Why are 80% of serial killers ex-military?
Some time after he was discharged from the army, his life turned sour, he got angry and delusional and he snapped. Wielding his gun in a suburban neighbourhood, he killed again and again: women, children, complete strangers, with military precision but without an evident motive…
This describes what police say about John Allen Muhammad, who was arrested yesterday in the Washington sniper-killing rampage. But it is also a precise description of Howard Unruh, a 28-year-old Second World War veteran who shot 13 of his New Jersey neighbours one day in 1949. His military firearms training made his "walk of death" the first modern serial-killer case.
In the 53 years that separate Mr. Unruh from Mr. Muhammad, hundreds of Americans have lost their minds and used guns to cause multiple deaths. One thing unites almost all of them: military training.
Mr. Muhammad served in the Persian Gulf war, as did Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. Both received weapons training and basic military training designed to psychologically condition soldiers to kill. They are far from alone.
Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer received military training in Texas and Alabama. David Berkowitz, the "Son of Sam" killer, was an army veteran. Charles Whitman, who killed 16 people and injured 31 in a 1961 sniper-shooting rampage from the top of a tower in Austin, Tex., had just been discharged from the U.S. Marines. Arthur Shawcross, who killed 12 people, was a Vietnam veteran.
In an overwhelming number of cases, serial killers and other mass murderers learned to kill in the military. Experts disagree whether this means that the army turns ordinary people into unfeeling killers, or the military simply attracts a large number of psychologically fragile people who are prone to become murderers.
David Grossman, a former U.S. military psychologist who helped develop programs to train new recruits to become more effective killers, said that the key to military training lies in breaking down the natural human aversion to killing in a process he calls "disengagement." Once this aversion has been removed, it never comes back, and can make it easier for former soldiers to become murderers.
"The ability to watch a human being’s head explode and to do it again and again — that takes a kind of desensitization to human suffering that has to be learned," Mr. Grossman said yesterday.
In earlier wars, many soldiers were psychologically unable to shoot anyone. In order to increase the "trigger-pull ratio," the United States changed the basic training offered to all recruits and draftees so they would be aggressively desensitized to killing.
Some observers believe this may be why mass murders have become far more common in the past 50 years.
In the 1970s, some observers believed that the humiliation and social opprobrium caused by the Vietnam War, led many former soldiers to become mentally unstable, and potentially to become killers.
The Persian Gulf war of 1991 showed that this might not have been the case. Their war was popular domestically, and Persian Gulf veterans were welcomed as heroes upon return.
Yet their conflict has produced more than its share of killers. Mr. McVeigh was a decorated tank commander. His case is strikingly similar to that of Mr. Muhammad.
Both seem to have gradually developed anti-American or antigovernment beliefs while serving in the Persian Gulf war; both seem to have left disillusioned. And both seem to have used their military training to commit grave crimes.
Posted in military firearms
January 19th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
hi mr V, to ask this question is like asking why do people go crazy but let’s tackle it this way i was in the military usmc but don’t hold that against me but in the military it is a different world they train you that the military is one great big family but then you get out whjat do you come home to. your friends have all left town or had an car accident and was killed. your family was not talking to each other your wife ran off with another man while your kids don’t know you. this is just a few problems that breaking back in civilion life. but you have some of your facts wrong son of sam when he was in court he was being lead away and he cried out hail to satan so you know he was already one shy of having a full deck. good luck hope i was helpful to you
January 19th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
Nice copy and paste.
Now give us a link, and not one from a blog.
January 19th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
what is your political affiliation?
January 19th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
It is all lies spread by liberals in an attempt to take away our guns and our religion. Don’t trust a liberal, they are evil bastards.
January 19th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
Because they all become completely insane after being in combat. 1 in 4 homeless people in America are war vets. God hates our soldiers.
January 19th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
No links what-so-ever… ? FAIL!
January 19th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
They probably already had psychological problems, or were at least prone to them. Psychological problems rarely just "appear" without probable cause, and usually, family or personal history of it.
There are cases of PTSD produced by every war, and the Gulf War is one of the first wars where everything-from the action to the soldiers’ former lives up to what they did after the war-is publicized, which could easily make it seem that there are more soldiers "snapping" after this war than others, when likely, it was similar.
Not to mention, there are probably as many postal workers and high school students that have "snapped" as well. I doubt that percentage is accurate, or honest.
January 19th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
Scary statistic.
Got any other names? What about the Green River killer and BTK – wouldn’t surprise me.
January 19th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
Yeah…..whatever! and in more recent news…6 black teens in Chicago beat another teen to death. A social activist of that area states that the victim was an honor student and did not have the same "attitude" as the others which may have been why he was targeted……….hmmmmmmmm. That seems a little more relevant!
Oh and alot of your facts are waaaaaay off…….one example…. like McVeigh being a "tank commander" LOL yeah Okay…a junior enlisted E4 is a tank commander……..McVeigh was not highly decorated and had trouble fitting in at his unit.
January 19th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
Good morning ms. napolitano.
January 19th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
No. Most serial killers were raised by liberal parents who would not condemn them when they tortured the family cat and when they masturbated thinking about eating people.
Very much like my ID clone the other Jared posting here.
January 19th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
Even if your "stat" is valid, only a very small percentage of veterans become "serial killers". And McVeigh was not a serial killer. He was a mass murderer. There is a difference. Both he and Dahmer were messed up in the head long before either were in the military.
January 19th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
It is all just statistics, the same as why are they all mostly male.
"Charles Whitman, who killed 16 people and injured 31 in a 1961 sniper-shooting rampage from the top of a tower in Austin, Tex., had just been discharged from the U.S. Marines"
This guy is not a serial killer, he was a mass murderer or terrorist even, but a serial killer is not someone that kills a lot of people, it is someone who kills one day, comes back again later and kills again and again and again.
John Wayne Gacy, Dahmer, Ted Bundy, the Zodiac and Son of Sam were serial killers, Whitman and the Va. Tech killers killed multiple people in one horrific incident.
How long have we realized the problem of serial killers and according to you 80% of them were ex-military? Since the 70′s? Well, from about 1940 to 1973, the US drafted millions of men into the military the odds are pretty good that at least a few veterans live on your block and since we have no idea what a serial killer(or mass murderer for that matter) looks like, then it is likely that they could be one and the same.
whale
January 19th, 2010 at 10:26 pm
False, weak try at slandering our military.