Speculation about the Aurora perp
So far, the information we’ve gotten about James Holmes doesn’t really fit the portrait of the usual perpetrator of mass murder.
That doesn’t mean that, as more facts emerge, he won’t seem to have been unstable and isolated, and to have exhibited all sorts of warning signs. But so far the only things about him typical of mass murderers appear to have been his age and gender, and the fact that some acquaintances and neighbors have said he was somewhat of a loner.
So the following is complete speculation on my part—but the mass murderer comparison that occurs to me is with University of Texas sniper Charles Whitman, who in 1966 climbed a tower and killed 15 people and wounded 32 more in a shooting spree that was lengthier than Holmes’ but similarly lethal, although Whitman ended up killing himself as well, which brought the final toll to 16.
Whitman had been a student at the university, an Eagle scout, a Marine, and was a married man. Although there was some violence and instability in his history, and some sort of agitation had driven him to seek therapy in his final months (and to receive some medication), there was little that most people around him knew about and nothing noticeable to acquaintances that would have indicated that one day he would climb that tower and start shooting. In fact, he himself expressed puzzlement as to his motivation in a note he penned shortly before going out to perform his nefarious act (which, like Holmes’, was preplanned):
I don’t quite understand what it is that compels me to type this letter…. I don’t really understand myself these days… Lately I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts. These thoughts constantly recur, and it requires a tremendous mental effort to concentrate. I consulted Dr. Cochrum at the University Health Center and asked him to recommend someone that I could consult with about some psychiatric disorders I felt I had…. I talked to a doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt overcome by overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail. After my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed to see if there is any visible physical disorder. I have had tremendous headaches in the past and have consumed two large bottles of Excedrin in the past three months.
If you read some of the other notes Whitman left (available at this link), you’ll find a person who clearly knows right from wrong, seems to regret his actions, and yet feels compelled to perform them, and knows he is going to die.
There is no real answer to what went on with Whitman, just as I doubt an answer will be forthcoming about Holmes, even though he is very much alive. But an autopsy was performed on Whitman, and revealed an interesting—and perhaps important—fact:
At the Cook Funeral Home the next day, an autopsy was performed as requested in Whitman’s suicide note and approved by Whitman’s father, Charles Adolf Whitman, and performed by Dr. Coleman de Chenar. A brain tumor was found and reported as an astrocytoma brain tumor; a subsequent Governor’s report investigation specified that the tumor was a glioblastoma. The document stated that this lesion “conceivably could have contributed to his inability to control his emotions and actions.”
Had Whitman lived and been tried for murder, would this have legally diminished his responsibility? I haven’t a clue, nor am I advocating that this should have happened. It is difficult if not impossible to draw a line of cause and effect in this sort of thing, and when in doubt we must assume that mass murderers have free will and are responsible for their actions.
It may turn out that Holmes has some sort of similar identifiable problem. If, for example, he turns out to be a bona fide paranoid schizophrenic with delusions that fed into his decision to murder people, that could muddy the waters of personal responsibility considerably.
In the meantime, you might well ask: who cares? “Open Blogger” at Ace’s criticizes those who would jump to the conclusion that Holmes must have been insane to have committed such as act, and I agree with Open Blogger that (as a character in “The Dark Knight” says), “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” We call those people sociopaths or psychopaths, but that’s just a descriptive word, a shorthand way of referring to something we understand hardly at all.
If you’re interested in trying to dig it up (I would but I don’t have time): there was an article in The Atlantic sometime within the past few years giving someone’s plausible-sound argument that Whitman’s problem did indeed have physiological causes.
We might understand it more, if we accepted an objective, material, tangible evil as a motivating force. That would beg the question as to why some give in to it in a big way, and others, experiencing it and even giving in to it in small ways manage to constrain the greater, the murderous, impulse.
There may be no explaining the physically inexplicable (brain tumors); the physically plausible (Breivik’s steroid use) but not wholly satisfying answer, steroid (and other drug) use does not always manifest itself in consistent or predictable behavior. Evil that is manifest in mass murder for some reason has some defining moment that can be interpreted as ‘hell is other people”; then, one’s own self interest is made subordinate to one’s desires. If we know little about Holmes we know this much — the persona he adapted was the Joker, of which Heath Ledger’s depiction of evil personified was terrifying; and I think enticing to deracinated souls looking at the world from the outside.
