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Mass murder

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This article deals with mass killings that are not considered genocide.
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Mass murder (massacre) is the act of murdering a large number of people, typically at the same time or over a relatively short period of time. Mass murder may be committed by individuals or organizations.

The term may refer to spree killers, who stage a single, horrific assault on their victims, or to serial killers, who may kill many people, but not necessarily all at the same time.

The largest mass killings in history have been attempts to exterminate entire groups or communities of people, often on the basis of ethnicity or religion. In modern times such events are sometimes described as genocide. Although some consider that "genocide" may exist where there is merely an intention or plan to exterminate a particular group, and that killing is not a necessary condition, by contrast "mass murder" involves the actual killing of a large number of people.


Mass murderers may fall into any of a number of categories, including killers of family, of coworkers, of students, and of random strangers. Their motives may range from revenge to financial gain to religious fanaticism to mental illness.[citation needed] Many other motivations are possible.

Workers who assault fellow employees are sometimes called "disgruntled workers," but this is often a misnomer, as many perpetrators are ex-workers. They are dismissed from their jobs and subsequently turn up heavily armed and kill their former colleagues. In the 1980s, when two fired postal workers carried out such massacres in separate incidents in the US, the term "going postal" became synonymous with employees snapping and setting out on murderous rampages. One of the 1980s most famous "disgruntled worker" cases involved computer programmer Richard Farley who, after being fired for stalking one of his co-workers, a woman by the name of Laura Black, returned to his former workplace and shot to death seven of his colleagues, although he failed in his attempt to kill Black herself.

In massacres by students, such as the Columbine High School Massacre and the Virginia Tech massacre, alienated youth(s) rampage through their schools killing fellow students and teachers alike before turning the guns on themselves.

There have also been mass killings that may have been unintended, at least in terms of formal premeditation to kill many people. In 1990, Julio González set fire to a New York City nightclub after having a fight there with his girlfriend. Eighty-seven people died in the blaze (Gonzalez's girlfriend survived).

Some financially-motivated mass-killings are either unintended, a result of a robbery going wrong, or are incidental to the primary crime of theft. One of the most bizarre cases was that of Sadamichi Hirasawa, who poisoned twelve bank workers by cyanide during a robbery.

Unlike serial killers, there is rarely a sexual motive to individual mass-murderers, with the possible exception of Sylvestre Matuschka, an Austrian man who apparently derived sexual pleasure from blowing up trains with dynamite, ideally with people in them. His lethal sexual fetish claimed 22 lives before he was caught in 1932.

According to Loren Coleman's book Copycat Effect, publicity about multiple deaths tends to provoke more, whether workplace or school shootings or mass suicides.

Mass murder by terrorists

See also: List of mass car bombings, List of terrorist incidents, and Suicide bombings in Iraq since 2003

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In recent years, terrorists have performed acts of mass murder to intimidate a society and draw attention to their causes. Examples of major terrorist incidents involving mass murder include:

Mass murder by a state

The concept of state-sponsored mass murder covers a range of potential killings. Some people consider any deaths in combat to be mass murder by the state,[citation needed] though this is not a generally held position. Clear examples of state-sponsored mass murder include:

More examples are:

Mass murder in warfare

The wrongful killing of large numbers of civilians or prisoners during war is called a war crime, although it may also be genocide if the proper ethnic motivation is present, as in the The Holocaust, the killings which occurred in the breakaway republics of the former Yugoslavia (e.g. Srebrenica massacre), in the killing of the Pequot in colonial America, the killing of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Hindu and Muslim Bengalis by armed forces of Pakistan in 1971.

Mass murderers

Mass murder cases not yet closed

These are mass murder incidents where the perpetrator(s) have not been determined or arrested, where one or more suspects has been charged but not yet convicted.

See also

References

  1. ^ http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/mass/lundgren/index_1.html
What makes a Mass Killer?
Mass Murder: A Small Person's Way to Immortality
Mass Murderers in White Coats : Psychiatric Genocide in Nazi Germany and the United States.Traces the parallels between the psychiatric and eugenics movements in Nazi Germany and the United States from early in the twentieth century through the present day
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