dagblog - Comments for "The Killer Profile"

Yeah, I definitely agree with

Orion — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 23:21:05 +0000

In reply to James Dean was an actor, who

Yeah, I definitely agree with all that. Most important certainly is your last two points. In tighter communities, expectations for life in general would be alot clearer and the desire to be violent (violence comes from confusion most the time) would come up alot less.

Also, obviously, a world in which you may get punched in the face for getting out of line would not be as scary as a world in which you have the risk of getting shot with an AK-47 someone can get at a damn hunting store.

Your observations are good enough for another article, me thinks.

James Dean was an actor, who

erica20 — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 22:48:01 +0000

In reply to Absolutely we probably

James Dean was an actor, who played a character in a movie. Real motorcycle gang members were not as good looking and had significantly less glamorous lives.

I agree with aa that looking back at how good things used to be or over at suicide bombers as examples of people who believe in something enough to die for it is an activity fraught with potential problems.

Being traumatized as a child and then raised in a manipulative, cultlike atmosphere doesn't necessarily create a young person freely choosing a heroic death.

And I believe (incorrectly, perhaps) that the kinds of troubled individuals who commit these crimes have always existed. In the old days, there was

1. generally more space for them to separate themselves from others,

2. less reporting of bad acts,

3. in smaller, tighter communities, people knew each other and word could get around to avoid the creepy guy who kept threatening to kill people.

4. bad people did not have access to weapons capable of killing so many people so easily. If the creepy guy caused a lot of trouble, there was a good chance he'd end up in a fist fight, not a bloodbath.

Absolutely we probably

Orion — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 22:23:10 +0000

In reply to You clearly haven't read a

Absolutely we probably shouldn't medicate it when we haven't much a clue of understanding the biochemistry of it nor the biochemistry of the drugs we are giving out.

Yeah. That's pretty much all I have been saying. =D

I also agree with everything that you just said as well about suicide bombers.

Nevertheless, juvenile delinquents still had normal human mindsets enough, thanks to a less drug riddled environment for kids, that you had the James Dean, etc. archetypes develop. No one would ever idolize what my generation got raised to be.

You clearly haven't read a

artappraiser — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 22:10:01 +0000

In reply to Suicide bombers live in third

You clearly haven't read a lot of the studies on all the young teen suicide bombers who are manipulated by their handlers into doing it during severe depression exacerbated by adolescent hormonal changes. After being taken out of their home environment and indoctrinated in madrassah-like environments, or worse, for several years. (I vaguely recall some data related to interviews with one of the surviving young man-child perps from the Mumbai terror attacks that is quite striking in this regard, maybe I'll do a search for it later.)

It is rare these days for a true believer to offer himself as the actual suicide bomber. They mostly send out young uneducated boys that they have picked out for the purpose and brainwashed.

I think you are underestimating the whole "raging young male" problem, and also how it might exhibit itself much worse in mentally ill individuals, in order to stress that we shouldn't medicate it.

Absolutely we probably shouldn't medicate it when we haven't much a clue of understanding the biochemistry of it nor the biochemistry of the drugs we are giving out.

But to imply that the drugs are the total cause of the trouble is a jump too far for me. Way before SSRI's and ritalin, we had the problem of society fearing, fearing "juvenile deliquents" and violent angry teens, rebels without a cause. Many societies have tried to deal with that in the past not by drugging but by using them for cannon fodder, forced military service precisely at the time brains were known to go haywire with a significant minority of them. They put em in boot camps with a mean drill sergeant, sent them off to maim and kill if need be.

Suicide bombers live in third

Orion — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 21:11:31 +0000

In reply to To throw another wrench in

Suicide bombers live in third world dictatorships and are driven by nationalism and religion.

These shooters grow up with affluence, Wal Marts and video games.

Suicide bombers believe in something significant enough to die for.

These shooters believe in nothing because our society believes in nothing.

I wrote a big response to

Orion — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 23:13:25 +0000

In reply to There was a book - years ago

I wrote a big response to this one, artappraiser, and the computer quite literally ate it. I'm going to try again but I'm not sure if it will be up to snuff. Sorry.

