In the past month alone, eight multiple-shooting incidents have occurred in the United States and Europe, leaving 70 dead, including three Pittsburgh police officers killed April 4.
In the criminology trade, they are known as mass murders, and they usually share several common traits, experts say.
The Pittsburgh police shootings, and the actions of suspect Richard Poplawski, fit some of these patterns, they say, but in other ways, they and another incident in which four Oakland, Calif., police officers were killed are atypical.
A common factor in most mass murders, said criminologist Jack Levin of Northeastern University in Boston, is revenge.
"At the most basic level," Levin said, "the revenge is directed against family members," who are the main victims in about 30 percent of all mass killings.
"The next most likely target is the workplace, where an ex-worker who was fired or laid off comes back shooting, killing the boss and co-workers."
And finally, he said, there are mass killers who blame society in general for their problems and may walk into a mall and open fire, or target certain groups for destruction, including, occasionally, the police, because "the police are representatives of society."
Besides an embittered sense of revenge, the experts said, another common thread in these killings is access to high-powered weapons, which is a particularly American phenomenon.
"You need to understand how our society permits easy access to lots and lots of guns if you're going to understand why these kinds of killings happen so much in the United States as opposed to somewhere else," said David Hemenway, a health policy professor at Harvard University.
"As far as I can tell, the psychological problems of these killers are not unique to the United States, but what is unique is that it's so easy for people in the U.S. to get access to weapons."
Daniel Nagin, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, agreed. "It's technologically impossible to kill a lot of people very quickly without access to these assault weapons," he said.
Besides the revenge motive, mass murderers usually share certain other psychological or behavioral characteristics, the experts said.
Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Department of Corrections who has written a history of mass murders in America, cited five:
-- The killer blames others for his problems.
-- He (almost all such mass killers are male) is much more likely to have a mental illness, particularly paranoid schizophrenia, than homicide perpetrators in general.
-- He is often a loner, with few friends or social connections.
-- He carefully plans his attacks, taking days to months to get ready.
-- He is much more likely to be suicidal than a typical killer. "Because the mass murderer considers his life no longer worth living, he will either kill himself or force the police to kill him," Duwe said.
E-mail Mark Roth at mroth(at)post-gazette.com.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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