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He had chosen his targets so that the bombs would create a smiley face across the United States map (an idea he borrowed from the 1999 film Fight Club).
Helder later said that both the bombings and the manifesto were intended to gather media attention so that he could inform the public about government control and promote marijuana legalization and astral projection. Helder was found incompetent to stand trial in 2004 and remanded to the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota, where he remains.
selective mutism, severe depression and anxiety.
“martyrs like Eric [Klebold] and Dylan [Harris].”
thirty-nine year old Major Nidal Malik Hassan, an Islamic U.S. Army psychiatrist, arrived at work armed with a semi-automatic pistol fitted with two laser sights, a .357 revolver and over 3000 rounds of ammunition.
killed thirteen people and wounded more than thirty others.
While an intern and resident at Walter Reed Medical Center from 2003 until 2009, he completed a Masters in Public Health and a two-year fellowship in Disaster and Preventative Psychiatry at the school’s Center For Traumatic Stress. Hassan received poor evaluations from his superiors and was reprimanded for substandard work. Students and faculty there found him to be “socially isolated,” “deeply troubled,” “disconnected,” “aloof,” “paranoid,” “belligerent,” and “schizoid.” On a number of occasions, his colleagues reported his strange behaviors to superiors and in 2008, the staff and board of
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colleagues there described him as “anti-American” and, at one point, the FBI had even conducted an investigation into Hassan’s online correspondence with known Islamic radicals.
Hassan became appalled and turned against the U.S. after hearing stories from patients who had recently returned from Iraq and Afghanistan.
While the Department of Defense classified the incident as ‘Workplace Violence,’ a Senate report described the Fort Hood shootings as “the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001.”
In 2008, Loughner called the police to report that somebody was impersonating him online, including having set up a fake MySpace account in his name with an accompanying picture of him. That same year, he attempted to join the Army but was rejected and deemed “unqualified.”
In February 2010, Loughner enrolled in community college where he often confused his teachers and classmates with meandering mumblings and random rants during class about the end of the world, government conspiracies, the monetary system, terrorism and faked space flights. Eventually, in September 2010, after becoming the subject of at least 51 campus public safety reports detailing his strange and erratic behaviors, he was suspended from attending classes pending the results of a mental health evaluation.
He believed in conspiracy theories about the illegitimacy of the U.S. dollar, the 9/11 attacks, the existence of a New World Order and the impending 2012 apocalypse. Among the pictures he posted to his MySpace profile was a handgun placed upon a document titled “United States History.”
use of fluoride and aspartame to control Americans.
Holmes himself later said he became obsessed with killing when he was just 10 years old,
During his senior year of high school in 2006, Holmes was an intern at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies where his supervisor described him as socially awkward, uncommunicative and stubborn. He was diagnosed with depression and once became so frustrated that he pulled out his hair; so much that he was left with a bald spot on the back of his head.
he studied neuroscience and graduated in the top 1% of his class. Letters of recommendation by his teachers described him as “a very effective group leader” and a person who “takes an active role in his education, and brings a great amount of intellectual and emotional maturity into the classroom.” In 2011, he was accepted into a highly competitive neuroscience PhD program at the University Of Colorado Anschutz
“temporal illusion [which is] an illusion that allows you to change the past” and spoke of carrying on his mentor’s interest in “subjective experience [or] what takes place inside the mind as opposed to the external world.”
and confiding that he thought he might be suffering from ‘dysphoric mania,’ a type of bipolar disorder, whose episodes, one psychiatrist said, include “[getting] this idea of doing something and even if your mind [tells you not to], your body moves you forward.”
himself. Page, a former Army Psychological Operations specialist until 1998, had a history of bad conduct while in the Army and was very vocal about his white supremacist beliefs.
fired 154 shots with a semiautomatic rifle, killed six adults and twenty children and then killed himself. All of the firearms used in the massacre were legal and registered to his mother.
Lanza spent a lot of time alone in his mother’s basement playing modern warfare video games including, among others, Call of Duty.
“Outkill [the] Norway Nut Job.”
