Mass Murder
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Wikipedia-Article "Mass Murder"
This article deals with mass killings which are not considered genocide.
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 not always be applied in relation to the acts of serial killers, who may kill many people, but not necessarily all at the same time.
Unlike the term "murder", the term "mass murder" does not have a formal legal definition but it does invoke negative moral connotations. Whether a specific event can be described as an instance of "mass murder" is sometimes a matter of controversy, as the characterization can be a subjective exercise and predicated on the historical and moral context. For example, some pacifist philosophies consider any killing during war as mass murder, on the basis that all human life is sacred.
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.
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Mass murder by individuals
Outside of a political context, the term "mass murder" refers to the killing of several people at the same time. Examples would include shooting several people in the course of a robbery, or setting a crowded nightclub on fire. This is an ambiguous term, similar to serial killing and spree killing.
The USA Bureau of Justice Statistics defines a mass murder as "[involving] the murder of four or more victims at one location, within one event."
Most mass murderers fall into one of three categories: family annihilators, individuals with mental defects, and disgruntled workers.
It can also, in rare cases, be a child (usually a male adolescent) who kills his parents and siblings. One example is Sean Stevenson, a sixteen year-old from Washington State who, on New Year's Day 1987, shot to death his parents and raped and killed his eighteen year-old sister. He was caught after talking of the murders to his girlfriend and inviting her to flee with him to Mexico.
Disgruntled Workers is often a misnomer, as most perpetrators are ex-workers. They are dismissed from their jobs and subsequently turn up heavily armed and slaughter 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 1980's 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.
These definitions are evidently outdated and do not take into account the phenomenon of school massacres by students, such as the Columbine High School Massacre, where alienated youths rampage through their schools killing fellow students and teachers alike before turning the guns on themselves.
There are also mass killings that are seemingly unintended, at least in terms of pre-meditation. In 1990, Julio Gonzales set fire to a New York City nightclub after having a row there with his girlfriend. eighty seven people died in the blaze (Gonzalez's girlfriend survived).
Some mass-killers may have financial motives, whereby the killings are either unintended as 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 to death 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 Silvestre 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 twenty two lives before he was caught in 1932.
Mass murder by terrorists
In recent years, terrorists have performed acts of mass murder as acts of intimidation, and to draw attention to their causes. Examples of major terrorist incidents involving mass murder include:
- September 11, 2001 attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia- ~3,000 deaths
- Beslan hostage crisis- ~350 deaths
- Bali bombings- 202 deaths
- Madrid train terrorist attacks- 191 deaths
- Air India Flight 182 bombing in 1985 - 329 deaths
- Russian airplane bombings of August 24, 2004 - 89 deaths
- London bombings of July 7, 2005 - 56 deaths
- Omagh bombing in Omagh, Northern Ireland- 29 deaths
- The Wandhama massacre in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir - 24 deaths
- The Rome and Vienna airport attacks - 20 deaths
- The 1972 Munich massacre - 12 deaths (not counting 5 terrorists killed)
Mass murder by a state
The concept of state-sponsored mass murder covers a range of potential killings. On one hand, there are clear examples of state-sponsored mass-murder, such as:
- Genocide of a particular ethnic or religious group, whether internal or external to the state, such as the Holocaust against the Jews
- Political mass murder or the killing of a particular political group within a country, such as Béla Kun's ethnic cleansing against turkish and tartar crimeans and other minorities in 1921-22, or Stalin's Great Purge.
- Deliberate massacres of civilians during wartime by a state's military forces, such as the Nanjing Massacre during World War II or the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War.
- Actions in which the state caused the death of large numbers of people, which political scientist R. J. Rummel calls "democide," which, in addition to the cases above, may include man-made disasters caused by the state, such as the Holodomor in the Soviet Union.
Some people consider any deaths in combat to be mass murder by the state, though this is not a generally held position.
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 killings which occurred in the breakaway republics of the former Yugoslavia (e.g. Srebrenica Massacre), in the killing of the Pequot in colonial America or in killing of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Hindu and Muslim Bengalis by armed forces of Pakistan in 1971.
Mass murderers
- Osama bin Laden (Pakistan, September 11, 2001 attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia) 2001
- Andrew Kehoe (Bath Michigan, Blew up school, killing 45 (mostly children) 1927
- John D. Lee (Mountain Meadows Massacre, 1857)
- Howard Unruh (Camden, New Jersey, 1949)
- Jack Gilbert Graham (Denver, Colorado, 1955)
- Charles Whitman (University of Texas Shootings, Austin, Texas, 1 August 1966)
- Harry Roberts (police killer, London, 1966)
- Richard Speck (murdered eight student nurses, Chicago, Illinois, 1966)
- Victor Ernest Hoffman (Shell Lake murders, in Shell Lake, Saskatchewan, Canada. August 15, 1967)
- John List (Westfield, New Jersey, 1971)
- Edward Charles Allaway killer of 7 people at the library of California State University-Fullerton on July 12, 1976
- Denis Lortie (National Assembly of Quebec, May 8, 1984)
- James Oliver Huberty (McDonald's massacre, San Ysidro, California, 18 July 1984)
- Jeremy Bamber (farmhouse family murders, Tolleshunt D'Arcy, Essex, England, 1985)
- David Burke, (PSA Flight 1771, San Luis Obispo, California, 1987)
- Michael Ryan, (Hungerford, Berkshire, UK), 1987
- Patrick Edward Purdy (Cleveland Elementary School Shootings, Stockton, California, 17 January 1989)
- Marc Lépine (École Polytechnique Massacre, Montreal, Quebec, 1989)
- Kanishka Tragedy (Air India plane bombed killing 329)
- Kenneth French, Jr. (North Carolina, USA - 1993)
- Colin Ferguson (LIRR Massacre; USA, 1994)
- Baruch Goldstein (Hebron, 1994)
- Thomas Hamilton (Dunblane massacre, Dunblane, Scotland, 1996)
- George Hennard, opened fire on diners in Killeen, Texas
- Martin Bryant (Port Arthur Massacre, Australia, 1996)
- Ivan Milat (serial killer), Backpacker murders, Australia, 1990-1991)
- Mohammad Ahman al-Naziri (Sanaa massacre, Sanaa, Yemen, 1997)
- Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden (Jonesboro massacre, Jonesboro, Arkansas, 1998)
- Larry Gene Ashbrook (Wedgwood Baptist Church, USA, 1999)
- Susan Eubanks (Vista, California, 1999)
- Buford O. Furrow, Jr. (Los Angeles, California, 1999)
- Michael Ryan (Hungerford Massacre, Berkshire, England, 1987)
- Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (the Columbine High School Massacre, Littleton, Colorado), 1999)
- Byran Uyesugi (Xerox Murders, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1999)
- Dipendra of Nepal (Nepal, 2001)
- Mamoru Takuma (Osaka school massacre, Osaka, Osaka, Japan, 2001)
- Robert Steinhäuser (Erfurt massacre, Erfurt, Germany, 2002)
- Hanadi Jaradat (Haifa, 2003)
- Jeff Weise (Red Lake High School massacre, Red Lake, Minnesota, 2005)
In addition, Brenda Ann Spencer attempted a mass murder at an elementary school in San Diego, California, in January 1979. She only killed two people, who were guarding the students that she targeted. Eight students and a police officer were injured. This event was the basis for the hit song "I Don't Like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats.