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Chapter Sixteen: Law-governed States、Law-enforcers, and Crimes
暴動、銃、ギャング問題/riots,
gun, gang problems
NRA
rape,
Columbine High School massacre case
The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting case
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The right to keep and bear arms is codified in the Second
Amendment to the United States Constitution, which reads: A well regulated
militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the
people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.(wiki) |
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The National Rifle Association of America is an American
nonprofit organization which advocates for gun rights. |
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The Depressive and the Psychopath
At last we know why the Columbine killers did it.
By Dave Cullen, April 20 2004 11:59 AM
Five years ago today, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered their
classmates and teachers at Columbine High School. Most Americans have
reached one of two wrong conclusions about why they did it. The first
conclusion is that the pair of supposed "Trench Coat Mafia outcasts" were
taking revenge against the bullies who had made school miserable for them.
The second conclusion is that the massacre was inexplicable: We can never
understand what drove them to such horrific violence.
But the FBI and its team of psychiatrists and psychologists have reached
an entirely different conclusion. They believe they know why Harris and
Klebold killed, and their explanation is both more reassuring and more
troubling than our misguided conclusions. Three months after the massacre,
the FBI convened a summit in Leesburg, Va., that included world-renowned
mental health experts, including Michigan State University psychiatrist
Dr. Frank Ochberg, as well as Supervisory Special Agent Dwayne Fuselier,
the FBI's lead Columbine investigator and a clinical psychologist.
Fuselier and Ochberg share their conclusions publicly here for the first
time.
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The first steps to understanding Columbine, they say, are to forget the
popular narrative about the jocks, Goths, and Trenchcoat Mafia—click here
to read more about Columbine's myths—and to abandon the core idea that
Columbine was simply a school shooting. We can't understand why they did
it until we understand what they were doing.
School shooters tend to act impulsively and attack the targets of their
rage: students and faculty. But Harris and Klebold planned for a year and
dreamed much bigger. The school served as means to a grander end, to
terrorize the entire nation by attacking a symbol of American life. Their
slaughter was aimed at students and teachers, but it was not motivated by
resentment of them in particular. Students and teachers were just
convenient quarry, what Timothy McVeigh described as "collateral damage."
The killers, in fact, laughed at petty school shooters. They bragged about
dwarfing the carnage of the Oklahoma City bombing and originally scheduled
their bloody performance for its anniversary. Klebold boasted on video
about inflicting "the most deaths in U.S. history." Columbine was intended
not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale.
If they hadn't been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they
set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. After those bombs
went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. An explosive third
act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip
through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and
reporters. The climax would be captured on live television. It wasn't just
"fame" they were after—Agent Fuselier bristles at that trivializing
term—they were gunning for devastating infamy on the historical scale of
an Attila the Hun. Their vision was to create a nightmare so devastating
and apocalyptic that the entire world would shudder at their power.
Harris and Klebold would have been dismayed that Columbine was dubbed the
"worst school shooting in American history." They set their sights on
eclipsing the world's greatest mass murderers, but the media never saw
past the choice of venue. The school setting drove analysis in precisely
the wrong direction.
Fuselier and Ochberg say that if you want to understand "the killers,"
quit asking what drove them. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were radically
different individuals, with vastly different motives and opposite mental
conditions. Klebold is easier to comprehend, a more familiar type. He was
hotheaded, but depressive and suicidal. He blamed himself for his
problems.
Harris is the challenge. He was sweet-faced and well-spoken. Adults, and
even some other kids, described him as "nice." But Harris was cold,
calculating, and homicidal. "Klebold was hurting inside while Harris
wanted to hurt people," Fuselier says. Harris was not merely a troubled
kid, the psychiatrists say, he was a psychopath.
In popular usage, almost any crazy killer is a "psychopath." But in
psychiatry, it's a very specific mental condition that rarely involves
killing, or even psychosis. "Psychopaths are not disoriented or out of
touch with reality, nor do they experience the delusions, hallucinations,
or intense subjective distress that characterize most other mental
disorders," writes Dr. Robert Hare, in Without Conscience, the seminal
book on the condition. (Hare is also one of the psychologists consulted by
the FBI about Columbine and by Slate for this story *.) "Unlike psychotic
individuals, psychopaths are rational and aware of what they are doing and
why. Their behavior is the result of choice, freely exercised." Diagnosing
Harris as a psychopath represents neither a legal defense, nor a moral
excuse. But it illuminates a great deal about the thought process that
drove him to mass murder.
Diagnosing him as a psychopath was not a simple matter. Harris opened his
private journal with the sentence, "I hate the f---ing world." And when
the media studied Harris, they focused on his hatred—hatred that
supposedly led him to revenge. It's easy to get lost in the hate, which
screamed out relentlessly from Harris' Web site:
"YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? Cuuuuuuuuhntryyyyyyyyyy music!!! . . .
"YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? People who say that wrestling is real!! . . .
"YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? People who use the same word over and over
again! . . . Read a f---in book or two, increase your vo-cab-u-lary f*ck*ng
idiots."
"YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? STUPID PEOPLE!!! Why must so many people be so
stupid!!? . . . YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? When people mispronounce words!
and they dont even know it to, like acrosT, or eXspreso, pacific
(specific), or 2 pAck. learn to speak correctly you morons.
