Criminal Profiling Topic of the Day: Motive of a Mass Murderer

We keep hearing how the investigators are working hard to find the motive in the mass murder at Virginia Tech, that somewhere in the life and writings of Cho Seung-Hui there is the answer to why he committed such a horrible act. I say, why are we wasting so much time to search for an answer that is meaningless and also impossible to prove as being the actual truth of the matter?Cho was a psychopath who hated the world. If he were alive, he might pick this motive or that motive in an attempt to justify his actions. This supposed motive might be something he feels comfortable with as his reason for committing a heinous crime or it might be a motive he picks just to make himself look better in the eyes of the world. He might choose a motive to punish his classmates, his family, or some girl who didn’t give him the time of day. He might pick a motive just to play games with us. If Cho were alive, we might get some sort of answer but we would never know the veracity of it.

But, Cho is dead. We can peruse his mind through his writings and behaviors and take a wild guess at a motive, but we will never get his confirmation that we have the right one (the one he wants us to buy which makes it a nonsensical exercise anyway). So what is the point of this exercise in futility? I guess folks just want some answer they can live with, an answer that will assure us that this horrifying act was an anomaly which only happened because of one specific issue in Cho’s life. Then we can breathe a sigh of relief and say, well, there is nothing we can do about some that one circumstance that set him off..

However, if we admit that Cho is a violent psychopath who simply wanted to get his revenge at the world for damned near everything that he felt went wrong in his life, then we have bigger problem: other psychopaths may come out of the woodwork and repeat Cho’s crime just for the hell of it. To stop future mass murderers we must address the creation of psychopaths and how we enable them to eventually take revenge on us. Accepting Cho as a psychopath is much scarier than just thinking he is a psychotic who misinterpreted some incident and snapped. If we finally accept that school mass murders and serial killings are on the rise in this country, we then know it is just a matter of time before we see another tragedy in the news.

Let’s stop looking for the “motives” of psychopaths and start spending our time figuring how to keep our children from developing antisocial personalities and how to protect society from those psychopaths that are already among us.

Criminal Profiler Pat Brown

Criminal Profiling Topic of the Day: Minimizing Crimes and Bad Behavior

This photo provided by the
Department of Homeland Security
shows Cho Seung-Hui , the gunman
suspected of carrying out the Virginia
Tech massacre that left 33 people dead.
(AP Photo/Department of Homeland Security)

Our country has gotten so desensitized to crime, violence, lying, bad language, public displays of sex, and other bad and dangerous behaviors that people minimize these actions when they occur. Our standards have sunk so low that we hardly blink an eye when even heinous behavior is exhibited. This minimization of bad behavior is one of the contributing factors to the horrible Virginia Tech massacre. Let’s look along a time line and how Cho ended up committing mass murder and how we citizens did little to stop it.

Cho goes through childhood displaying weirder and weirder behaviors. Probably not much was done about it because what he was doing and saying was weird, but his right.

Cho goes off to college and while at college starts creeping out his fellow students and teachers, being accused of stalking and acting scary enough to have one of his professors beg the administration to do something about him. While it is okay to be strange, it should not have been okay to frighten others with your behavior. An institution of learning ought to be responsible to make sure the environment is safe for all students and faculty. The student is a “guest” at the college and the college should have the right to expect proper behavior from him or he should be required to leave.

Cho goes and buys guns. While I personally believe in the right to own guns and the right to carry them to protect yourself, I also believe we have a responsibility as a society and as citizens to be serious about gun ownership. We should be required to have a background check, one which checks criminal, behavioral, and mental status. In other words, this should be a solid check so that people like Cho who exhibit frightening behavior and are on antidepressant meds aren’t considered citizens safe enough to be gun owners. The owner should also have to go through strong training in gun safety and sign a document that accepts full responsibility for the gun, that if the weapon is used by anyone other than the owner in a criminal act, the owner will also be liable for prosecution. Cho just walked in and was able to buy the guns he wanted simply because he was not a felon. His other frightening behaviors never were taken into account and he was never required to show even the slightest interest in responsible gun ownership.

Cho is given antidepressants, probably by a doctor who is not a psychiatrist and who does not have him under his care for his mental health problems. Depression and emotional problems are now considered something that can be magically whisked away with drugs. Pop a pill, problem solved.

There are two bomb threats on campus. This happens a lot these days. If they catch the guys who do such things, what kind of jail sentence do you think they would get? It might be labeled juvenile behavior that needs a little counseling instead of a horrific terrorist threat.

Two students are brutally murdered on the Virginia tech campus. The gunman is unknown and at large. Notification to the students of this extremely dangerous situation is delayed because the police and the administration minimized the danger by deciding the murders were just a domestic dispute and the gunman was probably just the female victim’s boyfriend and he was probably just going to go lay low. Shouldn’t such a heinous crime have horrified everyone, even the professionals? Shouldn’t the police and college administration have immediately gotten out the word out that two innocent people had been brutally murdered and there is an armed and extremely dangerous killer on the loose? Do we have to wait until thirty-two students are murdered to consider the killer a danger to the community?

It is becoming harder and harder for people to recognize concerning behaviors in individuals and dangerousness in our communities because so much rotten behavior is tolerated. When we raise our standards of acceptable behavior, bad behavior will be a whole lot easier to see and, perhaps, then we will stop ignoring it.

Criminal Profiler Pat Brown

Criminal Profiling Topic of the Day: Who is to Blame for the Virginia Tech Massacre?

It has been interesting in the wake of the Virginia Tech mass murder to see the reactions of the public to the incident. Much raw emotion is coming out and people, including myself, feel very strongly about one issue or the other. In doing television appearances concerning this horrible event, I get the inevitable hate mail and phone calls along with, thankfully, many more positive responses. What gets people really upset (other than the fact thirty-two innocent students and teachers have been murdered in cold blood? Let’s take a look at what is riling people up. Blame, or shall I say, who is to blame for the massacre.

There are those who become angry that blame is placed anywhere but on the shooter. These folks believe that nothing in society could have prevented or stopped the killer and, therefore, we should simply look at the situation as the sad result of a deranged individual who has done a horrible deed. We should call the killer evil (or mentally ill) and mourn the dead. We either hate the evildoer and blame him for everything or we feel sorry for the mentally deranged man along with the victims.

I find this a bit too simplistic and rather frightening, especially when we see a rise in the trend of school shootings, violence among our youth, and predators. If each time something like this happens and we just shrug our shoulders and say, “It couldn’t be helped” we are doing nothing to make the future of our citizens safer.

The reality is that various aspects of society can indeed be blamed for the creation of psychopaths and the crimes they commit. Family and societal problems such as broken homes, excessive violent imagery as a staple of youth’s lives, a gun culture which glorifies and internalizes the use of firearms as both an entertainment and a method of retaliation, a high level disrespectful behavior in our schools, parents who leave their children unsupervised and to their own devices, a lack of positive inputs into youths’ lives, irresponsible gun ownership, lack of public safety laws and security, a weak criminal justice system – these are many of the issues that lead to the development of violent psychopaths and allow them to carry out horrific crimes.

It is a complicated and difficult problem but one which we continually ignore as a society, pretending that pornography, violent media and gaming, poor parenting, and out-of-control school environments are not compromising our youth. It isn’t that this Virginia Tech killer isn’t a horrible creep that should be blamed for the deaths of these poor victims, but that as a society we need to wake up and realize we are to a good extent part of the problem as to why mass murderers, pedophiles, and predators have become such a nightmare in our country and are becoming an increasing problem in other countries as well.

Criminal Profiler Pat Brown