- external locus of control. Their violence is seen as a reaction, a re-assertion of power, hence the endless variations of “why did you make me do this?” in domestic abuse/murder. In extreme cases, this manifests as true paranoia (think Jared Loughner), but is also present in conspiracy theories and cleaving to various -isms that proclaim a Manichean culture war, and the old fashioned misogyny (in which the woman supposedly knows better but performs an act that merits harms, and is thus the “aggressor”).

That sense of deprivation of power may explain the suicide run of the spree*: the shooter can’t perceive a long-term “win” (contrary to the serial abuser, who sees a path to controlling the abused), and thus the momentary “win” of the spree—followed by going out on top, egoistic suicide—seems like the best option.

_{* However! I’m not sure that all spree shooters start their brutal act with death in mind. At least some imagine themselves getting away or continuing their spree. So “locus of control” is not a fixed number, more like a spectrum from “no perception of ability to regain power” to “desperate to continue exercising the fleeting power of the spree.” The domestic killer and/or occasional family annihilator who escapes and sets up a new family demonstrates that locus of control is not necessarily a fixed value: killing and getting away with it resets the value.}

- narcissism. So many variations on this, but mostly just an inability to relate to people as anything but use-value entities. This can be seen in the crimes where sexual resentment is the justification (San Bernadino, the Montreal shooting, every “man kills ex and her family”) with the greatest clarity, and also in various supremacist -isms that make the targets lesser people, but it is also present in the grandiose Raskolnikov-like justifications that invoke a superiority-as-predator or inherent greatness. Indeed, manifestos in general are less “explanations” and more assertions of narcissism by assembling a pseudo-intellectual frame for what’s basically a masturbatory act.

Abusive relationships tend to crop up in spree shooter backgrounds, and it’s likely a reflection of this use-value quality to how they view other people. Those that fail to serve a specific desired function are targeted. In most cases, that’s wives and girlfriends and exes who have “failed” in some specific way, and the constellation of associates for abetting that “failure.” In some cases, it’s people in general, because the internal cosmos of the more grandiose spree-killer simply declares everyone else less useful. Belief-specific targeting—misogyny, racism, et cetera—incorporates this too. Personally, I suspect that Sandy Hook was about what Adam Lanza wanted from children (to abuse them) but couldn’t find a path to…kind of like the man who took over the Amish school years ago.

And it’s not a coincidence that spree shooters tend to be male, and generally white: narcissism has a cultural component, and privileged individuals leap to a place of narcissistic injury faster. Which is a big part of the phenomenon of “toxic masculinity”: the sense of entitlement to rage, cruelty, and expression of antisocial impulses.

- sadism. Not expressed in the same way as a serial criminal, where power/sex drives more and more elaborate (and eventually ritualized) expressions of power and control…including desecration of corpses, trophy keeping, necrophilia, and cannibalism…because “dead versus alive” isn’t a meaningful distinction relative to the need to keep asserting power. Your domestic killer is generally trying to maintain a power relationship, fails, and then moves to killing spontaneously, killing as part of incompetent use of physical coercion, or as a premediated act of revenge. But for the spree killer the act of killing is a kind of climax, and the planning/rehearsal phase is all about the erotism of power, the fantasy of total control (specifically in contrast to the sense that power has been taken away, or respect not given).

That there’s a spectrum involved in this can be seen in things like taunting during the spree itself, pre-emptive villification of the targets as inferiors—another role filled by manifestos and “explanations.”

- low empathy and primarily interacting with power and dominance in mind. This is a corollary of “narcissism” and “sadism” but bears its own entry, because I suspect the degree of need for power determines the pattern of the violence. A domestic killer is a failed domestic abuser, trying to create a long-term power dynamic that has a social frame, but spree killers express variable degrees of permanently asserting power over targets. Domestic murders are about personal power exchanges—spree killings are about more about an amorphous sense of being unjustly down-power relative to people in general or a specific group (women and co-workers being a common specific group), though that’s not absolute certainty. There are patterns like: killing family members before initiating the public spree; targeting someone specific before expanding the scope of violence (many people are shot, but the specific target is the ex, being the best example) that demonstrate that specific grievances are turned into general grievances (Charles Dorner is a great example of an ever-expanding list of persecutors that merited harm, even thought the starting point was narcissistic injury in the workplace).