The natural born killer types you brought up sound quite interesting - although I'm not sure that takes apart the original point. I thought about this while doing errands today - Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, all the most famous serial killers - were conniving and sociopathic. Alot of commentators compared Holmes to Ted Bundy in regards to having a real deficit of empathy. However, none of those serial killers were so obvious, open and theatrical when they killed. Serial killers were traditionally known to murder prostitutes or other social outliers or sneak up on their victims, leaving clues but not obvious guilt - not go in to places like movie theaters or elementary schools and just let rip. Lanza and Holmes were both in the modern psychiatric treatment where, I can tell you from experience, antidepressants that warn of "homicidal ideation" are handed out as the first action to anyone who walks in.

We may have a large number of poor reactions to neurotransmitter-altering drugs out there with, more importantly, very poor medical help in solving these side effects, that does not necessarily give proof that this is causing these kinds of killings, which again, have NOT increased since before those medicines start being used.

I have to disagree with this. The first major mass shooting like in recent memory was the Columbine High School Massacre, which was followed by Virginia Tech, then all of these. People have brought up that sniper shooting at the Texas university back in the 1970s but there really was never anything like this before SSRIs specifically came on to the market. Gun violence used to be synonymous with the inner city.

To throw another wrench in

artappraiser — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 22:51:22 +0000

In reply to There was a book - years ago

To throw another wrench in the works, I would like to add that I have this inkling that studies of people like the young New Mexico killer might end up coinciding with better understanding of young suicide bombers. It's just intuition from the stuff I've read on that phenomenon, and I ain't got a whiff of proof, just throwing it out there without pretense to any theory.

There was a book - years ago

artappraiser — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 22:45:58 +0000

In reply to How the story struck me was

There was a book - years ago - called In Cold Blood.

You don't have to keep explaining that to me; Truman Capote is probably my favorite American writer, even though he failed woefully at reaching his full potential. The way he failed at it is also one of my favorite things. I was fascinated the first time I saw him on Johnny Carson as a kid and never let go.

I've read In Cold Blood several times plus inumerable articles about Capote writing it, plus inumerable articles about why it can be categorized as a "nonfiction novel" and not "nonfiction," and articles on and on what he did and didn't include to what effect, including including Capote's strange tender relationship with Perry Smith (who you are calling a "natural born killer" but I wouldn't) I've also watched the documentary where Capote talks about writing it. I've also seen the 2005 movie Capote where his writing of it and his relationship with Perry is dramatized by Philip Seymour Hoffman.

No, I am not talking about a Perry type, I am talking about the same profile type you are. (The Perry type killer is also in the work of Norman Mailer in his relationship with Jack Abbott, if you want to understand the difference of that type of criminal profile and the kind we are talking about, I can't recommend enough Abbott's book, In the Belly of the Beast. You learn as much from his macho posturing in it as you do when he speaks truth. That book is actually the one thing that most turned me on capital punishment when I first read it, as I could see that capital punishment clearly verfied the kind of thinking of such a killer's mind, that it promoted that killing is the ultimate power and this verifies that profile's beliefs and desires, and love for feelings of power. Capital punished verifies all their "reasons" for killing, if you could call it reason.)

Watch the movies Badlands or Natural Born Killers, you will see characters presented that are not running away from the law, they are having a fun killing spree that they have fantasized about and then basically going out in a blaze of glory, intending to committ suicide by cop. I really don't see much difference at all between those characters and the ones you are talking about. Yes, they are different from Perry Smith and Dick Hickcock and John Henry Abbott. (And Norman Mailer, who stabbed his ex-wife in anger and tended to glorify testosterone, was quite something different again. IIf he was around these days, he might be on some prescription drug to his mental health and behavorial benefit, mho.)

Re psychiatrist will prescribe that child drugs like Ritalin, Adderall, Zoloft, Paxil, or Prozac, drugs that scramble neurotransmitter systems and can very certainly cause that child to go violent.

What you don't seem to be accepting of to me is that there are many people out there who's neurotransmitters are scrambled naturally and there have always been such people. That it's not so simple as that the drugs are causing all the scrambling or all these killings, but rather the drugs are pitiful attempts at fixing the scrambling, and because they are so pitiful they make it worse in many cases. Still, you do not know how many cases of psychoactive drugs under psychiatric supervision have stopped mass killings, do you?

