Mass murder

This article deals with mass killings which are not considered genocide.

Mass murder (massacre) is the act of murdering a large number of people, typically at the same time, or over a relatively short period of time. Mass murder may be committed by individuals or organizations.

The term may not always be applied in relation to the acts of serial killers, who may kill many people, but not necessarily all at the same time.

The largest mass killings in history have been attempts to exterminate entire groups or communities of people, often on the basis of ethnicity or religion. In modern times such events are sometimes described as genocide. Although some consider that "genocide" may exist where there is merely an intention or plan to exterminate a particular group, and that killing is not a necessary condition, by contrast "mass murder" involves the actual killing of a large number of people.

Mass murder by individuals

Outside of a political context, the term "mass murder" refers to the killing of several people at the same time. Examples would include shooting several people in the course of a robbery, or setting a crowded nightclub on fire. This is an ambiguous term, similar to serial killing and spree killing.

The USA Bureau of Justice Statistics defines a mass murder as "[involving] the murder of four or more victims at one location, within one event."

Most mass murderers fall into one of three categories: family annihilators, individuals with mental defects, and disgruntled workers.

Disgruntled Workers is often a misnomer, as most perpetrators are ex-workers. They are dismissed from their jobs and subsequently turn up heavily armed and slaughter 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 1980's most famous Disgruntled Worker cases involved computer programmer Richard Farley who, after being fired for stalking one of his co-workers, a woman by the name of 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.

These definitions are evidently outdated and do not take into account the phenomenon of school massacres by students, such as the Columbine High School Massacre, where alienated youths rampage through their schools killing fellow students and teachers alike before turning the guns on themselves.

There are also mass killings that are seemingly unintended, at least in terms of premeditation. In 1990, Julio Gonzales set fire to a New York City nightclub after having a row there with his girlfriend. Eighty-seven people died in the blaze (Gonzalez's girlfriend survived).

Some mass-killers may have financial motives, whereby the killings are either unintended as a result of a robbery going wrong, or are incidental to the primary crime of theft. One of the most bizarre cases was that of Sadamichi Hirasawa, who poisoned to death twelve bank workers by cyanide during a robbery.

Unlike serial killers, there is rarely a sexual motive to individual mass-murderers, with the possible exception of Sylvestre Matuschka, an Austrian man who apparently derived sexual pleasure from blowing up trains with dynamite, ideally with people in them. His lethal sexual fetish claimed twenty two lives before he was caught in 1932.

According to Loren Coleman's book Copycat Effect, publicity about multiple deaths tends to provoke more, whether workplace or school shootings or mass suicides.

Mass murder by terrorists

In recent years, terrorists have performed acts of mass murder as acts of intimidation, and to draw attention to their causes. Examples of major terrorist incidents involving mass murder include:
* September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States - 2,976 killed
* Beslan school hostage crisis in Russia - 344 killed
* Air India Flight 182 bombing over the Atlantic Ocean - 329 killed
* Pan Am Flight 103 bombing over Scotland - 270 killed
* 11 July 2006 Mumbai train bombings in India - 207 killed
* 2002 Bali bombing in Indonesia - 202 killed
* 11 March 2004 Madrid train bombings in Spain - 191 killed
* Ashura massacre in Iraq - 170 killed
* Oklahoma City bombing in the United States - 168 killed
* Russian aircraft bombings of August 2004 in Russia - 89 killed
* 7 July 2005 London bombings in England - 52 killed
* Coastal Road massacre in Israel - 37 killed
* Dublin and Monaghan Bombings in Ireland - 35 killed
* Basbaglar Massacre [1] in Turkey - 30 killed
* Passover massacre in Israel - 30 killed
* Omagh bombing in Northern Ireland- 29 killed

Mass murder by a state

The concept of state-sponsored mass murder covers a range of potential killings. Clear examples of state-sponsored mass-murder include:
* Genocide of a particular ethnic or religious group, whether internal or external to the state, such as the Holocaust against the Jews, the Armenian Genocide, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Darfur conflict.
* Political mass murder or the killing of a particular political group within a country, such as Béla Kun's ethnic cleansing against Turkish and Crimean Tatars and other minorities in 1921-22, Stalin's Great Purge, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, or the Hama massacre.
* Deliberate massacres of civilians during wartime by a state's military forces, such as the Nanjing Massacre during World War II or Project Phoenix during the Vietnam War.
* Actions in which the state caused the death of large numbers of people, which political scientist R. J. Rummel calls "democide," which, in addition to the cases above, may include man-made disasters caused by the state, such as the Holodomor in the Soviet Union, and the disastrous effects of the Great Leap Forward in China.Some people consider any deaths in combat to be mass murder by the state, though this is not a generally held position.