Because of this violence we must impose movie control now: movie producers must obtain from the government a license to make a movie, for each movie, or they could a obtain a Federal Movie Dealer license and undergo background checks every four years; actors will need a background check and license to act for each movie; scripts will need to be screened by Fatherland Security; and ticket buyers will be must register, undergo psychiatric evaluation, and take a three day cooling off period before attending the desired movie.
Per Wikipedia:
“The University of Texas refuses to release the medical records and history of Whitman at the University of Texas citing legal and ethical issues. The only record released was that of Dr. Heatly once it had become known to the press that Whitman had seen a psychiatrist at their facility”. (2009)
An odd coverup by UT, no?
It is said he had a hypothalamic glioblastoma at his 1966 autopsy. The only drugs cited as used by him are Valium and amphetamines.
It was terribly difficult in 1966 to have made a tumor diagnosis antemortem. Whitman clearly had big time headaches, gobbling Excedrin.
Personally, I am inclined to invoke the amphetamines as contributory, if not causative, of Whitman’s rages. For a hypothalamic malignancy to cause this sort of conduct remains extrordinarily conjectural. Those tumors cause all sorts of neurologic deficits, but unfocused lethal rage while being otherwise entirely functional is not among them, IMHO. They are unresectable and rapidly fatal.
My father died of a glioblastoma. He had been an easy-going person, Navy vé¨teran, stable provider, friendly and happy. After his first surgery, he got it into his head that he was going to kill my ex and my sister’s ex before he died. We were worried enough about it that my brother removed his hunting guns from the house. His reasoning was that they deserved it, and he was already dying, so what could they do to him?
I don’t remember what website it saw it on today, but I did see a post in which it was said that,
when the police initially called the perp’s mother, she said something like, “you probably have the right guy.”
So, I would assume that his mother thought he was likely to “go postal” at any time.
P.S. Worked as a corpsman on a brain surgery ward. Remember a patient, a supposedly brilliant officer, who had a glioblastoma removed–this, of curse, in the 1960’s when ending up on a brain surgery ward was basically a death sentence–and this supposedly formerly placid “nice guy” was very combative post surgery, which was a pretty common side effect, and we ended up putting boxing gloves on him so that he couldn’t hurt anybody, and even so he did manage to catch me unawares and hit me a couple of times as I passed him.
Nice GBM (glioblastoma) anecdotes, but they ignore neuroanatomy and neurophysiology. GBMs are almost never completey resected, even today. In the 1960s median survival after surgery alone was approx. 4 mo (not from 1st symptoms). “Frontal release” behavior is what the anecdaotes describe. Frontal release also means loss of lots of higher powers-reasoning, planning, judgment, and non-agitated action among them. That was not Whitman. Sorry.
I think we understand sociopaths and narcissists. The problem is some people don’t want to believe what they are. You can go over it and some of the blank slate types just won’t buy it.
But the people that know right from wrong are neither. In some way I think they simply want to kill themselves but can’t do it. So they paint themselves in a corner by going on a rampage. That can be written off in shorthand as sociopathic but I think it is usually something else. Whatever drove them to want to die kept gnawing away and making them more unstable… which, in our culture, can also cause them to identify with being the ‘bad guy’.
Something to be said for the Japanese concept of the honorable suicide IMO (esp before your issues lead you to harm others). It can be the complete opposite of using it as an attempt to hurt those around you….
njartist49 Says:
“Because of this violence we must impose movie control now”
Unfortunately some are (not you of course, you are obviously kidding) Also disappointing; some actually are conservatives.
The attempts at finding numerous secular causes for such behavior merely result in going around in circles.
I didn’t get the bicycle I wanted for Christmas in the third grade, so why haven’t I killed a host of people?
This ghoul committed an evil act because he was motivated by evil. Evil is real. Evil is a proximate cause.
Until our society realizes this age-old fact, attempts at explaining such acts will continue to be sterile.
Why did Hitler kill Jews? Because he could. Why did Pol Pot slaughter Cambodians? Because he could. And both were evil men pursing evil.
