While much remains unknown about the motives of our two most recent alleged mass murderers—the man who shot up a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado last month, and the husband-and-wife couple who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California, on Wednesday—all appear to have become self-radicalized. Something happened within the mind of each individual that led them to make the tragic leap from strong belief in an ideology to violent action on its behalf.
This is, fortunately, a relatively rare occurrence. The overwhelming majority of people who believe abortion is murder, or that Islam is being unfairly attacked by the West, do not feel compelled to kill innocents in the name of their cause. But as we have witnessed over the past week, a few do, and this lends increasing urgency to the question of why.
Terrorism researchers emphasize that there is no single path that leads to mass murder, and the motivations behind such attacks are often a mix of the political and personal. In a 2010 paper, Australian sociologist Ramón Spaaij reported that "lone-wolf terrorists tend to create their own ideologies that combine personal frustrations and aversion with broader political, social, or religious aims."
[For more of this story, written by Tom Jacobs, go to http://www.psmag.com/politics-...ass-murderer-is-made]
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