Mass Murders Literature Review

The article, “A Literature review of Characteristics and Factors Associated with Mass Murders,” focused on mass murders’ personalities, mental health, and other factors that could have contributed to how or why these people became murders. It talks about how aggression is the behavior carried out with the proximate intent to harm someone. However, violence is the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person or against a group or community. The article speaks of a similarity to how violence is the form of mass murders. There are some people who are willing to kill more than 3 people with careful planning and certain or no distinctive time frame. Mass murders can also be known as pseudocommando,
which are murders that kill within the day time. The author profiled people who commit mass murders as people whose has had trouble background, making them the victim. Keeping in mind with the feeling of being the victim, they are fueled with the motive of revenge, power, loyalty, terror or profit. However, at times mass murders target specific groups or people that treated them poorly. Occasionally some of the public the murder kills, has nothing to do with the killer at all, they just so happen to be at the location at the wrong time. The article states, that the likelihood to commit murder fall into the group of 95% male, which is 98% black or white.
The authors noted in the article that mental health and violence is another factor that causes a person to become a killer.
When kids are exposed to violence at a young age they begin to experience and express behaviors of withdrawn. Child maltreatment, abuse, frustration, failure, mental illness and brain injury can also fuel murders because of people not understanding them. Thus they take it out through their actions. As the article goes on, it talks about gender and how from young age kids are taught what's accept or what's not. This contributes to why people do certain actions in mass murders. An example would be if a boy plays with dolls their mother may approve but the father would disapprove. Also, boys are more prone to express their emotions more than girls because aggression is encouraged, which is the boys only outlet for their emotions. A key point that causes many to go the route they do is due to their childhood. Sometimes when a child is raised in a certain environment they grow up from what they see, hear and feel. People who do commit mass murders do not seek treatment, while some do, but not until later on. On another note, the article spoke about how some of the criminals don't know what they feel or how to describe it when they commit the crime. Keeping that in mind, these symptom murders were showing was called, alexithymia. It was basically an association of impaired verbally and nonverbal recognition of
emotions