Mass Murder - Mass Murder By Individuals

Mass Murder By Individuals

Mass murderers may fall into any of a number of categories, including killers of family, of coworkers, of students, and of random strangers. Their motives for murder vary. A notable motivation for mass murder is revenge, but many other motivations are possible, including the need for attention or fame.

Workers who assault fellow employees are sometimes called "disgruntled workers," but this is often a misnomer, as many perpetrators are ex-workers. They are dismissed from their jobs and subsequently turn up heavily armed and kill their former colleagues. In the 1980s, when two fired postal workers carried out such massacres in separate incidents in the US, the term "going postal" became synonymous with employees snapping and setting out on murderous rampages. One of the 1980s most famous "disgruntled worker" cases involved computer programmer Richard Farley who, after being fired for stalking one of his co-workers, Laura Black, returned to his former workplace and shot to death seven of his colleagues, although he failed in his attempt to kill Black herself.

In some rare cases mass murders have been committed during prison riots and uprisings. During the February 1980 New Mexico State Penitentiary riot, 33 inmates were killed. Most of the dead, 23, lived in the Protective Custody Unit, and were killed by other inmates using knives, axes and being burnt alive over a 48-hour period.

Unlike serial killers, there is rarely a sexual motive to individual mass-murderers, with the possible exception of Sylvestre Matuschka, a Hungarian man who apparently derived sexual pleasure from blowing up trains with dynamite, ideally with people in them. His lethal sexual fetish claimed 22 lives before he was caught in 1931.

Vasili Blokhin's count of 7,000 Polish prisoners shot in 28 days remains one of the most organized and protracted mass murders by a single individual on record.

On July 22, 2011, Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik, killed 77 people in two separate attacks in Oslo, Norway. The first attack was a car bomb attack on the national government quarters in Oslo, killing 8 people. Behring Breivik then drove some 40 km to the island of Utøya, where a political youth camp was in progress. Dressed as a policeman, he gathered the attendants and then opened fire, leading to the massacre of 69 people over the span of roughly 90 minutes.

The Daegu subway fire was a mass murder-suicide on February 18, 2003 which killed at least 198 people and injured at least 147. Kim Dae-han set fire to a train stopped at the Jungangno Station of the Daegu Metropolitan Subway in Daegu, South Korea. The fire then spread to a second train which had entered the station from the opposite direction a few minutes later. The mentally ill arsonist, who was caught and didn't perish in the fires, claimed he wanted to commit suicide but did not want to die alone.

Incidences of mass murder that are committed by more than one individual, mostly duos, happen less often than by a single individual but are not uncommon. Examples include Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden, and Kumatarō Kido and Yagorō Tani.

Dictators are often called mass murderers too, for example Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin and Pol Pot. The states ruled by dictators are seen by some only an extension of the means of murder for the dictators. This use of the term mass murderer is strictly speaking inconsistent in cases where the dictator did not kill anyone personally.