that the vast majority of the killing is done by a small number of people who can be considered the “Michael Jordans” of killing. In his book On Killing, Lt. Col. David Grossman documents how, during the civil war era, a regiment would fire at a target shaped like a regiment on the battle-field as target-practice and get something like an 80+% hit rate. When in battle, however, their hit rates were abyssmally low, in the teens. It doesn’t make sense to say “they’re scared” because the best thing you can do, rationally, is KILL the things that are the cause of your fear. It was true of experienced as well as green troops. WWII-era studies duplicated these results even though troops were armed with rifles which are inestimably more accurate than smooth-bore weapons.
I think there is a spectrum of killing-aptitude and most people are born naturally very low on that scale. Cultural reinforcement might shift the population average upward on this scale but it will never change the basic gap between the natural elites of killing and the average individual who will - despite his own rational interests - squeeze his eyes shut and shoot over the head of his enemy.
Grossman provides more than ideology to explain why people do this, too. Most inter-species conflict in other animals and most conflict between human beings is settled merely by posturing. Roaring, beating your chest, yelling, throwing mostly harmless rocks or sticks… these are generally sufficient to persuade the other guy to get lost, which is usually the desired outcome.
Only very recently (10kya) have human beings begun to engage in large-scale, totalistic warfare requiring vast hosts of people to cooperate in the act of killing an enemy. For the vast majority of us, this really is learned, not innate. The mechanics of killing have to be drilled in and made into a “thoughtless reflex” that is only later regretted. The goal of military training is to get the recruits to skip pondering the consequences of their actions in the moments prior to shooting. Kill first, regret later. And that’s why the US military’s suicide rate is at nearly one per day. This is the natural consequence of the post-Vietnam training regimen which has succeeded in training soldiers to kill first, regret later.
Clayton -
Those with mental problems are more likely to go into psychology as a major, ostensibly to learn about themselves and their disorder.
I figure the guy went schizo.
So, you’d be saying that that strong desire to avoid physically harming others is instinctive in humans, and not just acquired through learning?
We know there’s a class of people whom lack the capacity for empathy whom thereby cannot imagine what others feel, and such have made the worst murderers. I’d say empathy is probably innate, sure. It’s not hard to imagine that we feel bad about harming others because we know what pain feels like, and there is a certain economy of pain.
By which I mean that man, as a praxeologic creature, attempts continually to avoid or minimize loss, and also to promote gain. Pain can be rightly viewed as a loss of well-being.
If the pain of others if viewed as a loss for ourselves, we will tend to minimize it. It’s when a person’s value system gets upended just enough that the pain of others is to them a gain that problems can quickly materialize into serious crimes.
@Merlin: I think the brain is wired to default to not killing until fight-or-flight really kicks in. At that point, I have no doubt that the human is plenty capable of killing. The problem is that you can’t just flip the “fight-or-flight” switch at will. We’re wired this way because almost always, a confrontation will be non-lethal in the Ancestral Environment and if the genome favored a cannibalistic hair-trigger, we would have ended up extinct a long time ago.
Some people don’t need the switch to flip in order to be able to kill. Those guys go right to the top in the military and, if they have the right connections, they might even end up working with these guys - basically, USG’s Murder Inc.
Clayton -
Obviously you have not, thus the stupid question. Is Bill Clinton mentally ill? Was Paul Tibbets?
A good starting point would be to define Mental Illness. In the DSM you see everything from identifiable diseases with etiologies, to much more broadly defined syndromes with multiple supposed potential causes that go from genetic to environmental. So what counts; is incessant fidgeting a mental illness or is it someone who was just never disciplined as a kid? Is psychopathy an illness or is it just someone who was born way to one side of the mental spectrum, with the same mix of psychological traits we all have, merely in massively different balance and proportion?
And the follow up question is does it really matter in the end? It’s the old legal debate; what’s the practical difference between an irresistable impulse and an impulse that wasn’t resisted?
It’s a bit subjective, but I think if your morals and ethics are in line with your planned actions and you view this as acceptable or correct in regards to any action or situation you may view the act of killing as something that may be “routine” or justified due to certain circumstances.