I am doing a bit of reading these days. Just finished “The Long Walk – A Story of War and the Life That Follows” by Brian Castner. Castner was an EOD man. Did two tours in Iraq. Mustered out of the service and was going along normally until one day he began to feel “crazy.” He had multiple symptoms and some of them were urges to kill people. It was, IMO, an excellent trip through the psyche of someone who was normal and then suddenly became abnormal. Fortunately, he didn’t act on any of his impulses and he has begun to recover after a lot of treatment – both talk therapy with a psychiatrist and physical work. (Yoga and relaxation techniques.)
He thought he had PTSD. But he didn’t. His brain had been injured while blowing things up as an EOD man. His problem was physiological. Maybe it was not quite like Whitman, but there was something about all those blasts that had a cumulative effect on his brain. Kind of like NFL football players who get multiple concussions.
What it taught me is that it seems easy to write someone off as pure evil, but sometimes there are other things involved. That said, I don’t claim there are no evil people – just that we don’t know about this killer in Aurora. I have a more open mind about the issue as a result of reading Brian Castner’s story and reading neo’s account of the Whitman tragedy.
I mentioned in an earlier thread that there was a mass shooting four years ago near where I live. In that case the young man was known to be abnormal and his mother had tried to get him put away for his safety. However, the authorities would not do anything until he actually harmed someone. He killed six and wounded four. The county is being sued by the victim’s families for negligence. It remains to be seen, but Holmes’ mother’s reaction to the shootings indicate she knew he had problems. Much we still don’t know.
“Had Whitman lived and been tried for murder, would this have legally diminished his responsibility?” Well, at the very least he would not have been set free. What about women murderers? It seems the justice system and the media frequently make excuses for violent women. If women say they have been abused, that is often accepted on face value. Many are found not guilty by reason of insanity. I know there are instances where women are held accountable but think about Andrea Yates who drowned her 5 kids or Casey Anthony. Dads would be convicted of first degree murder. Clearly there seems to be sense that their murderous behavior by women is an aberration. The kids are dead all the same though. Holmes sounds like he might have paranoid schizophrenia. If that is the case, the real crime here is that he was on the streets. Of course many people in prison are mentally ill. Who pushed to close down mental hospitals? An idiot NE politician as I remember.
About 20 years ago, lame-duck Ohio Governor Dick Celeste granted clemency to several women who had been convicted of the assault or murder of their husbands/lovers. These prisoners had declared that they had been battered or abused by these men but the evidence of this had not been allowed at their trials*. This was a very controversial event in Ohio at the time and the governor was both lauded and reviled, the latter exacerbated because he waited until the last days of his term to grant clemency.
*The previous March the law was changed allowing the battered woman syndrome defense
to be presented at trial.
3 of the victims were men who died shielding their dates who survived… real hero’s. the world will miss them because we need as many of that quality as possible. one was ex navy and in process of re-enlisting.
i wonder how many feminists where there and jumped on top of their dates to save them?
given that our culture, thanks to such people, have no good role models for males, and demonize them, and the media representations in shows and so forth are reprehensible, we are lucky to have any such heroes left, and sad they are unequal.
the shooter and his mental state sure were not helped by that situation either.
Susanamantha
did you know that there is an organization of feminist judges whose dedication is to get women released? and that lots of judges went into family court, ergo the 94% chance of a single outcome…
then there is what i call the single mother effect, which no one discusses. that is, a single mother with male children who succeeds without a mate, demonstrates to her children they have no purpose (and then they wonder why they cant motivate their sons and so on). the ones that dont succeed dont tell the boys much better (ie. look what can happen to your kids). [notice i never said whose fault or what not. its not relevant to the testimony of the condition created]
One influence that no one is going to bring up is the expansion of title IX and other affirmative action in medical school admissions may have been making his search and entry to what he wanted to do almost impossible.
in the 90s (as i posted previously and may have been deleted due to size), a candidate with his class qualities would have had a 1341 to 1 odds of acceptance. with other classes entries at near 100% acceptance. the worst of it being that he would not have been told that his work was futile and given the chance to change to some less futile endeavor.
i wonder what the loans a phd neurology candidate would have…
not saying this is it, he is obviously cracked up, and in a very bad place… but this would be one pressure on him whether he knew it or not as it effects outcomes a lot. (58% in college degrees are women, and its a lot higher in medical schools. just take a look at their websites marketing.. girls then minorities, then what?)
on another note..
