The real super villains

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/07/2012 (5002 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The suspect in the Batman movie shootings in Colorado was said to be a “weird loner” — where have we heard that phrase before? — but it is of course an observation that explains nothing. Many people are loners — aren’t they all a little weird? — but it doesn’t follow ipso facto that they pick up assault rifles and kill as many strangers as possible.

Many people are depressed and angry after experiencing failure — Hitler the failed artist who wanted to be an architect is one example, and there are many others. But again it doesn’t follow automatically that they turn violent. Yet there were no obvious failures in the life of James Holmes, 24, which makes understanding his behaviour more difficult.

It’s possible Holmes, who once aspired to be a medical doctor, suffered a severe mental and emotional breakdown when he armed himself with automatic weapons, booby-trapped his apartment, and headed to a movie theatre in search of victims, but such an explanation has not been offered. He was apparently imitating one of Batman’s foes — the Joker, a highly intelligent psychopath — but that is hardly an insight to his crimes.

If Holmes does offer a reason, it’s unlikely it would be satisfactory, unless he was in the grip of a schizophrenic episode, but there is no suggestion so far he was driven by other voices. Similar events usually spark cries for more police, tougher sentences and more robust mental-health programs, but it seems unlikely any of these measures would have prevented the disaster.

Nor is it valid to postulate that such crimes can only be committed by the insane, particularly when there is so much evidence that simple evil is frequently the prime motivator in mass or serial killings.

Paul Bernardo, for example, to name just one loathsome character, was not criminally insane — he knew it was morally and legally wrong to rape and murder young women — but he did not care because his own sense of depraved satisfaction was more important. Another scary figure was Anders Brevik, the Norwegian racist who killed more than 70 people to draw attention to his white supremacist ideology. Opinions varied as to whether he was a paranoid schizophrenic, or just an extreme narcissist.

The natural reaction is to assume that people like Brevik, Bernardo and now Holmes must be insane; otherwise they wouldn’t have committed such unimaginable crimes. This, too, ignores the overwhelming culture of violence that characterizes human history, and, indeed, current affairs.

Anyone who hasn’t read the story of Anne Frank, the talented Dutch girl who hid with her family in Amsterdam for two years before being sent to her death in Germany, can be forgiven for thinking the Holocaust was an example of mass insanity. But it was, in fact, an extermination program carried out with scientific precision by individuals, most of whom were quite ordinary.

The killing of 12 people and wounding of 58 in Colorado is relatively small compared to the death tolls experienced in other countries as a result of terrorism or war, but it is qualitatively different for precisely those reasons. War and terror usually have a context — territorial gain, power, ethnic hatred — but the movie-theatre slaughter is without one, at least so far.

Even the Norway shooting had some kind of context, bizarre and grotesque though it was.

But as a result of what happened in Aurora, Colo., communities everywhere are left to wonder how they can protect themselves from random violence. Should parents keep their children at home? Should “weird loners” be put under surveillance? Would tougher gun laws, which aren’t on the American agenda anyway, make a difference, particularly when there are other means — the automobile, for example — of causing random death and destruction?

That, in the end, is the insidious effect of the random killer. There simply is no way to protect yourself from the unimaginable. Even the Dark Knight, who faces super villains with goals in his fictional world, would be stymied.