High profiles murders in the U.S: what is going on?

nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
High profile murders in the U.S: what is going on?

Is it just me, or have there been a simply huge number of senseless murders this year??

First, we had the rampages where those two guys each killed a bunch of people at their former place of employment (one was at a Simon and Schuster wearhouse in PA)...

Then there was the guy who killed his girlfriend and their 2-year-old twins with the claw of a hammer. And the Casey Anthony case.

Just this week we've got: Jennifer Hudson's mother, brother, and nephew dead, a campus killing in Arkansas, a triple murder of black men in Detroit, AND the young newsanchor who was killed in a home invasion.

WTF? I know we always have murders but this just seems crazy.
 
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nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
oh yeah, forgot about him...made me not want to take greyhound ever...

did you hear that he was eating the guy by the time the cops got there?
 
nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
this is actually the second triple murder in Detroit in three weeks

Wonder what's going on in Miami? Anybody tie people up in a car and burn them to death this week? What about LA, I heard they had a couple of burners. Some woman burned her husband's dead body and left it on the side of the road a couple of months ago.

Anymore prostitute killers in Kansas City after they caught Terry Blair that last one who killed 10 or 12 including his wife? This guy's mother shot Terry's step-dad in the head in front of him, and his brother has already been executed for capital murder.

This society is so done.
 
S

Shonx

Shallow House
Just out of interest - is the murder rate increasing stateside or have their just been more noteworthy homicides? Not wishing to sound cold, but in terms of media coverage, those are always going to top single, simple gunshot homicides aren't they.

Presumably the overwhelming majority of americans didn't shoot anyone today either. Not underplaying the loss to the people involved, but it seems the way these things are reported and the individuality of these sort of crimes make them appear more widespread than they are. It's happened here with knife crime, the majority of which is reported in that "moral decay" tone that they reserve for the death of society scares.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Shonx said:
Just out of interest - is the murder rate increasing stateside or have their just been more noteworthy homicides? Not wishing to sound cold, but in terms of media coverage, those are always going to top single, simple gunshot homicides aren't they.

Presumably the overwhelming majority of americans didn't shoot anyone today either. Not underplaying the loss to the people involved, but it seems the way these things are reported and the individuality of these sort of crimes make them appear more widespread than they are. It's happened here with knife crime, the majority of which is reported in that "moral decay" tone that they reserve for the death of society scares.
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True...one thing about knife crime in the UK, though, is that the age of both perpetrators and victims seems to have decreased substantially in the last few years.
 
S

Shonx

Shallow House
Mr. Tea said:
True...one thing about knife crime in the UK, though, is that the age of both perpetrators and victims seems to have decreased substantially in the last few years.
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I may getting confused here, but hasn't knife crime actually fallen in the last few years - can't really speak about the ages, again is it not newsworthiness - Mary Bell and Jamie Bulger's killers also caused a similar stir, although they clearly weren't the only murders of those years.

I do get the feeling as well that if we look at this in more relative terms, weren't there plenty of knifings going on at most periods since the 50's, which probably pale into insignificance with the violence of the victorian era and before. We can look at the Teddy Boys of the 50's, the clashes between mods and rockers in the 60's, and the NF skinheads of the 70's just as violent youth cultures, not to mention the violence that always seems to exist in densely populated, poor areas.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Overall violent crime has declined since the mid '90s, but the statistics don't include crime committed by under-16s, although there are apparently plans to record this as well from now on. Also it says nothing about how much of that crime was particularly serious (GBH vs. ABH, for instance).
 
nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
It's not that there hasn't always been barbaric and horrible violent crimes. It's the type that's gained prevalence over here in the past 10 years or so that bothers me.

Yeah, sure, you used to have Mogol hordes raping and pilaging and whatever. You even had genocide and evil dictators and Vlad the impaler etc. I'm the first one to admit that the media sensationalizes crime.

But what you have now in the U.S. is an alarming number of serial murderers, serial rapists, malignant narcissist "family killers" (men who, because their family doesn't live up to his ego ideal, brutally and senselessly murder them), gorey dismemberments of women, wife beaters who end up tossing severed limbs into trash cans.