Naval Reservist, Aaron Alexis, arrived at a Washington D. C. Navy Yard,
Although described as a “polite” kid and “typical teenager,” throughout his adult life Alexis displayed disturbing, “bizarre” and “alarming” behaviors. In 2004, at the age of twenty-five, Alexis had walked out of his grandmother’s house and, later claiming to be frustrated over the parking situation there, shot three rounds from a .45 caliber pistol at the car of a nearby construction worker. He later explained to police that he had PTSD and had blacked out and only later remembered shooting at the car. His troubles, he told them, began when he participated in rescue and recovery operations in
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cited for misconduct at least eight times before receiving an honorable discharge in 2011.
After his discharge from the service, Alexis retained his secret level security clearance, which allowed him to do sensitive military work for The Experts, a contracting company that serviced the Navy’s Internet system.
In August 2012, the Newport, Rhode Island police department issued a report sent to a local Naval Base where Alexis had been cleared to work, warning that he suffered from hallucinations and was hearing voices.
Alexis held an increasingly obsessive belief he was being “targeted,” controlled or influenced by Extremely Low Frequency (ELF) electro-magnetic waves.
ELF denotes a technology deployed by the government to harass, monitor and manipulate individuals, a growing number of whom believe, like Alexis, that they are "Targeted Individuals," (or TI’s).
Call of Duty for hours
reportedly became obsessed with “conspiracy theories.”
[He was] over concerned.
confused from sleep deprivation”
“Conspiracy Theorists Are Dangerous Enemies To Have,”
Among the worst and most ironic of these conspiracy theories, other commentators observed, were ones that purport the mass shootings themselves were staged theatrical events.
Essayist Timothy Gallimore attributes McVeigh’s love of guns, racial ideologies and acts of terror to his having been targeted by bullies, his parents’ divorce and his military experiences.
While the author concedes that such ‘end times’ imaginings are a universal phenomenon often accompanied by violent fantasies that in reality help negotiate other underlying psychological conflicts, he expresses concern about the frequency at which “these fantasies lead to violent actions.”
what if’ scenarios,” so called survivalists are engaging in optimistic fantasy about the types of “creative transcendence [that] calamitous change” might bring; an act he views as rational in the face of an irrational world, proactive rather than reactive, “a novel exploration” of possibility rather than “a retreat from or renouncement of social life,”
Oswald read about Huey Long’s assassin. Sirhan read about Oswald. Bremer read about Sirhan and wrote about Oswald. Hinkley read about various American assassins including Oswald and was deeply inspired by Taxi Driver, a movie based on Bremer. When he drove to OKC the morning of the bombing, McVeigh wore a t-shirt with “Sic Semper Tyrannus” or “Thus Ever To Tyrants” printed on it, the words John Wilkes Booth yelled right after he shot Abraham Lincoln. McVeigh inspired the acts of other disaffected, frustrated, anti-social, loner killers who mentioned McVeigh specifically in their writings. They
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newspaper clippings about previous Lone Gunmen including Breivik and even created a scorecard for each detailing their kill rates. And so it goes. The stories about recent Lone Gunmen (illustrated in the above compilation of media reports) echo those told about Timothy McVeigh, who himself both enacted and expanded upon certain cultural scripts and models .
Still, when taken together, the clinical diagnosis they assigned and profiles they constructed depict him as a narcissistic, fragmented, paranoid, delusional, suggestible, possibly amnesiac man suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) as well as the more controversial diagnosis, Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). A review of the professional literature reveals all of these descriptions to be interrelated.
DID is conceived of as a set of dissociative symptoms and tendencies thought to be a coping mechanism instigated by intense traumatic experiences, often during childhood.
they observed paranoia “both in Tim and in members of his family.”
To his attorneys he revealed that both his mother and father had a history of mental illness and that Bill was on some type of mood medication, a disclosure that caused Dr. Halleck to opine that there was “more to Bill than we have picked up so far.” To his biographers, Tim wrote that since the bombing his mother kept saying “strange things” were happening to her, but it was hard to tell if what she was saying was real, as she had always been paranoid.
“duck and cover” drills at school
Secretary of State Alexander Haig declared that the deadliest threat faced by Americans was terrorism.
The United Nations condemned Iraq for their use of chemical weapons against
Iran, and U.S. President Reagan called for an international ban on chemical weapons.
The worst industrial disaster in history left more than 8,000 dead and half a million injured after methyl isocyanine leaked from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in India.
