Nikolas Cruz delighted in torturing animals. The Florida school shooter is reported to have killed frogs and squirrels, and sicced a dog on a neighbor’s piglets. Cruz’s social media feeds were replete with images of dead and maimed critters, apparently hurt by his own hand.
Cruz is not alone in taking perverse pleasure in harming the helpless among us. Jeffrey Dahmer, David Berkowitz (known popularly as the Son of Sam), and Ted Bundy were all prolific animal torturers. And all, of course, went on to long careers as serial murderers of their fellow humans.
Serial killing, that quintessential American phenomenon and existential fear of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, has declined. Measuring this precisely is difficult—there can be serial killers operating without our knowledge (if, say, authorities haven’t yet managed to link a series of deaths to one perpetrator), and where one pegs murders as “serial” is inherently subjective—but the numbers seem incontrovertible. One study from criminologists at Radford University finds an 85 percent decline in American serial killing from its peak in the early 1980s. Instances of mass shootings, meanwhile, like the atrocity we just witnessed in Florida, have risen sharply, a 2014 FBI study determined.
Determining precisely why this happened is extremely difficult, but it’s enough to raise a question: Is the personality type that 40 years ago might have been attracted to serial killing now more likely to become a mass shooter? Had he been born in, say, 1962 rather than 1998, would Cruz have looked to Ted Bundy, rather than, say, a Columbine killer, for inspiration?
Probably not, criminologists say. Mass killing and serial murder are “two very different phenomena,” says Harold Schechter, CUNY professor and author of the The Serial Killer Files. Serial killing is often a form of “lust murder,” a “sadistic sex crime” with the killer often achieving orgasm during or after the event. Adam Lankford, criminologist at the University of Alabama, agrees: “There are often sadistic and sexual elements in serial killing which don’t appear in mass shooting,” he says. There are no known cases of a mass killer having a sexual experience during his deed.
Serial killers, moreover, try to “avoid detection,” notes retired FBI profiler Gregg McCrary, whereas mass killers often die at the end of their acts or, at a minimum, certainly don’t plan on getting away with it. Serial killers also typically kill strangers, while most “mass shooters know their victims,” McCrary says. They might commit their murders at the school they were expelled from, the workplace that fired them, or the home of the wife who kicked them out. (The murder of multiple family members is the most common form of mass murder, according to McCrary.)
All serial killers are psychopaths—they are unable to experience empathy and indeed take pleasure in the pain of others. This is increasingly considered a neurological condition, one that appears to begin at birth.
By contrast, there are a “variety of different motivations” among mass killers, McCrary says. Some are indeed psychopaths: Eric Harris of Columbine infamy displayed strong psychopathic tendencies, as Dave Cullen revealed in his 2009 book Columbine. And some, like Jared Lee Loughner, who shot congresswoman Gabby Giffords and murdered six others at an Arizona grocery store, are plainly insane.
The vast majority of mass shooters, however, appear to be neither. They may be “angry” or “insecure” or “jealous,” McCrary says, or full of “rage,” as Schechter puts it. In other words, their emotions tend to be those of a normal human—but their reactions go to vicious, abnormal extremes. In this sense, Cruz’s history of hurting animals was in fact telling. It’s not necessarily a predictor of serial killing per se, but indeed, “violence against socially valued animals is a strong predictor of adult violence,” McCrary tells me.
A brilliant 2015 New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell came to an even more alarming conclusion. Researching a plethora of school shootings, Gladwell found something strange and frightening: A growing number of school shooters were, in many respects, normal. They were not psychopathic, not insane, not from abusive homes. They weren’t bullied or socially isolated. So what could be driving their behavior?
Gladwell likened the growing plague of school shootings to how riots spread. A riot is a “case of destructive violence that involves a great number of otherwise quite normal people who would not usually be disposed to violence,” he wrote. Likewise, it might make sense to “think of [school shootings] as a slow-motion, ever-evolving riot, in which each new participant’s action makes sense in reaction to and in combination with those who came before.” What began with psychopaths like Harris now encompasses the (relatively) healthy and well-adjusted.
It’s not as simple as saying that mass shooters want fame, and that therefore media outlets should refuse to publicize their names, as some prominent editors have pledged. Nor is every case of mass killing a simple issue of “mental health.” Rather, it seems, there is a cultural contagion at work. Witness the dozens of copycat threats that have been issued in the wake of the Florida slaughter. Some were more than threats; in several cases across the country, students were found with caches of weapons. And not all of those would-be perpetrators are psychopaths. The frightening implication is that some number among the “normal” are now regularly contemplating mass murder.
And that’s why it’s telling that the 1970s and ’80s saw what Harold Schechter calls a “cultural fascination” with serial killing. That has now declined, “replaced by a fixation on mass murder,” he says. As long as that particular cultural obsession remains dominant, we’re likely to see more mass killers. Born that way, psychopaths will always be with us. But mass killers are in many cases a product of our society.
Ethan Epstein is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
