Journalists are missing the underlying motive of mass murderers. Hint: murder is symptomatic of egomania.
Alcoholic Myth-of-the-Month
“Many motives drive mass murders.”
So said a spate of “experts” in response to the rash of mass murders in recent months. Personal failures and revenge were cited as factors in the Binghampton, N.Y. massacre, in which Jiverly Wong (aka Jiverly Voong), 42, gunned down 13 people in an immigrant center. These same so-called experts say anger is a common thread among such mass killers, who act on that anger by showing others who’s boss. Professor of criminology at Northeastern University in Boston, James Alan Fox, says that “men will often use violence to show them who’s boss, to assert control.” According to a colleague of his, Jack Levin, mass murderers “typically” have no criminal record or history of psychiatric treatment, which he says would describe another recent mass killer, Robert Stewart, who burst into a North Carolina nursing home and killed seven residents and a nurse. However, the former house painter had a DUI on his record and was disabled, which suggests possible use of pain killers. His ex-wife, from whom he had been divorced since 2001, said he had “some violent tendencies from time to time,” which in conjunction with the DUI virtually confirms alcoholism. Wong had been investigated on a tip that he had a crack cocaine “habit” and was planning to rob a bank. In addition, the building he lived in was a “magnet” for drug dealing and prostitution. Few if any non-addicts would live in such a building.
Yet actual use often goes unreported or is reported only months after the incident in minor one-paragraph articles. Three months after the murder-suicide, Bruce Pardo, dubbed the Santa Claus killer, was reported to have had “small” amounts of cocaine in his system when he killed nine people in December. While authorities cannot say whether the drug affected his behavior, the odds of a non-addict over the age of 25 getting his hands on cocaine are remote. And recall I had to read a dozen articles on the anthrax killer, Bruce E. Ivins, before discovering in the 28th paragraph of the 13th article that he’d been in alcohol rehab twice last year as discussed in the Aug 2008 issue of TAR.
As shown in Drunks, Drugs & Debits, the odds of alcohol or other drug addiction in a convicted felon, or in one who should be convicted, are at least 80%. Many other motives have been offered for committing murder, including even heavy-metal music. As I wrote in the May 2005 TAR “Myth of the Month” in which the idea that music could be an incitement to murder was thoroughly debunked, “While mass or serial murderers about whom biographies have been written can almost always be identified by the careful reader as alcoholics, there is often little in all-too-brief newspaper reports offering confirming evidence of alcoholism. However, the likelihood is at least 80% that the motive behind the crime is egomania rooted in this disease.” While the circumstances and environment of the addict helps determine the particular destructive path he or she takes, alcoholism is usually at the root of such wanton destruction.
In the Nov-Dec 2008 TAR I suggested the likelihood that, due to the economic turmoil (which I believe could get far worse), we might be on the cusp of a marked increase in violence. Since we are all at increased risk, it bears repeating:
“Greater…strife, including violence, is a predictable result of an increase in unemployment-induced re-channeling of alcoholic power-seeking misbehaviors. Naturally, ‘financial problems’ will be blamed, but we will know the truth.
“Attempts to wield power may take form in greater violence outside of the home as well. My friend and publisher of The Elliott Wave Theorist Robert Prechter, Jr. and a subscriber of his, John Whitney, discovered a link between bear markets and an increase in serial and mass murder. Charles Manson and his followers committed their heinous crimes in 1969, which encompassed a bear market in stocks. There was an especially large number of such murders during the 1970s, a decade during which stocks essentially went nowhere. Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and David Berkowitz went on killing sprees over the course of several years in the middle of that decade. As Whitney wrote on the elliotwave message board, ‘Jeffrey Dahmer killed his first victim in 1978 and then lay dormant until 1987 when he began again, only being caught at the tail end of the recession in 1991 as the [1990s] bull market was beginning.’ Jim Jones convinced 900 men, women and children to commit Kool-Aid suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, near the end of the stagflation of the 1970s. Every one of these murderers was an alcoholic.”
The Associated Press report of April 6, 2009, from which this myth was taken, said, “Like Wong, hundreds of thousands of Americans have been laid off in recent months. And Stewart…is not the first man whose wife has left him.” Most never hurt anyone. Levin says it is virtually impossible to know that someone is going to commit mass murder. While this is true, we can at least narrow the focus of our greatest concerns to the 10% of the population with the disease of alcoholism. Those who know how to spot them, as I show in How to Spot Hidden Alcoholics, can gain an enormous advantage over others.