Scott Peterson anyone? Then there's the other Peterson guy who's killed at least 2 wives and they STILL haven't indicted him. Do you realize that O.J. Simpson actually cut Nicole Brown Simpson's head clean off? I never knew that until recently.

The most common murders in the U.S.--gunshot deaths as a result of drug dealing/gangs turf wars--are just like the deaths you can expect in any war, i.e. inevitable, insofar as these wars exist. But the gruesome way in which domestic violence increasingly leads to grisly murder really sickens me.
 
nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Regarding statistics, the way that they count homicides changes all the time, usual according to political convenience, but also tons of homicides get tossed into the suicide pile or labelled as "cause of death unknown"s...this is part of why NYC's crime rates have gone down, the other parts have to do with Giuliani turning NYC into a kind of Disneyland for the tourists.
 
nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Also, there seem to be more and more Columbinesque "walk into a place of business and kill everyone..." incidents.

Last year there was that guy in Pennsylvania who held that Amish school full of young girls captive for hours, planning to sexually molest them before he killed them, but ended up only having time to kill them all before shooting himself in the head all while the police had the building surrounded.

Does this happen in other countries of comparable size? I'm sure the U.S. has its own particular pathologies...
 
S

Shonx

Shallow House
nomadthesecond said:
Also, there seem to be more and more Columbinesque "walk into a place of business and kill everyone..." incidents.

Last year there was that guy in Pennsylvania who held that Amish school full of young girls captive for hours, planning to sexually molest them before he killed them, but ended up only having time to kill them all before shooting himself in the head all while the police had the building surrounded.

Does this happen in other countries of comparable size? I'm sure the U.S. has its own particular pathologies...
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Hungerford in 1987 and Dunblane in 1996 - we don't get too many massacres because each time one happens, gun laws are usually made more restrictive. I'm not totally sure under what circumstances you are allowed a gun permit in the uk now.

There's an interesting correllation between narcissism and excessive spoiling of children in their early development (materially and through ego-boosting/absence of chastisement for bad behaviour), and aggressive tendencies are often more likely to be present in children that have absent parents (either through neglect or being left with creches/child carers).

It may well be that parents trying to make opportunities for their children and give them the life they never had are, via inability to have time to spend with them, doing them far more harm than good. There was an article I read a while ago where they mentioned that a lot of the more disruptive kids in schools were now coming from more affluent families where they were treated like the centre of the universe, and demanded the same gravitas from teachers and pupils alike.

I suppose in countries where materialism, celebrity and influence are seen as important factors then it's no wonder that problems will arise.
 
M

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
Shonx said:
. I'm not totally sure under what circumstances you are allowed a gun permit in the uk now.
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You just need to apply for an FAC and have good reason to own one. I love that bit. Self-defense isn't a good reason, but hunting or 'work-related' issues are. Then the Special Branch do a check on you and follow around all your friends for a couple of months and then you have to spend vast amounts of money on safe storage of the firearms but after that, those damn partridges had better look out.
 
nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
But what's interesting to me about sociopathy is not when you see it in the sort of people you'd expect to be sociopaths--people whose parents were in and out of jail, people who were physically/emotionally abused and in foster care, people with attachment disorder from neglect--but when it's someone who ostensibly had a perfectly "normal" average upbringing and ends up completely whacked out.

Look at the most famous American serial killers from the past 20 or 30 years--Jeffrey Dahmer, Gary Ridgeway, Dennis Rader, Ted Bundy. As far as people know, none of these were victims of serious or sustained abuse. They were well-liked and (with the exception of Dahmer) all had successful relationships, jobs, and even families.

People used to think that sociopathy was always the result of early childhood trauma. Now it's not so obvious. And I'm not so sure the average persons idea of "spoiling" someone is what's triggering this...many, many people are spoiled as children and they don't lose the ability to empathize with others. There's something much more insidious going on...

(Also, I don't buy the argument that availability of guns causes people to dismember other people or even to kill them. In fact, guns are more controlled in the U.S. than they've ever been. There have always been weapons handy that people could've used to kill others had they wanted to do so. It's a larger cultural issue.)
 