YOU KNOW WHAT I HATE!!!? STAR WARS FANS!!! GET A FaaaaaaRIGIN LIFE YOU
BORING GEEEEEKS!
It rages on for page after page and is repeated in his journal and in the
videos he and Klebold made. But Fuselier recognized a far more revealing
emotion bursting through, both fueling and overshadowing the hate. What
the boy was really expressing was contempt.
He is disgusted with the morons around him. These are not the rantings of
an angry young man, picked on by jocks until he's not going to take it
anymore. These are the rantings of someone with a messianic-grade
superiority complex, out to punish the entire human race for its appalling
inferiority. It may look like hate, but "It's more about demeaning other
people," says Hare.
A second confirmation of the diagnosis was Harris' perpetual
deceitfulness. "I lie a lot," Eric wrote to his journal. "Almost
constantly, and to everybody, just to keep my own ass out of the water.
Let's see, what are some of the big lies I told? Yeah I stopped smoking.
For doing it, not for getting caught. No I haven't been making more bombs.
No I wouldn't do that. And countless other ones."
Harris claimed to lie to protect himself, but that appears to be something
of a lie as well. He lied for pleasure, Fuselier says. "Duping
delight"—psychologist Paul Ekman's term—represents a key characteristic of
the psychopathic profile.
Harris married his deceitfulness with a total lack of remorse or
empathy—another distinctive quality of the psychopath. Fuselier was
finally convinced of his diagnosis when he read Harris' response to being
punished after being caught breaking into a van. Klebold and Harris had
avoided prosecution for the robbery by participating in a "diversion
program" that involved counseling and community service. Both killers
feigned regret to obtain an early release, but Harris had relished the
opportunity to perform. He wrote an ingratiating letter to his victim
offering empathy, rather than just apologies. Fuselier remembers that it
was packed with statements like Jeez, I understand now how you feel and I
understand what this did to you.
"But he wrote that strictly for effect," Fuselier said. "That was complete
manipulation. At almost the exact same time, he wrote down his real
feelings in his journal: 'Isn't America supposed to be the land of the
free? How come, if I'm free, I can't deprive a stupid f---ing dumbshit
from his possessions if he leaves them sitting in the front seat of his
f---ing van out in plain sight and in the middle of f---ing nowhere on a
Frif---ingday night. NATURAL SELECTION. F---er should be shot.' "
Harris' pattern of grandiosity, glibness, contempt, lack of empathy, and
superiority read like the bullet points on Hare's Psychopathy Checklist
and convinced Fuselier and the other leading psychiatrists close to the
case that Harris was a psychopath.
It begins to explain Harris' unbelievably callous behavior: his ability to
shoot his classmates, then stop to taunt them while they writhed in pain,
then finish them off. Because psychopaths are guided by such a different
thought process than non-psychopathic humans, we tend to find their
behavior inexplicable. But they're actually much easier to predict than
the rest of us once you understand them. Psychopaths follow much stricter
behavior patterns than the rest of us because they are unfettered by
conscience, living solely for their own aggrandizement. (The difference is
so striking that Fuselier trains hostage negotiators to identify
psychopaths during a standoff, and immediately reverse tactics if they
think they're facing one. It's like flipping a switch between two
alternate brain-mechanisms.)
None of his victims means anything to the psychopath. He recognizes other
people only as means to obtain what he desires. Not only does he feel no
guilt for destroying their lives, he doesn't grasp what they feel. The
truly hard-core psychopath doesn't quite comprehend emotions like love or
hate or fear, because he has never experienced them directly.
"Because of their inability to appreciate the feelings of others, some
psychopaths are capable of behavior that normal people find not only
horrific but baffling," Hare writes. "For example, they can torture and
mutilate their victims with about the same sense of concern that we feel
when we carve a turkey for Thanksgiving dinner."
The diagnosis transformed their understanding of the partnership. Despite
earlier reports about Harris and Klebold being equal partners, the
psychiatrists now believe firmly that Harris was the mastermind and
driving force. The partnership did enable Harris to stray from typical
psychopathic behavior in one way. He restrained himself. Usually
psychopathic killers crave the stimulation of violence. That is why they
are often serial killers—murdering regularly to feed their addiction. But
Harris managed to stay (mostly) out of trouble for the year that he and
Klebold planned the attack. Ochberg theorizes that the two killers
complemented each other. Cool, calculating Harris calmed down Klebold when
he got hot-tempered. At the same time, Klebold's fits of rage served as
the stimulation Harris needed.
The psychiatrists can't help speculating what might have happened if
Columbine had never happened. Klebold, they agree, would never have pulled
off Columbine without Harris. He might have gotten caught for some petty
crime, gotten help in the process, and conceivably could have gone on to
live a normal life.
Their view of Harris is more reassuring, in a certain way. Harris was not
a wayward boy who could have been rescued. Harris, they believe, was
irretrievable. He was a brilliant killer without a conscience, searching
for the most diabolical scheme imaginable. If he had lived to adulthood
and developed his murderous skills for many more years, there is no
telling what he could have done. His death at Columbine may have stopped
him from doing something even worse.
Correction, April 20, 2004:The article originally identified Dr. Robert
Hare as a psychiatrist. He is a psychologist. Return to the corrected
sentence. |
    
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