Someone may have a friend who was raped, but in a lot of cases this is not reported for various reasons. You find out who it was, and you decide to “take action,” and in the process end up killing the person, and for the sake of argument let’s say you get away. If in your mind your morals and ethics do match up with how you think and feel (that psychologically what you did was normal and justified from your perspective and context), you may not have an negative after affects and find it to not be any concern afterwards.
In these more motivated circumstances (not just being robbed at gun point and then shot out of a criminal’s chaotic choice/reaction) the murderer see’s nothing taboo about it, but understand’s “society” does not see it so.
Let’s say he was motivated by material culture and obsession with the fictional and highly profitable movie industry who’s fans act like drones rushing and fighting to see a movie remade and remade again and that in his view some this just adds to the decline of culture and progress, and took it upon himself to shoot people at a Batman movie with a plot where a secret society plans to destroy Gotham because they view it as degenerate waste. The irony is a film is being played where, in a certain light the League of Shadows is trying to fix Gotham from it’s own demise by destroying it at it’s lowest to rid the world of degeneracy, while Batman optimistically tries to save Gotham by destroying half the city in each movie, and when someone goes into the very theater and shoots people while they watch and freak out over a violent fictional movie they get hit hard with reality and can’t believe someone could ever actually go and kill people as they watch a film about the same very thing! The gunman is Ra’s al Ghul, “good intentions,” but not an acceptable way of achieving it.
…or I’m completely full of shit and I hate the people who clamour to see the damn movie.
This raises a lot of interesting questions…
Reality Check: Unanswered Questions About Colorado Theater Massacre
Patsy?
In fact this reminds me of the Soviet situation where the Soviets (or so I heard it told) designated political dissenters as mentally ill and stuck them in mental institutions, because obviously it would take a nutter to dislike the glories of Soviet Socialism.
Just because you are not able to understand someone does not mean they are mentally ill. That is extremely patronizing to claim.
No murderers are not inherently mentally ill. There are plenty of people who have directly or indirectly killed other people who have no mental problems.
"This raises a lot of interesting questions…
Reality Check: Unanswered Questions About Colorado Theater Massacre
Patsy?" - John James
It raises nothing. The guns are relatively easy to get, the cost was not beyond him or most people if they had a mind to do it. The bombs weren’t that complex or sophisticated, from what I understand they were containers of gas with electic igniters. Anyone who has shot off a model rocket as a kid could make them. And the police taking their time to disarm them isn’t unusual from what I understand. Even the simplest device can blow you to hell if you handle it improperly. Given their ‘trap’ nature likely the cops were taking their time to make sure they didn’t blow themselves up. The kid was emulating The Joker it seems, so it would make sense for them to try and think through every possible angle before taking a step, as the hallmark of The Joker was nothing being what it seemed, and tricks within tricks, etc.
And he wasn’t such a marksman either, he had a crowded theater in front of him and an automatic weapon. He’d have to have been a total spaz to have not hit a significant amount of people.
Uh. It raises quite a bit.
You’re suggesting this unemployed kid could have legally got his hands on ~$4000, without any help? Not likely.
For two days? Containers of gas with electic igniters cause an official to specifically comment on intricacy of the bombs and state it’s rarely seen outside of warzones?..and takes the FBI two days?
What does this have anytihng to do with what was discussed in the video?
And I find it interesting you completely neglect to even mention one of the major points raised…that all the evidence doesn’t indicate that he acted completely alone…and in fact points in the opposite direction.
“raises nothing”. 
I think most college students could get access to a few thousand dollars relatively easily. Could have been working and going to school. Could have used scholarship/grant money. Could have just taken out a loan, if he did take out a loan I’m sure he was fairly certain he wouldn’t be paying it back.
He had $21,000 in federal grant money at his disposal. Per year…I have grant money (not that much)…it got me a tube amp, a new computer, tons of books, food, fuel, etc. and it paid my tuition and rent.
Who is he a patsy for if he was one?
There’s a source somewhere that says he had that money? Or you’re saying the grant money is available for people to apply for?
Anyone else who was complicit?
Nope, I made it up out of thin air.
First result for: Batman shooter grant money
Thank you, Captain…
But seriously, do you mean to imply some kind of ‘Alex Jones-esque assumption’, or just that some other kids did this with him?