Mass murder in warfare

The wrongful killing of large numbers of civilians or prisoners during war is called a war crime, although it may also be genocide if the proper ethnic motivation is present, as in the killings which occurred in the breakaway republics of the former Yugoslavia (e.g. Srebrenica massacre), in the killing of the Pequot in colonial America or in killing of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of Hindu and Muslim Bengalis by armed forces of Pakistan in 1971.

Mass murderers

* John D. Lee (Mountain Meadows Massacre, 1857)
* Andrew Kehoe (Bath, Michigan, Blew up school, killing 45 (mostly children) 1927
* Mutsuo Toi (Tsuyama massacre, Okayama, Japan, killing 30, 1938)
* Howard Unruh (Camden, New Jersey, 1949)
* Jack Gilbert Graham (Denver, Colorado, 1955)
* Edgar Ray Killen (Mississippi civil rights worker murders June 21 1964)
* Charles Whitman (University of Texas Shootings, Austin, Texas, August 1 1966)
* Harry Roberts (police killer, London, 1966)
* Richard Speck (murdered eight student nurses, Chicago, Illinois, 1966)
* Victor Ernest Hoffman (Shell Lake murders, in Shell Lake, Saskatchewan, Canada. August 15, 1967)
* John List (Westfield, New Jersey, 1971)
* Edward Charles Allaway (killer of 7 people at the library of California State University-Fullerton on July 12 1976)
* Woo Bum-Kon (Sang-Namdo, South Korea, killing 57, 1982)
* Denis Lortie (National Assembly of Quebec, May 8, 1984)
* James Oliver Huberty (McDonald's massacre, San Ysidro, California, 18 July 1984)
* Jeremy Bamber (farmhouse family murders, Tolleshunt D'Arcy, Essex, England, 1985)
* David Burke, (PSA Flight 1771, San Luis Obispo, California, 1987)
* Michael Ryan, (Hungerford massacre, Berkshire, UK), 1987
* Patrick Edward Purdy (Cleveland Elementary School Shootings, Stockton, California, 17 January 1989)
* Marc Lépine (École Polytechnique Massacre, Montreal, Quebec, 1989)
* Kenneth French, Jr. (North Carolina, USA - 1993)
* Colin Ferguson (LIRR Massacre; USA, 1994)
* Baruch Goldstein (Hebron, Israel 1994)
* Thomas Hamilton (Dunblane massacre, Dunblane, Scotland, 1996)
* George Hennard, opened fire on diners in Killeen, Texas
* Martin Bryant (Port Arthur Massacre, Australia, 1996)
* Mohammad Ahman al-Naziri (Sanaa massacre, Sanaa, Yemen, 1997)
* Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden (Jonesboro massacre, Jonesboro, Arkansas, 1998)
* Larry Gene Ashbrook (Wedgwood Baptist Church, USA, 1999)
* Susan Eubanks (Vista, California, 1999)
* Buford O. Furrow, Jr. (Los Angeles, California, 1999)
* Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (the Columbine High School Massacre, Littleton, Colorado), 1999)
* Byran Uyesugi (Xerox Murders, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1999)
* Michael McDermott (Edgewater Technologies, Wakefield, Massachusetts, 2000)
* Dipendra of Nepal (Nepal, 2001)
* Mamoru Takuma (Osaka school massacre, Osaka, Osaka, Japan, 2001)
* Robert Steinhäuser (Erfurt massacre, Erfurt, Germany, 2002)
* Hanadi Jaradat (Haifa, 2003)
* Jeff Weise (Red Lake High School massacre, Red Lake, Minnesota, 2005)
* Kyle Huff (Capitol Hill massacre, Seattle, Washington, March 25, 2006)
*In addition, Brenda Ann Spencer attempted a mass murder at an elementary school in San Diego, California, in January 1979. She only killed two people, who were guarding the students that she targeted. Eight students and a police officer were injured. This event was the basis for the hit song "I Don't Like Mondays" by the Boomtown Rats.

Mass murder: Encyclopedia BETA