I sometimes wish I'd studied criminology, because I'm constantly boggled by what drives a person to grab one or more guns, then slaughter a mess of people. Jiverly Wong's story (told somewhat sensationally here) is a good example; the even more recent family slaughter in Washington-- in which a father killed his five children and then himself-- is another. What makes these people tick? Wong (ethnically Chinese, as it turns out... I never thought "Wong" sounded like a Vietnamese surname) was apparently a coke addict, had trouble learning and speaking English, and was a gun nut. But these factors don't add up to an explanation, do they? Good Lord.
_
Marathon
12 years ago
3 comments:
Can you imagine the public outcry, if the carnage going on in Mexico on a daily basis was happening with greater regularity in the U.S.? Sadly, it is the U.S.’s appetite for drugs that is contributing to all the death south of the border, but there is a marked increase in kidnappings seeping north of the border. As for firearms, raping, pillaging, looting, and destruction were occurring well before the invention of the flint-lock. I’m just stunned that no one has utilized biological or chemical weapons to commit their mass murders yet.
I discovered years ago that there is no “good” lord, as the civilian population in North Korea knows all too well.
What makes men do the evil they do? I think it is just our survival instincts, or why hasn’t anyone taken out, er…removed, the dear leaders of the world? We do what we have to do to survive even if it is in extreme poverty and unsanitary conditions. No one was asked if they wanted to be born into this highly imperfect world, but not many want to leave it easily either.
Two interesting experiments involving the nature of man are the “Milgram experiment” and the “Stanford prison experiment” which sought to answer such questions as “"Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?”
John from Daejeon
John,
Ah, yes-- I'm familiar with those experiments. Fascinating stuff.
Do you really think survival instincts are enough to explain something like mass murder? If we all have such instincts, shouldn't we all be out there, rampaging about?
(I'll have my Nerf guns ready.)
Kevin
I do think survival instincts play a role in it when a good portion of the public is mentally unbalanced. Some numbers go as far to indicate that up to 20% of the population suffers from some type of imbalance or other.
People who don’t suffer from diseases of the brain don’t realize the daily agony one goes through when your own mind is your enemy. Couple this with losing one’s job, drug usage (proscribed and illegal), family problems, fear of institutionalization, incarceration, etc., and I am surprised that it doesn’t happen more often. Hell, it was only a week or so ago that a young man killed two of his sisters with a knife and decapitated one of them.
What we don’t hear more about is all those who disappear on the streets by ones. Do you know how many people, especially children, go missing world-wide every year? There are a lot of bad people out there; then, there are those who aren’t even in their “right” minds.
John from Daejeon
Post a Comment