Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Shooters: They Think They’re the Victims
As usual, the cries for getting to the root of these terrible mass shootings are dominating the media landscape. It’s guns! It’s mental illness! It’s the lone wolf syndrome! I’m not against trying to understand the perpetrators of these horrifying events. In fact, this post is an effort to look at one other possible source of the problem—although if there’s any truth to my proposition, dealing with it may be more complex than we can imagine.
The problem? The mentality of the shooter: his victimization and our indulgence of it.
To better understand a victim mentality, I found this source:
The victim’s locus of control is likely to be external and stable. An external locus of control orientation is a belief that what happens to a person is contingent on events outside of that person’s control rather than on what one does. Stable, in this context, refers to the consistency of the out-of-control feelings of the victim vs. the belief that the outcome of events is due to luck or random events.
This essay further explained:
While the costs and suffering of victims are apparent, the benefits are much more subtle, and, for the most part, unconscious. They may include the right to empathy and pity, the lack of responsibility and accountability, righteousness, or even relief as the bad self is punished.
If we look at the latest mass shooter in south Florida, Nikolas Cruz, we see a young man who fits the typical portrait of the mass murderer. He was a loner; he had access to guns; he was angry and made threats. We also see a young man who had recently lost his remaining parent. He was expelled from school for his behavior. He was unhappy with the family who took him in after his mother died. I expect we will learn much more about him over time.
Do his circumstances justify his sick behavior? Of course not. Do other people with many more life losses plan and execute mass murders? They don’t. Should we view people who have been subject to life’s cruelties and disappointments as lifelong victims? That would be absurd. In fact, most people are victims at one point or another, and they may deserve our compassion and support.
But there is more to Nikolas Cruz’s situation that points to his exploiting, maybe even subconsciously, his possible victim’s role: society in general, and attorneys and psychotherapists (and other helping professionals) may be encouraging people to make the most of their victimhood:
We have become a nation of victims, where everyone is leapfrogging over each other, competing for the status of victim, where most people define themselves as some sort of survivor. We live in a culture where more and more people are claiming their own holocaust. While some victims are truly innocent (i.e., the child who is being molested, a victim in the other car in a drunk driving accident), most violence involves some knowledge, familiarity or intimacy between victims and victimizers. Charles Sykes, author of the widely acclaimed A Nation of Victims (1992), points out that if you add up all the groups that consider themselves to be victims or oppressed, their number adds up to almost 400 percent of the population. Exploring the psychology or the dynamic of victimhood has been suppressed and censored because it has been equated with “victim blaming.”
Essentially the victim does not take responsibility for his situation; believes he or she is right; can’t be held accountable for what has happened; and is indignant because he or she has been wronged. In response to their circumstances, we express compassion, empathy, and care. I suspect that Nikolas Cruz may see himself in this way. The paradox in this situation is our “help” only feeds the monster of victimization.
So while we are trying to understand what drives a person to murder others in an obscene and ugly episode, what can we do if our very society encourages these people to see themselves as justified to act against a repressive and alienating society?
Published in General
I dare what I want, but I’m not blaming the American character for anything. I was saying that the American character makes the solution I hypothesized seem unlikely to be tried. That it is more in keeping with our nature to just want to deal with shooters directly. On the right the favor is to have good guys with guns that can fire back, on the left the favor is to just keep them from having guns.
Character is molded by culture and in our culture, the police went to the shooter’s house 39 times last year. He was hearing voices telling him to kill. A bail bondsman made one of at least two calls to the FBI about him; in another,
If “protocols were not followed” doesn’t result in “is no longer employed by the FBI and this information will be disclosed in any background check requested” and the upshot isn’t massive public outrage, I submit that there may be something wrong with today’s version of the American character.
Our ability to involuntarily commit the mentally ill was crippled by deliberate action by the ACLU. This is the result.
I’d be curious to know how many of these women had leftist parents, or feminist moms in particular.
Yes, I think this is so true.
People who divide the world into oppressors and victims not only get things backwards, they exacerbate the problems they hope to solve.
Victimizers are often yesterday’s victims (or perceived victims) paying it forward.
A society that puts victims on a pedestal is going to devour itself.
We need to provide victims comfort and support without fetishizing their victimhood.
All your points, well said, @gilreich! I especially appreciate this one. So true.
We did. We failed to commit him and treat him, and then having failed to do that, we failed to shoot him down before he murdered his former schoolmates and teachers.
How was not killing him failing him? Had he been a sane, responsible member of society he would have rather died than do what he did. (In insane or evil societies such as the Palestinians, killing enemy schoolchildren is a socially approved act, and children are educated and conditioned to such violence.) In this case, the killing was not valued by society as a whole, though it promotes the political agenda of the mass media and one major political party.
Despite the proven fact that there were staff (and JROTC students, too) with the courage to put others’ lives before their own, no staff members were trained and armed.
Even worse, given the politicization of the DOJ, the FBI and other DOJ agencies and the willingness to risk collateral damage (Fast and Furious comes to mind,) one can’t help having the uncomfortable thought that that “failure to follow procedures” seems to fit certain partisan agendas a bit too well.
Makes you grateful you’re not the one who has to come up with policies for real, doesn’t it?
@Valiuth, You are here on the cusp of socialist philosophy. You really aren’t addressing American society. Rather, you’re talking about “fundamentally changing” human behavior to what it is not . If you assert that such a change is possible, then you are faced with explaining why, after all these thousands of years, we haven’t already arrived at this level of, well, “civilization,” for lack of a better word. Attempts have been made many times to set up a society just as you describe. The results have been the same every time – despotism, the loss of the most basic individual freedoms and rights altogether, and chaos. The most recent and stunning example, given its speed, is even in our own hemisphere – Venezuela.
To give the socialists their do, human society has changed radically before. I think the emergence of sedentary agrarian communities were very radical in their day. Change I guess is a matter of time, and trial and error. Though it isn’t clear anyone was going around the hunter gatherers proposing immediate change over a gradual transformation. That eventually saw humanity forsaking small bands and conglomerating into large cities. Seems natural because we made it work. Of course we don’t really know how many times the conglomeration failed to take.
We also don’t know how much technology can make new social structures possible that were previously unthinkable. Certainly without various farming and food storage technologies along with water management technologies you could never have a dense city emerge. But you can’t predict what technologies will develop and what they will enable.
Though like I said I was offering speculation, allow me to speculate some defense for it. It is possible to not socialize the economy while implementing more socialized and communitarian practices in other parts of society. What if they are not government imposed, but emergent from the population? Will that really be the same thing?
No, because there is no political force involved.