Mass shootings frequently end with the shooter killing himself, and nearly all mass shooters are male. Fewer than 2 percent of all suicides in the country—about 800 per year—are preceded by murder, and most murder-suicides occur outside the spotlight. Psychologist Thomas Joiner categorizes murder-suicide motives into four perceived virtues: mercy, justice, duty, and glory. Mercy cases include husbands who kill chronically ill spouses or parents who kill children to spare future suffering. Justice can include victims of long-term abuse who kill their abuser before taking their own life. Many shooters kill themselves to avoid facing the consequences of their actions.
Last week, a 23-year-old man who, according to police, was obsessed with previous mass shooters, opened fire at a school in Minneapolis, killing two children and injuring 18 others. It was the latest mass shooting to make headlines, and it ended the way most of them do, with the gunman killing himself. In highly publicized cases, the horror looms large in the public consciousness.
Most common is mercy, for example the husband who shoots his chronically ill wife to take her out of her misery before he shoots himself. To others it's murder, but to him, it's a mercy killing. A variation of this is the spouse who kills her child before killing herself. The justification is that she is sparing the child from a lifetime of pain and hardship at the hands of society in general or the child's father in particular.
Collection
[
|
...
]