James Holmes when off meds still is pounding his own head against the prison wall, and didn't look ready to apologize or get remorseful or be afraid of punishment. We shall see.

I think it is much too facile to just attribute all recent mass spree killings to drug side effects since drugs like the aforementioned ones were introduced. So far all I see proof of is that incorrect prescribing of them for a very few already mentally ill people with already violent tendencies and perhaps already adolescent hormonal surges causing more havoc, taking these might have made them go over some edge. Not only that, that does not mean they might have done something nearly as bad if not taking them! To accommodate your theorizing, you are ignoring any possible good Ritalin or SSRI's or whatever have done to stop some people with mental disabilities or mental illness from contributing to society or stop them from committing crimes they might have done without them.

We totally agree on the research and we totally agree on how pitiful psychiatric knowledge is. I just see you making some of the same kind of leaps of judgment bad psychiatrists make!

Your Vicodin assumption was one that really hit me. I am all for empowerment of the individual to use drugs that make them feel better, I don't like nanny state solutions to problems like this. If someone takes too much Vicodin to get high or doesn't monitor their own usage enough and gets opiate addiction problems, the rest of the people using it shouldn't be punished by making it so hard to get. (BTW, many believe the Tylenol in Vicodin is more dangerous in overdose than the hydrocodone, it is very toxic to the liver.)

Likewise, they shouldn't take away the ability for individuals with neurotransmitter diseases like depression to experiment with SSRI's that might help them a great deal because a bad psychiatrist gave them to a mentally ill person where he has no clue what is causing the mental illness and didn't monitor the side effects.

We may have a large number of poor reactions to neurotransmitter-altering drugs out there with, more importantly, very poor medical help in solving these side effects, that does not necessarily give proof that this is causing these kinds of killings, which again, have NOT increased since before those medicines start being used. I have posted the proof that they have not increased since then. Your reliance on presenting that they have increased also hurts your argument. Also, to rely on this line of argument you are opening yourself to the argument that all of the people who admit to having homicidal ideation symptoms on your related forums to homicidal ideation side effects should be brought in forcibly for treatment until they can be proven to be safe for society?

Perhaps I can best put what I am trying to say in the latter half of this comment this way:

You do realize that homicidal ideation can easily occur with things like blood sugar imbalance from untreated diabetes onset? And that treatment with insulin, a drug made to mimic the body's insulin, rectifies this? That people can actually become mentally ill and homicidally ideate without using drugs? and that very few of those people end up committing a crime?

Don't misunderstand-- I do

Orion — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 21:49:36 +0000

In reply to We do actually - Holmes is

Don't misunderstand-- I do get your point that an opiated James Holmes might have less emotional reaction to death than an un-opiated James Holmes, but then a highly opiated James Holmes over a long period wouldn't have the gumption or anger to plan a detail mass murder. Unless, that is, he has severe mental illness with a different biochemistry that reacts differently to all sorts of drugs than most people. In which case, it wasn't the drugs, (and I mean any drugs, pick one, it was the biochemistry of his mind that is the problem, a mind that reacts differently to both life and to drugs than most other people.

Well then - where is the argument? I'm confused. SSRIs themselves cause homicidal ideation, of course Vicodin doesn't. However, large doseages of Vicodin would damage someone's emotional responses. SSRIs really only come in to the picture as regards the second photo released of Holmes - where his eyes are heavily dilated. There was actually a Slate article that asked if that - a condition called "mydriasis" - was a sign of mental illness - I actually found that it was a sign of serotonergic drugs after searching on Google for pupil dilation. I wasn't even looking for anything regarding SSRIs.

I brought up the In Cold Blood case to show what serial killers traditionally behave like - before prescription drugs started being handed out like Mike and Ikes. The case I'm trying to sell, and I'm sure there are contradictions in it because there is alot of emotion involved, is that both guns and prescription drugs need to be better regulated so that people would be more emotionally normal and less able to blow each other's brains out.

Prescription drug companies used to not be able to sell their products on television. (I may be wrong but I think that changed about when Viagra was introduced in the late 90s.) There also used to be an assault weapons ban. There are actually actions that can be taken to make this problem better.

Hey hey we're all good people

Orion — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 21:36:12 +0000

In reply to No, your first comment was

Hey hey we're all good people here. Let's ease up. =D