Are those who commit unspeakable crimes insane by definition?

In a recent article (Guns and Mental Illness) the author noted that:

Yes, it is true, as has been noted in recent weeks, that most mentally ill people don’t commit crimes. But it is equally true that anyone who goes into a school with a semiautomatic and kills 20 children and six adults is, by definition, mentally ill. ~JOE NOCERA

I have to wonder if that is true, because if it is then we need to seriously rethink how we punish crime and how we look at some of the great atrocities that have been perpetrated over the centuries.   I think that this results from a desire to place atricities at the feet of those different from us, either the mentally ill, or people of a different worldview, different race, gender, ethnitcity, national origin you name it.

There seems to be this unconscious, yet strong desire to believe that if the ones that do these horrific things are different from us in some way that we see as important, then that difference must be what made them carry out the crime in the first place (The Social Psychology of Stigma).

Almost as if we can say that if we can just put away, get rid of 'those people', if we could somehow incapacitate or prevent them from coming anywhere near us, then we would be safe.  Because people like 'us' are safe.  It is 'those' people who are dangerous.

I can see how when we lived in small villages with little contact with people from the outside, this kind of thinking probably kept us safe.  A stranger wonders into town, he carries an illness nobody in that town has any immunity from, and before you know it half the town is dead or dying.

But we no longer live in small villages, and these days the most horrific crimes that we know of in recent history committed at a massive scale, were a result of this kind of thinking, of racial, ethnic, religious and gender discrimination that often eventually turned into hatred.

The uncomfortable question then becomes, are all those people who participated in these mass crimes, insane?  Were the inquisitors insane?  Were those who gave up their neighbors to be burned alive as witches, insane?   What about slave traders past and present, are they insane?  Sex trafficers?

When the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia murdered everyone who had a professional job, or who went to university (Wikipedia: Khmer Rouge), were they all criminally insane?  When former neighbors and friends in Bosnia (Wikipedia: Bosnian Genocide) and Rwanda (Wikipedia: Rwandan Genocide) killed and raped each other, did they all suddenly and collectively become insane?

Were the Nazi's insane?  Were all the people involved in these atrocities and many more that I have not listed here, criminally insane?  Recently I was reading an article about an ex Nazi fighting deportation from the US, the following passage struck me (From a lengthy deposition the story of Anton Geiser of Sharon is told):

Geiser said he only saw a prisoner harmed once. He was escorting prisoners to work and could see ahead some friction among prisoners.

“So the one prisoner couldn’t take it anymore and he walked out,” Geiser said. “So, the guards start to fire on that person, and he walked maybe 15, 20 feet before he fell. I was very upset. I did not like it. I thought to myself, ‘We all have good days, some days are maybe not as good. So, that poor soul, maybe had something he couldn’t take no more.’ I thought to myself, ‘That life could be saved. They could stop the prisoner and bring him back into his ... where he came from.’ He didn’t have to shoot him. I did not like it then, and I hate it today, but there’s nothing I could do. If I could do anything, I maybe be shot myself.”

I asked myself, could he really have been at a concentration camp and not seen the horror of it? But I looked at the pictures

 and listened to Edward R. Murrow's description of what he saw when he entered one of the camps that Geiser worked at (Edward R. Murrow Reports From Buchenwald), and I wondered how can one look upon such suffering and think that this is OK, or even normal.

Then you have studies like the Stanford Prison experiment which showed that putting ordinary people under certain conditions leads to some pretty extraordinary behavior when it comes to the treatment of other humans who have been dehumanized by their environment (in this case by design).  If you have not heard about this experiment, it is a fascinating and depressing view into the darkest recesses of the 'normal' human soul (http://www.lucifereffect.com/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment).  In this experiment and in another (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment), it was shown rather depressingly that rather ordinary people can do rather ugly things under the right conditions.

It seems to me that when an individual, or a society is able to dehumanize other people, for whatever reason, race gender, sexual orientation, religion (you name it we have done it), then it become easy to do the unthinkable.  Keeping guns out of the hands of the 1% of criminally insane that do become violent, will not really make a dent in mass atrocities, mass murders or even your garden variety murder.

Perhaps we should keep guns out of the hands of racists (of any race), as many mass murders have involved racially motivated hatred, we should also prevent those accused of domestic violence from getting them, as yes a number of mass killings were motivated by a desire to kill an ex, or current partner.  We should also focus on those who have been victims of crime, sexual abuse, bullying and discrimination, because that can lead to anger that can lead to this type of crime.  Not to mention men, as 99% of these crimes involve male perpetrators.  Who else?  Oh yes the recently divorced, those involved in nasty settlements from these divorces and child custodians should also be kept away from guns as some of those involved in these crimes have a history of domestic abuse and killed their ex or current loves just before, or after getting a divorce or a child custody hearing.

My point here is that I really see only two ways of reducing these types of crimes, and violent crime in general, one is my Kumbaya theory.  If you look at the people who do these things (mass murder on a small scale, not the larger scale genocides), unless they had a serious mental illness, their lives were spiraling out of control.  We live in a society that often is not very loving and supportive of those among us who we consider to be different, we don't have many of the social safety nets of other countries, we don't really have a great deal of empathy for those we feel are not worthy of our empathy, many in our society face ugly treatment from others if we are overweight, unattractive, introverted, short, disabled, or different in a way that is viewed in a negative manner by our extroverted, materialistic society.  Not to mention racial, gender and other forms of discrimination that despite some claims to the contrary, are still alive and well.

In addition to all that we live in a winner takes all society, where aggression, ruthlessness, anger (usually in men), power and force are seen as positives in normal social interactions.  People in jobs are often rewarded for having these characteristics, kids in school are rewarded for these behaviors as well, you know 'kids will be kids'.

And to top that off, 33% Americans have guns.

So my two ways of reducing these types of violent crime to levels seen in other industrialized countries, would involve having a kinder gentler society (most likely not going to happen in my lifetime, odd considering how many people consider themselves religious..subject for another blog), and/or removing guns.  I don't think either is likely to happen any time soon.

I wanted to, but decided not to include pictures from the Rwandan massacre (google search images: Rwandan Genocide), the Cambodian massacres (google search images: Khmer Rouge), lynching (google search images: lynching), Inquisition torture (Google search images: Inquisition torture), Wounded knee Massacre (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wounded_Knee_Massacre), depressingly there are many, many more!