Insane

A year ago, a lone gunman walked ashore on Utoeya Island in Norway and calmly went about shooting down teenagers. By the time he was done, scores were dead and many more wounded.

Before proceeding to the summer camp, the far-right gunman set off a car bomb in central Oslo. It was a one-man operation difficult for the authorities to detect and prevent.

Although the deed was totally insane, the perpetrator was deemed sane enough to stand trial — and receive the just penalty for the carnage. He is not to have the comfort of quietly retiring to an asylum.

Almost exactly a year after the Utoeya massacre, James Holmes calmly walks into a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado with a shotgun, an assault rifle and an automatic pistol. In a most surreal moment, he fires into the audience, attempting to kill as many as he could. Just as calmly, we walks back to his car and peacefully surrenders to policemen when confronted.

Adding to the bizarre nature of this incident, police later discovered that Holmes wired his apartment with booby traps. The improvised explosives might have killed careless police officers entering to investigate the suspect’s home.

Remarkably, the suspect in this case would have escaped any profiling for mass murderers. The 24-year old was working on his PhD in neuroscience, a promising young scientist quietly on the brink.

He did not seem like a wild-eyed advocate of strange causes, unlike the man who bombed the government center of Oklahoma City several years back. From what is known about him thus far, there was little indication this is a man of seething rage, a sociopath at war with his community. He was simply a quiet college student with a passion for collecting firearms.

All the firearms used in this rampage — the AR-15 assault rifle (same as what Ronald Llamas has), the shotgun and the Gluck automatic pistol — were legally owned. All the thousands of rounds of ammunition he accumulated were legally acquired. Nothing about this man’s minor weapons hoard was extraordinary in the US and did not provoke the curiosity of the police.

This is one more incident to momentarily fire up the recurrent debate over gun control in the US. It is unlikely, however, that this tragedy will lead to any change in the liberal gun-ownership laws in that country. The National Rifle Association (NRA) is such a powerful lobby in American politics, successfully blocking all moves to legislate stiffer gun regulations.

The police are not saying much about the suspect in this rampage until they have looked over all the evidence. That is just as well. It enables the community, in the wake of the tragedy, to focus on mourning the loss and celebrating the heroism of those who, in a moment of confusion and fear, shielded others with their own bodies.

 Mass murderers, and other who inflict their insanity on the defenseless, do not deserve remembrance. In the solemn ceremonies held in Oslo on the anniversary of the massacre there, the name of the perpetrator was never mentioned. His notoriety will never win him fame.

Nevertheless, it is important for all of us that the experts arrive at a set of indicators that might warn us of mass murderers. That might improve the community’s ability to avert the sort of tragedies that visited Utoeya and Aurora just a year apart.

As a social scientist myself, I know building a reliable profile for persons capable of inflicting horrors on their communities is a tough task. The perpetrators of outlandish antisocial crimes are of diverse backgrounds, even of psychological characteristics. The process of profiling itself might inflict costs on civil liberties and the right to privacy that might make it unworthy to pursue.

We can only point out some striking similarities between Brevik in Oslo and Holmes in Aurora. Both were rather intelligent individuals capable of systematically planning a murderous operation. Both appear to be rather introverted men who sought self-affirmation in the possession of powerful firearms — and eventually their use on helpless victims.

Both were absolute cowards. They were over-armed when they confronted their unarmed victims. They could consummate whatever insane passion drove them only by overpowering advantage. This is why both Brevik and Holmes were captured alive, without resistance. Neither chose to shoot it out with policemen on even terms.

Then again, the authorities could not mitigate the occurrence of mass murder by arresting all known cowards with a propensity for collecting forearms. That will trample on rights. The authorities have no choice but to wait for tragedy to happen first.

Even as the most proximate cause for sad incidents like these is some form of insidious psychological torment, open societies cannot possibly go about profiling citizens and arresting them for the mere possibility they might perpetrate a crime. If we cannot regulate the behavior of people, stopping them from committing crimes on some presumptuous profiling, then the only thing that we can regulate is the possession of firearms per se.

It would be absurd, for instance, for the authorities to ban neuroscientists from owning guns, learning from the Aurora incident.   What could be regulated is the private ownership of, say, assault rifles. If Holmes had only a handgun and no AR-15 assault rifle to go with it, might he have been overpowered quickly by his intended victims? Might he have had second thoughts, considering his apparent cowardice, about indulging in the mass murder?

If a debate on upgraded gun control is unlikely in the US, given the influence of the NRA, might we have that debate here please?