S

Shonx

Shallow House
nomadthesecond said:
People used to think that sociopathy was always the result of early childhood trauma. Now it's not so obvious. And I'm not so sure the average persons idea of "spoiling" someone is what's triggering this...many, many people are spoiled as children and they don't lose the ability to empathize with others. There's something much more insidious going on...
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Spoiling kids doesn't necessarily turn them into narcissists, but it can be a contributing factor and an excessive sense of entitlement and bouts of anger are common in both. NPD is at one end of the anti-social personality disorder scale and sociopaths/psychopaths at the other. Sociopaths and psychopaths differ in that psychopaths are thought to have more of a neurological basis to their disorder and generally do not feel remorse or empathy, this would explain why they don't have to be from bad environments to act in that way. From reading the book "The Serial Killers" by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman (good insight into the psychological aspects), it seems that there's also a high proportion of head injuries that required hospitalisation in the youth of many of these killers which also gives weight to the idea that this might stem from brain dysfunction.

Although there's a large grey area with psychopathy, sociopaths are capable of remorse and are generally the way they are due to environmental factors.

I think with guns, you can't seperate the fact that ease of killing does put it in the grasp of many that wouldn't be able to otherwise.

I'm still unconvinced that there's more serial killers now than there were twenty years ago, I would have thought that they'd be caught far more quickly nowadays. Maybe the ferocity of the crimes is to ensure more coverage - murders need to be quite savage to be front page news and make a name for the killer
 
nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Shonx said:
Spoiling kids doesn't necessarily turn them into narcissists, but it can be a contributing factor and an excessive sense of entitlement and bouts of anger are common in both. NPD is at one end of the anti-social personality disorder scale and sociopaths/psychopaths at the other. Sociopaths and psychopaths differ in that psychopaths are thought to have more of a neurological basis to their disorder and generally do not feel remorse or empathy, this would explain why they don't have to be from bad environments to act in that way. From reading the book "The Serial Killers" by Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman (good insight into the psychological aspects), it seems that there's also a high proportion of head injuries that required hospitalisation in the youth of many of these killers which also gives weight to the idea that this might stem from brain dysfunction.

Although there's a large grey area with psychopathy, sociopaths are capable of remorse and are generally the way they are due to environmental factors.

I think with guns, you can't seperate the fact that ease of killing does put it in the grasp of many that wouldn't be able to otherwise.

I'm still unconvinced that there's more serial killers now than there were twenty years ago, I would have thought that they'd be caught far more quickly nowadays. Maybe the ferocity of the crimes is to ensure more coverage - murders need to be quite savage to be front page news and make a name for the killer
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From what I understand, sociopath is just the new name for psychopath. I've never heard anyone distinguish between the two terms, do you know of anything I could read to learn about the difference?

I don't think there are more killers now than 30 years ago, I think there are more sexual sadist sociopathic serial killers since the Victorian era in the U.S. I also think the range of personalities observed among serial killers and other sociopaths has broadened over time. NPD is different from narcissism in general, which is just a single trait among many possible traits.

There have been tons of theories about traumatic brain injuries and their potential to turn people violent, but the problem with this theory is that many, many people get brain injured and very few of them kill anyone. Why don't brain injuries in, say, Swedish people lead to serial killings as well? What's apparent is that there are certain traits common to serial killers, and they are:

1) sexual sadism
2) necrophilia
3) narcissism
4) lack of empathy
5) feelings of disempowerment (e.g. I shouldn't have to work this shit job, women shouldn't be allowed in professional fields, etc)

Many psychiatrists and other scholars think that legends of monsters like werewolves, vampires, etc. originated when people found victims of brutal murders in times before people understood that people could be responsible for these sorts of crimes. Vampires in particular were a supernatural explanation for the work of serial killers--of course, no normal person wants to think a human would do something so vile.
 
nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
Also, remorse is not the same as empathy. A sociopath only ever regrets getting caught, they don't empathize with others. That is what enables them to hurt others with impunity.
 
M

mistersloane

heavy heavy monster sound
I read Jeffrey Dahmer's dad's book this week, heartbreaking tale but quite good on the outside manifestations of how 'it' developed within him, plus how he was brought up, mother's pregnancy etc. It was closer than I've read before about how 'it' manifests.

