Mass murder
From Academic Kids
A mass murder (massacre) involves the murder of large numbers of people either by a state or an individual. This should not be confused with serial killers, who usually kill one person (or perhaps two) at a time.
The largest mass killings in history have been attempts to exterminate ethnic and other groups; for more about this subject see genocide. This article refers to non-genocidal mass killings.
Although "genocide" does not necessarily require actual killing, only acting on a plan to exterminate an ethnic group, mass murder by definition involves killing a large number of people.
| Contents |
Mass murder by the 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 murder of a particular political group within a country, such as Stalin's Great Purge.
- Deliberate massacres of civilians during wartime by a state's military forces, such as the Nanjing Massacre during World War 2 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 Great Leap Forward in China.
More controversially, acts of war that are not directly genocide or direct massacres aimed at civilians are also sometimes refered to as state-sponsored mass murder. Some of these more controversal events may include:
- Bombing of areas that included substantial civilian populations in Japan by the United States, including the atomic bomb attacks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
- Deaths during civil war, such as the Mexican Revolution
- Deaths caused by individuals, but as a result of state-sponsored systems of oppression or injustice, such as slavery in the United States.
Finally, some people consider any deaths in combat to be mass murder by the state, though this is not a generally held position.
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 Terrorist 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
- The Wandhama Massacre in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir - 24 deaths
- Omagh Bombing in Omagh, Northern Ireland- 29 deaths
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, firearms enthusiasts or disgruntled workers.
Family Annihilators, as the term suggests, slaughter their immediate family. In a typical instance, a husband kills his wife and children and then takes his own life, quite often when they are under mounting financial or other pressures. An example is Robert Mochrie, a Welsh businessman who was suffering from depression and financial problems when, in July 2000, he battered to death his two sons, two daughters and wife before finally hanging himself.
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 16-year-old from Washington State who, on New Years Day 1987, shot to death his parents and raped and killed his 18-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 adopted as slang for someone who snaps and goes on a rampage.
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.
There are also mass killings that are seemingly unintended, at least in terms of pre-meditation. In 1990, Julio Gonzalez set fire to a New York nightclub after having a row there with his girlfriend. 87 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 12 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 22 lives before he was caught in 1932.
Mass Murderers
- 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, 1966)
- John List (Westfield, New Jersey, 1971)
- 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)
- 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), back packer 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)
- 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, 1979. She only killed two people guarding the students that she targeted. Eight students and a police officer were injured. This event was the basis for the song I don't like Mondays by the Boomtown Rats.
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) or in the killing of the Pequot in colonial America.
