Very good article about the psychology of mass shooters.
Micah Johnson Was Not Who You Think He Was. But You Know Him Well.
In the pantheon of American assassins, there was nothing unusual about Micah Xavier Johnson.
In the days after Micah Xavier Johnson’s mass shooting in Dallas, The Drudge Report took to calling him simply, and in outsized font, Micah X. Though it was the most transparent of the attempts to tie Johnson to black militancy and/or the Black Lives Matter movement, it was only the most extreme expression of a widespread phenomenon.
It was also dead wrong.
After the shooting spree that lasted for several hours, Johnson was mortally wounded by a robot wielding an explosive. His final act was to write a note in blood ― “RB”. The desire to tie him to a black nationalist movement is so strong that there’s been serious speculation that he was trying to write “RBG,” which stands for “red, black and green,” the colors of the Pan-African flag. But in looking for meaning in the message, the media has missed the meaning in the act. The very act of writing in that moment places Johnson in the tradition not of the black militant, but of the American assassin.
While he looked different, both politically and physically, from most well-known assassins, in the pantheon of American assassins, there was nothing unusual about Micah Xavier Johnson.
In his book The Anatomy of Motive, FBI profiler John Douglas dissects a variety of crimes and criminals to determine what makes them tick. He pays special attention to what he calls “assassin type” personalities. Isolated, suspicious and armed to the teeth, assassin types have been responsible for some of America’s most iconic and heinous crimes. They are our mass shooters, our anonymous poisoners and our political murderers, but in their imaginations they are acting defensively. They are the victims.
Douglas noticed that assassins were not grandiose, like the Charles Mansons of the world, but instead avoided eye contact. They were suspicious. They often had a deep sense of inadequacy. They were followers, not leaders. They were, routinely, domestic abusers to the extent they could maintain domesticity at all.
The assassin has a “highly organized system” of paranoia, Douglas wrote. It is a system with causes, effects, enemies, traitors, actions, reactions ― and artillery. Lots of artillery. A peculiar feature of the assassin is that they often want to understand and be understood, so they write.
They write journals, like Arthur Bremer. They write manifestos, like Chris Dorner. They write letters, like John Hinckley. They sometimes create detailed plans and schematics for their shootings, like Lee Harvey Oswald. And in some cases, like Charles Whitman, they combine these characteristics. Their writings ultimately reveal lives collapsing into themselves like black holes, absorbing relationships, jobs and opportunities while simultaneously growing more armed and lethal each day.
Several days before fatally shooting 14 people and injuring more than 30 others at the University of Texas at Austin, Whitman wrote of his mental state, “I talked with a Doctor for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt come [sic] overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw that Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.”
A journal was found among Johnson’s belongings, but its details have not yet been released.
Charles J. Whitman, a 24-year-old student at the University of Texas, in a 1966 photograph. Until the carnage at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., on Monday, April 16, 2007, the Aug. 1, 1966, sniping rampage by Whitman from the Austin school’s landmark 307-foot tower had remained the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history.
Assassins often document their political views, but they are usually conspiratorial and contradictory, if not incoherent. Because they’re all over the map, that gives partisans on both sides the opportunity to pull out a single quote or two in order to shoehorn the shooter into whatever ideological box is preferable. John Hinckley, Jr., the man who shot Ronald Reagan and three others in March 1981, wrote of a deep love and appreciation for John Lennon’s music. He was devastated by the musician’s death; he called it the “death of the dream.” However, Hinckley saw no contradiction between Lennon’s dreams of love and brotherhood and his own flirtations with white nationalism and later murder.
Arthur Bremer’s politics were equally murky. He mocked his fellow Americans and their political disengagement. “A 50% voter turnout. Now THAT’S confidence in America!”, he wrote in his diary. Yet he did not himself vote. He made up for his personal avoidance of the ballot with a commitment to the bullet. In that, he was bipartisan and open-minded. He wrote of his admiration for George McGovern, while planning to assassinate him. He expressed a dislike for Richard Nixon, while preparing to shoot him also. He wrote mostly of indifference to George Wallace. Then he shot Wallace five times.
More at the Link.