More than 500 killed in 48 hours as Assad’s forces allegedly used ‘toxic gas’ against civilians
One of the biggest problems we have today is the fact that we still have the same kind of bodies, brains, and emotional makeup we had back when we were hunters/gatherers but now have leverage that amplifies what we can do.
That leverage can be used for both good and bad things. Examples of good things are the use of high tech farm equipment to feed more people and the ability to speak with and see a family member across the globe for free on the Internet.
Examples of the bad things are the ability for 21 men to kill 3,000 people by flying jet airliners into buildings 100+ stories high, the atomic bomb, people having worn out joint problems because we are living longer than we have been evolved to live, and terrorists being able to communicate and train via the Internet.
If this guy had been in a hunter/gatherer tribe of about 30 families he couldn’t have done much damage before the members of the tribe ganged up on him and killed him.
I think the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden is an allegory for the tension between accepting what we are given naturally and being tempted to take matters into our own hands through our knowledge.
“…. something we understand hardly at all.”
Or perhaps, just perhaps, we understand it all too well… understand that anybody is really capable of anything. As Burroughs wrote, “Anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death.”
Then again, business is bad at lunatic asylums these days. As Velociman observes: “Because as a culture we have decided it is more humane to let the lunatics roam amongst us. To institutionalize them is cruel, as they might miss their fucking Friday cupcake. ”
All sorts of theories and suppositions. No resolutions. Mass murder? Grin and bear it.
Proper use of “allegedly”: we don’t know if it was Assad – was he using Saddam’s stockpile? – or CIA trained/led/undercover “insurgents.”
“More than 500 killed in 48 hours as Assad’s forces allegedly used ‘toxic gas’ against civilians”
I’m looking at:
http://english.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/07/21/227615.html
and
http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/12644075-over-500-killed-in-48-hrs-as-assads-forces-used-toxic-gas-against-civilians
and
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=506528
and they all read and look like propaganda to me. Right down to posed “dead bodies in rubble” shots.
Not saying it is “incorrect,” only that is it not persuasive.
Once knew a kid in junior high who would act like a normal 8th grader sometimes, then at other times, he’d go off and throw tantrums like a three-year-old. You never knew whether you’d get Jekyll or Hyde with him. It got so bad that the private school I went to made him leave because they didn’t have the facilities to handle him. Many years later as an adult I caught up with some of my former schoolmates and mentioned this kid’s irrational behavior. One of them who’d kept in better touch with the old crowd than I had said, “Oh, him. He died. Brain tumor. Happened a year or two after he left the school” (this would have been around 1970). I thought at the time he was just an immature jerk, but he actually was in the latter stages of a fatal disease. I don’t know if Holmes’ problem has a similar physiological origin (my layman’s guess is it doesn’t), but I’ve seen what a brain tumor can do to someone’s behavior, and it isn’t pretty.
We should also remember this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/opinion/sunday/the-unknown-why-in-the-aurora-killings.html?_r=3&smid=tw-share
Now normally I woudn’t link to the Times as I think the “paper of record” has fallen on its face too many times to be trusted as anything other than toilet paper. But this is an excellent opinion piece by a man who spent years researching the Columbine murderers.
A snippet:”
Mr. Harris kept a sort of journal for an entire year, focused largely on his plan to blow up his school and mow down survivors with high-powered rifles. Mr. Klebold kept a more traditional journal for two years, spewing a wild array of contradictory teen angst and deep depression, grappling seriously with suicide from the very first page.
Audiences are never surprised by the journal of Mr. Harris. It’s hate-hate-hate all the way through. He was a coldblooded psychopath, in the clinical use of that term. He had no empathy, no regard for human suffering or even human life.
Mr. Klebold’s journal is the revelation. Ten pages are consumed with drawings of giant fluffy hearts. Some fill entire pages, others dance about in happy clusters, with “I LOVE YOU” stenciled across. He was ferociously angry. He had one primary target for his anger. Not jocks, but himself. What a loathsome creature he found himself. No friends, no love, not a soul who cared about him or what became of his miserable life. None of that is objectively true. But that’s what he saw.
