The title is self explanatory. The current wave of mass murder suggests several different psychological characteristics. The first characteristic is that the potential mass murderer is aware of the recurring nature of mass murders that take place in a given society. His grandiose fantasy is that he wants to compete with mass murderers. Therefore, he diligently plans how he will surpass all previous mass murderers and become the greatest mass murderer in history. He is the dark side competitive with other mass murderers. He displaces his competitive impulses towards murderous/suicidal acts instead of other people’s normal competitive activities.
The second characteristic is that he wants the people he kills. He wants to die the same way they do. Therefore, he is both the victim and the perpetrator of the murder. He sees death as a desirable solution to his problems with the world. He may even hate the world and the people in it and think that he is nothing and that he should die along with his victims. He is like a person divided into two parts. One part wants to kill others, while at the same time wishing to die itself. He thinks in terms of black and white. He is all or nothing. At some point he adopts a paradoxical view of himself as omnipotent and great and also worthless and worthless.
He abstracts people and takes the position of the loner and justifies that his position is the absolute correct one and challenges anyone to prove that there is another way of seeing the world and existence. It is emotionally repressed, isolated, and traumatically reverberating back to insults that have never been resolved. He can list his pursuers one by one, but his revenge is spread through the defense mechanism of generalization. He goes from one victimizer to a hundred victims and victimizers, all serving to die. Mass murder and suicide are her solution to his problems. He believes that if he were in the slaughtered position, he would omnipotently survive, when in reality he has very powerful mixed feelings about being alive and dead.
You think you can do whatever you want, but whatever you do isn’t going to change anything. So, he resorts to mass murder and suicide to drastically change his sense of not being. He lives in a black hole where part of him doesn’t want to do anything and another part wants to do something. When he plans to mass murder, he believes that he is doing something and experiences the feeling of being God and Devil at the same time. He has the omnipotent power of life and death. His defenses make him so armored that he makes it impossible for anyone to reach him. He ravenously fights against being vulnerable. He doesn’t want to and can’t feel the normal range of human emotions. His coping mechanisms, learned in childhood, are usually justification, rationalization, intellectualization, abstraction, repression, splitting, drinking, and drugs.
Most of us use very well internalized mechanisms to keep our dark side inclinations and emotions in check. A mass murderer at some point has had this survival/kill or be killed part of his mental brain opened up and then proceeds to act out fantasies of it on very specific and significant target persons. Murder and suicide is the solution to his need to be heard, understood and accepted. His grandiosity prevents her from understanding that his highly distorted thinking of him not only rejects him socially, but also alienates him and pushes other people away; because of his extreme idiosyncrasy. Through mass murder and suicide, he finally gets everyone’s attention. It’s only when he commits his atrocities that people and the media start trying to analyze and understand him. In his wicked way, he has achieved his goal.
In fantasy, he gets his reckoning. But when the fantasies escalate to the point of acting out, he loses all sense of normal morality and impulse control. He is driven to feel almighty God and the power of the devil through destruction and murder. His level of existence is at survival levels. He is even consumed with visualizations related to his own death. He doesn’t matter. He just acts! He cannot solve his own problems as most of us would consider by normal methods. He believes in very black and white terms that he can solve them through mass murder and self-suicide.