Mass murder

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This article deals with mass killings that are not considered genocide.
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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 refer to spree killers, who stage a single, horrific assault on their victims, or to serial killers, who may kill many people, but not necessarily all at the same time.

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. Some of these mass murders have been found to be genocides and others to be crimes against humanity, but often such crimes have lead to few or no convictions of any type.

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Outside a political context, the term "mass murder" refers to the killing of several people at the same time or not 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."[citation needed]

Mass murderers may fall into any of a number of categories, including killers of family, of coworkers, of students, and of random strangers. Their motives may range from revenge to financial gain to religious fanaticism to mental illness.[1] Many other motivations are possible.

Workers who assault fellow employees are sometimes called "disgruntled workers," but this is often a misnomer, as many perpetrators are ex-workers. They are dismissed from their jobs and subsequently turn up heavily armed and kill 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 1980s 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.

In massacres by students, such as the Columbine High School Massacre and the Virginia Tech massacre, alienated youth(s) rampage through their schools killing fellow students and teachers alike before turning the guns on themselves.

There have also been mass killings that may have been unintended, at least in terms of formal premeditation to kill many people. In 1990, Julio González set fire to a New York City nightclub after having a fight there with his girlfriend. Eighty-seven people died in the blaze (Gonzalez's girlfriend survived).

Some financially-motivated mass-killings are either unintended, 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 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 Sylvestre 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.

According to Loren Coleman's book Copycat Effect, publicity about multiple deaths tends to provoke more,[2] whether workplace or school shootings or mass suicides.

See also: List of mass car bombings, List of terrorist incidents, and Suicide bombings in Iraq since 2003.

In recent years, terrorists have performed acts of mass murder to intimidate a society and draw attention to their causes. Examples of major terrorist incidents involving mass murder include:

According to unofficial sources: 67% of all Mass Murders are religious 20% are acts of terrorism The remaining 13% are undefined[dubious – discuss].

The concept of state-sponsored mass murder covers a range of potential killings. Some people consider any deaths in combat to be mass murder by the state,[4] though this is not a generally held position. Clear examples of state-sponsored mass murder include:

More examples are:

During war, a military force commits mass murder when it unlawfully kills non-combatants. Depending on the circumstances such murders may constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide or a combination of two or all three.

These are mass murder incidents where the perpetrator(s) have not been determined or arrested, where one or more suspects has been charged but not yet convicted.

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

  1. ^ http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1612368,00.html
  2. ^ http://hammernews.com/copycateffect.htm
  3. ^ http://www.hrw.org/press98/nov/italy-apendix.htm
  4. ^ http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/COM.ART.HTM
  5. ^ http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/mass/lundgren/index_1.html

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_murder"
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