ETA:

In effect, serial abusers and serial killers are trying to extend a power dynamic, and plan and strategize with that in mind. Both repeat, finding new targets, to meet their needs. Both experiment with new power assertion methods when deprived of their preferred operation mode: for example, serial killers are very adept at messing with psychologists, other inmates, “fans” using only narratives and minor social assertions of power (Edmund Kemper being the master, basically whole-cloth inventing excuses for his own behavior and selling them to profilers desperate for a deep-psychology explanation of sexualized serial crime inn return for small in-prison perks…Kemper thus asserting power over his reviled mother, and the profilers he duped, the prison system itself, and every asshole that believed him.) Domestic murderers and spree killers are trying to end a power dynamic as a final assertion of dominance.

- a specific breaking point in which desire, or desperation, transcends calculation of other means of obtaining power/sadistic/narcissistic needs. Again, this is best looked at in comparison to serial crime. There are serial killers for whom murder is enjoyable but about immediate needs—kill to take shit, kill to retaliate against perceived harm; kill because you can get paid to kill—who just go on and on. There are serial killers who have a very specific, fetishistic need that they want to fulfill over and over, hence the mix of predatory behavior (seeking targets) and opportunism (seizing targets that jump into view) and covering behavior (hiding so that the need can be fulfilled over and over). The domestic murderer and the spree killer generally reach the place of “I want to kill” after failing to see or execute alternatives—healthy alternatives (such as letting go of the need for power assertion), unhealthy but viable strategies (the skillset that permits long term domestic abuse, or finding a job that allows indulgence of power/sadism needs), or the serial killer pattern of addressing those needs as maintenance. Even spree killers that plan to get away plan in terms of “escape current lifestyle, maybe continue spree” rather than try to completely conceal themselves.*

The familicide John List is a very interesting demonstration of this point of arriving at a moment of desperation after failing other strategies, since he got away and started a whole second life before getting caught. With his first family, he had a tightly set-up abuse structure that met his needs until his work life and financial failures made him feel ashamed…thus desperate…thus willing to “fix” the issue by killing everyone and making a new family.

ETA:

An interesting example of this “down power, must fix with extreme measures” is the Las Vegas shooting, because it gestures at, of all things, the geopolitical scale at which this shit can work. The minute it turned out that the shooter was wealthy and spent time in SE Asia, what occurred to me was…Colonel Kurtz. Big dollar money in the developing world is an example of a perfect setup to abuse power…and sure enough, there’s signs that he was deep into child trafficking. Hitting a moment where he becomes down power by losing money—and maybe by catching wind that the law was after him, given what happened with his brother being arrested (after the shooting), we may be looking at an especially large scale narcissistic tantrum. I mean, that’s fucking dark, but none of these crimes really makes sense outside of “fuck everybody, I feel hurt and somebody’s going to get hurt to make me feel big.”

_{* though as we’ve just seen with Cruz trying to slip away unidentified, this is not a set value.}

All of the above means that mental illness can exacerbate that lack of empathy/sadism/power need triad. Paranoia and delusions mean leaping to that critical moment of feeling out of control and overwhelmed by external forces. Anger issues (not that we have a robust pathology for anger, because our culture is fucked) mean rashness and less planning. Depression and anxiety mean a struggle to see a long term. But no mental illness completely explains the final choice of action.

In the same way, cultural factors, scaling from family influence to national/regional culture, can chop and channel the leap to mass killing. Misogyny turns up a great deal, because it the single most common cultural component that encourages lack of empathy/assertion of power/dehumanization of the target. The idea of masculinity as defined by aggression and “hitting back” dovetails with this,* as does a more general idea of lethal force as personal empowerment.

_{* and somewhere in here, instead of comparing with serial killers, there’s a case to be made for comparison with honor killings, honor culture violence like feuding, and even pre-modern social structures that included killing as a response to injury of personal or collective dignity (such as summary executions by samurai, vigilante violence in a caste structure, lynchings) .}