Micah Johnson Was Not Who You Think He Was. But You Know Him Well.
In the pantheon of American assassins, there was nothing unusual about Micah Xavier Johnson.
In the days after Micah Xavier Johnson’s mass shooting in Dallas, The Drudge Report took to calling him simply, and in outsized font, Micah X. Though it was the most transparent of the attempts to tie Johnson to black militancy and/or the Black Lives Matter movement, it was only the most extreme expression of a widespread phenomenon.
It was also dead wrong.
After the shooting spree that lasted for several hours, Johnson was mortally wounded by a robot wielding an explosive. His final act was to write a note in blood ― “RB”. The desire to tie him to a black nationalist movement is so strong that there’s been serious speculation that he was trying to write “RBG,” which stands for “red, black and green,” the colors of the Pan-African flag. But in looking for meaning in the message, the media has missed the meaning in the act. The very act of writing in that moment places Johnson in the tradition not of the black militant, but of the American assassin.
While he looked different, both politically and physically, from most well-known assassins, in the pantheon of American assassins, there was nothing unusual about Micah Xavier Johnson.
In his book The Anatomy of Motive, FBI profiler John Douglas dissects a variety of crimes and criminals to determine what makes them tick. He pays special attention to what he calls “assassin type” personalities. Isolated, suspicious and armed to the teeth, assassin types have been responsible for some of America’s most iconic and heinous crimes. They are our mass shooters, our anonymous poisoners and our political murderers, but in their imaginations they are acting defensively. They are the victims.
Douglas noticed that assassins were not grandiose, like the Charles Mansons of the world, but instead avoided eye contact. They were suspicious. They often had a deep sense of inadequacy. They were followers, not leaders. They were, routinely, domestic abusers to the extent they could maintain domesticity at all.
The assassin has a “highly organized system” of paranoia, Douglas wrote. It is a system with causes, effects, enemies, traitors, actions, reactions ― and artillery. Lots of artillery. A peculiar feature of the assassin is that they often want to understand and be understood, so they write.
They write journals, like Arthur Bremer. They write manifestos, like Chris Dorner. They write letters, like John Hinckley. They sometimes create detailed plans and schematics for their shootings, like Lee Harvey Oswald. And in some cases, like Charles Whitman, they combine these characteristics. Their writings ultimately reveal lives collapsing into themselves like black holes, absorbing relationships, jobs and opportunities while simultaneously growing more armed and lethal each day.
Several days before fatally shooting 14 people and injuring more than 30 others at the University of Texas at Austin, Whitman wrote of his mental state, “I talked with a Doctor for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt come [sic] overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw that Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.”
A journal was found among Johnson’s belongings, but its details have not yet been released.
Charles J. Whitman, a 24-year-old student at the University of Texas, in a 1966 photograph. Until the carnage at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., on Monday, April 16, 2007, the Aug. 1, 1966, sniping rampage by Whitman from the Austin school’s landmark 307-foot tower had remained the deadliest campus shooting in U.S. history.
Assassins often document their political views, but they are usually conspiratorial and contradictory, if not incoherent. Because they’re all over the map, that gives partisans on both sides the opportunity to pull out a single quote or two in order to shoehorn the shooter into whatever ideological box is preferable. John Hinckley, Jr., the man who shot Ronald Reagan and three others in March 1981, wrote of a deep love and appreciation for John Lennon’s music. He was devastated by the musician’s death; he called it the “death of the dream.” However, Hinckley saw no contradiction between Lennon’s dreams of love and brotherhood and his own flirtations with white nationalism and later murder.
Arthur Bremer’s politics were equally murky. He mocked his fellow Americans and their political disengagement. “A 50% voter turnout. Now THAT’S confidence in America!”, he wrote in his diary. Yet he did not himself vote. He made up for his personal avoidance of the ballot with a commitment to the bullet. In that, he was bipartisan and open-minded. He wrote of his admiration for George McGovern, while planning to assassinate him. He expressed a dislike for Richard Nixon, while preparing to shoot him also. He wrote mostly of indifference to George Wallace. Then he shot Wallace five times.
More at the Link.
