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Motivations and Methodology of Mass Murderers Essay

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Introduction Mass murder is defined by the FBI as the killing of three or more people in a single event or in the same day (Petersen & Farrington, 2007). Mass murderers are complex and can be examined by the many factors that regularly appear among them, such as violence precipitating events, weapon of choice, and mental illnesses. The motivations and methods for committing mass murder are easily broken down into specific groups, and through the examination of these definitions and specific cases there is much to learn about the mind of a mass murderer.
History
Throughout history mass murder has not been a problem to the same level and in the same sense as it is today. A related occurrence that is seen in history, which can be …show more content…

The event of mass murder as known today, postal workers going postal and school massacres, has been emerging as a more regular occurrence throughout the last century (Lester, Stack, Schmidtke, Schuller & Muller, 2005). Starting with the Vietnam War era, there have been an increasing number of mass murders, which share a causal link to the increased militarization of American Society. The introduction of semiautomatic weapons in mainstream society gives the opportunity for explosive and gratuitously violent events such as have been seen in recent years (Hamamoto, 2002). The increase in graphically violent war movies and first person video games, full of violent images and massive destruction, lend a hand in the building of a society that is hyperaware of war level violence.
Legal Concerns
The central legal concern associated with mass murder has been gun control. More specifically the aftermath of Columbine can be examined to show the range of gun control concerns. A result of the Columbine massacre, the most terrible mass shooting in United States history, was the media calling for more gun control and identifying too many guns and too little control as the cause of the attack (Kelck, 2009). It is important to note that while this attack was horrendous, it comes nowhere close to the number of victims in

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