By Don Curren
Talk of the killer’s “motive” has become as integral and
predictable a part of the public discourse about mass shootings in the US as
the inevitable hypocrisy about “thoughts and prayers” from the opponents of gun
control.
It usually surfaces in the initial reporting about such incidents,
when little is known about the killer. Sometimes even when they are still an
“active shooter,” a phrase that sometimes seems to convey excitement as well as
dread from officials and reporters.
The sequence was illustrated vividly in the coverage of the
Independence Day massacre in Highland Park.
Here’s a paragraph from an early NPR report on the shooting:
A seventh person has died from the
mass shooting in Highland Park, Illinois. Police said today the gunman
pre-planned the July Fourth attack for several weeks. More than 30 other people
were injured after the suspect fired over 70 rounds during a holiday parade.
While the community grieves, law enforcement is still trying to determine a
motive.
I always find references to
“motive” in this context disconcerting, for reasons I will try to explore in
this piece.
Firstly, and perhaps most
importantly, it’s because whatever “motive” the police can piece together in
many of these cases will likely only seem bizarre and incoherent to most
people.
The shooters are often suffering from some acute form of mental
illness that can deeply distort their perceptions of the external world as well
as their reasoning about it. (This doesn’t apply to all mass shooters, of
course, but I’ll consider those cases a little later.)
What constitutes a motive for many such killers will only seem
like incomprehensible nonsense to most people. Trying to understand their
“motive” as if they were someone who robbed a bank or murdered an adversary of
some kind is futile, because they inhabit a different world with an
idiosyncratic “logic” all its own.
Sometimes, even when a mass killer Is judged
competent to stand trial, their motives ultimately prove indecipherable.
The futility of focusing on a motive in such a
context is illustrated by the case of James Holmes, who killed 12 people and wounded 58
when he opened fire during a showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” in the Denver
suburb of Aurora on July 20, 2012.
According to an Associated Press
story in 2018, a psychiatrist who spent hours talking with Holmes says that
what led him to open fire in a crowded Colorado movie theater was “a
one-of-a-kind vortex of his mental illness, his personality and his circumstances
— and some other, unknown currents that will probably never be uncovered.”
“A big part of it is, it’s hidden
in Holmes’ mind, and he can’t see it either,” the psychiatrist William H. Reid
said in an interview with AP about his book, “A Dark Night in Aurora: Inside
James Holmes and the Colorado Mass Shootings.”
“The answer — and this really is the answer, but
it’s not very satisfying — lies in an unimaginably detailed and complex
confluence that we can’t replicate because we can’t see all of it,” he said.
Reid listed some of the factors at play:
· Holmes’ mental illness, and the way it influenced
his behavior.
· The way Holmes’ personality shaped his awkward
interactions with other people and influenced his view of the world.
· The ups and downs of Holmes’ life as he struggled
in neuroscience graduate school at the University of Colorado in Denver and
broke up with his girlfriend.
What creates a mass murderer is a complex process involving
social, personal, psychological, and medical considerations. Trying to
understand what led them to kill – and how to prevent more such events – means
grappling with that complexity and coming to terms with the fact that such
events are not usually triggered by some readily identifiable cause such as a
“motive,” but reflect an array of causes.
Mass shootings are “multifactorial,” an idea I explored in the
Curren(t) Thinking post immediately before this one, meaning that they have
multiple causes.
The drive to find a mass shooter’s motive is entirely
understandable; it’s a response ingrained in us by the structure of our legal
system and the way it’s echoed in our popular culture. Depictions of detectives
at work – from Sherlock Holmes to the Law and Order franchise – make motive one
of the essential requirements for identifying the perpetrator of a murder or
other serious crime, along with opportunity and weapon.
And of course, the question of motive is relevant for any criminal
investigation, including mass shootings. In some cases, there is something
resembling a more conventional motive at play, frequently involving anger over
issues at home or in the workplace.
One such incident was the May 26, 2021 mass shooting that occurred at a Santa Clara Valley Transportation
Authority (VTA) rail yard in San
Jose, California, when a gunman named Samuel James Cassidy killed nine
people and then committed suicide.
Cassidy was 57-year-old VTA employee whose ex-wife described him as having anger issues and
often being angry at his co-workers and at the VTA for what he believed to be
its unfair work assignments.
These cases involve someone who is
triggered by motives that most of us can understand but responds to them in a
way that’s inconceivable to the rest of us, often because of festering personal
and/or mental health issues.
The question of motive is also important in the many mass
shootings where some kind of racist or supremacist “ideology” influenced the
killer and at least in part motivated them.
I would still maintain that focusing on “motive” as it’s
conventionally understood is too narrow an approach.