It’s a common high school malady, taken to extremes. Psychologists have a simple term for this state: depression…”
I’m not defending this shooter. I’m suggesting we remember Jared Lee Loughner, Richard Jewell, and many others and remember how the first impression one often gets from our sensationalistic media is often the wrong one. We’ll find out more about him as time goes by, and esp. when we hear more from him or his family as to possible problems and motives.
Brad: it is not uncommon, in murders or mass murders that feature a duo of perps, for one to be a psychopath and the other to be someone with other disturbances (depressive, easily influenced, social isolate, etc.). Together they form a lethal combination. This was true of the perps in the In Cold Blood crimes, and it was also true for Leopold and Loeb. For the former, Dick Hickock was the psychopath and Perry Smith the other one. For the latter, Loeb was the psychopath and Leopold the other.
By the way, Leopold and Loeb were both considered to be academic geniuses.
Just caught the last 45 min of “Adam’s Rib.”
Attorney Hepburn’s defense of accused, Judy Holiday, was that she did not intend to murder her husband and his mistress – she was just upset when she saw them “together” and wanted to frighten him, so she shot the gun.
A childless couple, Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, both attorneys, find themselves in court supporting the opposing sides.
Prosecutor Spencer Tracy’s position was that no one has the right to break the law: she shot the gun, she admits it, she’s guilty. Hepburn brings in women’s rights and women’s equality to back her defense – and the notion that the poor little woman was just trying to protect her family. Plus, Judy Holiday’s husband was a jerk and thought she was fat, which Judy Holiday was not.
Over the course of the trial, Hepburn and Tracy grow more testy at home.
She gives her final argument to the jury: the little woman was protecting her family.
Tracy stands up and says something like, “That sounded pretty good – and it was all just pretty sounds.”
Hepburn wins.
Tracy cannot believe she twisted the law just to win – she had called it “the spirit of the law.” He leaves and she begins to realize that he is really gone. A paramour who had long been hanging around Heburn comes over to Hepburn’s apartment and tries to move in on her, but she is all thinking about Tracy now, the husband she loves. Paramour tries to kiss her and Tracy, outside from the street, sees their silhouette in the window, goes up, bursts in, and holds a gun to the two of them. You think he “cracked” because of this case that just finished that had “driven him crazy.”
Hepburn shouts out “You have no right! You have no right!” Then he puts the gun into his own mouth! She is aghast – but with just the right timing, Tracy bites down and eats it. The gun is chocolate. Licking his lips, he says, “I just wanted to hear you say that, ‘You have no right.'”
In the process of divorcing, they go for one more night to their country home – and she just can’t quit with the women are equal, women’s rights, talk talk talk. She relents at the end and says, “Well maybe there’s one little difference,” and he replies, “Vive la difference”–which he has to translate for her. The curtain is closed on their little bed and they make love. The End.
Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, writers, 1949 – so they wrote it just after The War, when Rosie the Riveter rose to a new stature – making the weaponry for men to kill men so they could come home and have famlies.
A nice illustration of the unresolvable issues: the nature of differences and the fairness of systems and laws.
The Sanity Squad: how to evaluate dangerousness
http://neoneocon.com/2007/04/25/the-sanity-squad-how-to-evaluate-dangerousness/
this just hit now that people are looking
A Less Horrific Colorado Shooting Spree
Matthew Murray, who was also aged 24 when he barged into a church in 2007 determined to kill as many as possible. Like Holmes, he was armed to the teeth. But whereas Holmes killed 12 and injured at least 50, Murray’s body count was only 2 killed and 2 wounded.
The difference?
and note…
who said that a person attempting to stop the even has to do so more perfectly than the police? the police often hit bystanders and have even killed innocents. if they cant do it perfectly then perfect is a false goal. even if you just shoot at the ceiling a gunman will turn to you rather than ignore you.
Colorado theater called ‘gun-free’ zone
Lawmaker: ‘Was there nobody that was carrying that could’ve stopped this guy?
http://www.wnd.com/2012/07/colorado-theater-called-gun-free-zone/
look at this way.
Holmes and Murray.. sociopathic, if not crazy, picks places where they know their victims cant fight back… (if they can, you cant feel the power over them can you?)
obama and bloomberg.. sociopathic? and want to create a sitution where they know their victims cant fight back.. if the victims can fight back, what kind of power is that?