The 21st century is just going to be violence though isn't it? Violence and behaviourism. Best to knuckle down and just get used to it.
 
nomadthethird

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
There's that one prominent shrink [who interviewed Dahmer and worked for the FBI] who claims that serial killing starts invariably when males torture animals during puberty. During this time when males are having spontaneous erections and such (so the theory goes), this sort of experimenting with animal torture can end up having an effect where the adolescent associates the smell of death and blood etc with his sexual arousal. Then it's all downhill from there. There's also an element of "born predator" in this theory, I think, but it's shaded.

I've just been thinking lately about how the sociopath is the ultimate capitalist hero, really the embodiment of everything capitalism stands for (not an original idea but interesting to me at least). Mostly in terms of "gansters" (Omar is obviously the hero of the Wire, right? Scarface, Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver, Patrick Bateman, Hannibal Lecter, Tony Soprano, the list goes on) but there's also a sort of repulsion-attraction this culture has to serial killers that works, too.
 
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S

Shonx

Shallow House
nomadthesecond said:
From what I understand, sociopath is just the new name for psychopath. I've never heard anyone distinguish between the two terms, do you know of anything I could read to learn about the difference?
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By the looks of it, it might not quite be standard psychological terminology yet (excuse the source, but the reference is reliable),

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopath#Relationship_to_sociopathy

Apparently there is also some move towards removing both terms and just terming them as different degrees of this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder

nomadthesecond said:
I don't think there are more killers now than 30 years ago, I think there are more sexual sadist sociopathic serial killers since the Victorian era in the U.S. I also think the range of personalities observed among serial killers and other sociopaths has broadened over time. NPD is different from narcissism in general, which is just a single trait among many possible traits.
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Sorry was using narcissism as an abbreviation for NPD, bit confusing in hindsight.
From the wiki article on NPD -

"The etiology of this disorder is unknown according to Groopman and Cooper. However, they list the following factors identified by various researchers as possible factors.[3]

An oversensitive temperament at birth
Overindulgence and overvaluation by parents
Valued by parents as a means to regulate their own self-esteem
Excessive admiration that is never balanced with realistic feedback
Unpredictable or unreliable caregiving from parents
Severe emotional abuse in childhood
Being praised for perceived exceptional looks or talents by adults
Excessive praise for good behaviors or excessive criticism for poor behaviors in childhood"

If we look at NPD as part of the same group of disorders as sociopathy and psychopathy, we could follow that the lack of empathy and sense of entitlement in both could lead to violent, anti-social conduct. We should also figure as well that not all spoilt kids become narcissists, in much the same way that not all abused kids become sociopaths.

nomadthesecond said:
There have been tons of theories about traumatic brain injuries and their potential to turn people violent, but the problem with this theory is that many, many people get brain injured and very few of them kill anyone. Why don't brain injuries in, say, Swedish people lead to serial killings as well?
Click to expand...

Brain traumas can change the personality considerably, it depends how dramatic the injury was and to which part of the brain it happened. Not all people with brain injuries necessarily become amnesiac or lose cognitive function.

Read this for the neurological basis

http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/182/1/5

"The suggestion is that the pathology of individuals with psychopathy detrimentally affects two processes that are required for socialisation, i.e. aversive conditioning and instrumental learning. This is thought to result from amygdala dysfunction potentially compounded by OFC dysfunction. However, the reasons for this dysfunction remain unknown. The noradrenergic system could be implicated but why this system should be dysfunctional is, again, unknown. An answer is likely to follow an understanding of the genetic architecture and morphogenesis of the forebrain."

nomadthesecond said:
What's apparent is that there are certain traits common to serial killers, and they are:

1) sexual sadism
2) necrophilia
3) narcissism
4) lack of empathy
5) feelings of disempowerment (e.g. I shouldn't have to work this shit job, women shouldn't be allowed in professional fields, etc)
Click to expand...

Necrophilia isn't common to all serial killers. If you're interested in the subject I suggest reading this -

http://www.rbooks.co.uk/product.aspx?id=0753513218

Very good look into the psychological and environmental factors in the development of killers. It's a bit of a Pandora's box affair though, so be warned. ;)
 
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