There are two reasons for that.
Firstly, the kind of belief systems that motivated mass shooters
in instances such as the 2019 Christchurch synagogue shootings in New Zealand
or the killing of 6 Muslims at a Quebec City mosque in 2017 can themselves be
considered a kind of collective psychosis.
They can’t be refuted on rational grounds because they aren’t
arrived at through reasoning. They need to be examined as symptoms of mental
illness, both in the individuals involved and at a social level, if we are to
understand why they flourish - and how to eliminate, or at least discourage,
them.
Secondly, individual pathology seems inextricably intertwined with
ideology in these cases. It appears that often an isolated, alienated young man
looks for something to identify with, something to create meaning in his life,
and he is drawn into twisted belief system that seems to validate him, but
which just exacerbates his problems and creates a threat to society at large.
A dangerous form of feedback may be at play. Vulnerable
individuals are attracted to noxious ideologies, and their statements and
actions raise the profile of those ideologies, thereby attracting more
potentially violent followers.
The emphasis on some kind of easily comprehended motive for a
killing – such as those found in a drug deal gone wrong – seems linked to an
understanding of human behaviour akin to that implicit in mainstream economics:
people make a rational assessment of all their options in deciding on a course
of action, and then pick the one that’s optimal in terms of realizing their
goals.
But that model of human behaviour is mostly irrelevant in
all-too-many cases of mass murder.
Just as the inadequacy of the mainstream economics based on the
model has prompted the rise of behavioural economics and other schools of
thought to help fill the gap, it’s essential to expand the scope of our
thinking about mass shootings beyond the conventional understanding of crime
and the psychology it’s predicated on.
What we’re ultimately after – or what we should be after – is an
understanding of why the tragic events in question occur and what therefore
needs to be done to stop them. What we need to understand goes well beyond the
“motive” of the killer and includes the overall social context that created him
and enabled him to perpetrate such a heinous act.
The limitations of motive as a tool for understanding contemporary
mass killers is reinforced by an insightful, well-reported NPR piece in the
aftermath of the Highland Park shooting that suggested aesthetics, not
ideology, may have been the key driver for suspected shooter Robert "Bobby" Crimo III.
It says Crimo left an
extensive digital footprint. “But sifting through the trove of memes, photos,
music, rap videos and more, extremism experts agree: There is no clear
political or ideological motivation,” writes NRP reporter Odette Yousef.
Instead, many experts see Crimo’s
activity as consistent with a still-emerging profile of a new kind of mass
shooter. It’s not in line with the categories of killers familiar to law
enforcement and the public, such as white supremacists, radical Islamists, or
antigovernment militants. Instead, it reflects immersion in an online world of
violent imagery, she writes.
One video
posted by the suspect shows a cartoon version of himself with a long gun in a
bloody confrontation with law enforcement officers, Yousef reports.
Emmi Conley, an independent researcher of
far-right extremist movements quoted in the NPR story, says said this
purposeful embodiment of a cartoon-like version of a mass shooter is intended
to play to a "known aesthetic" of what such an individual looks like
in the popular imagination - and to claim the “brand” of being a mass shooter.
"[Crimo] doesn't fit into an
individual ideology, because ideology is irrelevant in this case," said
Conley. "The thing that starts to tie this type of violent actor to other
types of violent actors is not ideological, it is aesthetic. "
The idea that some mass shooters are, in
their own minds, engaging in act of self-expression is appalling. But given the
toxic culture they emerge from, where creating imagery that glorifies violence
is easy - and where that message can be endlessly amplified in dark corners of
the social-media world - it’s an idea we may to accept.
It's supported by one disturbing detail
from the Uvalde shooting, where alleged shooter Salvador Ramos reportedly
provided a soundtrack to the massacre. A survivor of the event told ABC news
that Ramos started playing “sad music” during the slaughter. “She said it
sounded like ‘I want people to die’ music,” said the producer who interviewed
the child.
Understanding crimes like these obviously
requires understanding more than simply establishing the killer’s motive. It
requires a deeper probe into the minds and lives of the killers, and, perhaps
more importantly, the social context that creates them.
It’s particularly urgent in the US, but
it also applies in Canada, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, and other countries
that have been terrorized by mass shootings in recent decades, albeit less
frequently than the States.
In an ideal world, it would be the second
task authorities should devote themselves to.
The first, of course, is banning access
to the weaponry that enables them to carry out their horrific crimes, whatever
the “motive” may be.
(Photo: A Lake Forest police officer walks down Central Avenue in Highland Park, Illinois, on July 4, 2022 after a shooter fired on the Chicago suburb's Fourth of July parade, killing seven people and injuring dozens. Brian Cassella/AP)
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