Topic: School shooters and the matrix
Found this article on school shooters and their perception of 'reality' I couldn't resist posting it since it contains issues that are often discussed here. This is not the whole article because its too long but you can read the entire thing on dreamsend's website. Its a pretty good website too.
http://dreamsend.wordpress.com/
The Making of Child Assassins
May 2nd, 2007 at 5:52 am (Uncategorized)
In order perhaps to understand Cho better, I began looking into other school shootings. And while there are books which outline the similarities among these and seek to develop some sort of psychological profile, I wonder if there is one aspect being overlooked. Specifically, it appears to me that these children and young adults are often in some sort of dissociative state while engaged in the shooting and often have previous symptoms that are symptomatic of dissociative disorders. (This most certainly applies to some very famous assassins, such as Mark David Chapman and Sirhan Sirhan, but I’m not going to deal with that here. )
I ‘m using the term assassin here, because while it is tragic when any young person shoots another, whether out of anger or gang activities or whatever, these cases share certain features those other cases lack. Here are a few of the features that I’ve not seen highlighted in discussions of these young shooters.
They usually plan their attacks well in advance and in great detail.
They carry out their attacks in a calm, almost businesslike manner, even when vengeance is alleged to be the motive.
They often report not remembering the attacks or, more usually, feeling as if they were in a “dream” during the attacks.
They seldom flee the scene of the crime, either ending the attack in suicide or in calm surrender.
There are often strong suspicions or direct evidence of others who help plan the attacks.
There is often a history of what is often considered to be “early schizophrenia”, including hearing voices, “irrational fears”, paranoia and hallucinations.
And schizophrenia, though not typically considered a possible diagnosis in children, could be the culprit. However, it’s important to note that schizophrenia is primarily a thought disorder and makes the sort of meticulous planning that is often seen in these cases rather difficult if not impossible. In many ways, then, dissociative disorders, whether involving multiple personalities or simply a tendency to shift into “altered states” of consciousness during times of high stress, seems just as likely to explain what we are seeing, if not more so. If you combine the tendency to dissociate with a relationship with an abusive or manipulative authority figure or peer, this could easily explain most of the factors so common in these shootings. This is very important, in my view, even absent theories of “MKULTRA” or “Manchurian Candidates.” Dissociative disorders come about primarily as a result of long-term childhood abuse, often sexual abuse and/or extreme neglect. As such, it should be of concern that no one seems to be looking at this pathway in the development of these child “psychopaths.” (It should also be noted that the abuser does not necessarily have to be a parent.)
Here are a few “case studies” and I’m sticking with the lower profile cases we don’t hear as much about. I don’t have access to much material on these cases, but what I do find is shocking.
Let’s start with Brenda Spencer. In San Diego back in 1979, 16 year-old Spencer took a rifle and started taking shots at kids in the school across the street. When a siege ended with her arrest, she reportedly said that she began shooting just because, “I just don’t like Mondays.” Other reports have her gleefully recounting that it was “a lot of fun” to shoot the children. This, by the way, was before video games even existed…if you don’t count Pong, which is not a particulary violent game.
What makes a 16-year-old girl so cold? Well, apparently the courts believed that that’s just the way she was, and reasons aren’t important. And to be fair, she did not offer up any reasons until her parole hearing in 2002. Here is a collection of articles on that hearing. And what she told the parole officers, though ultimately rejected as unsubstantiated excuses, should raise a few red flags.
Spencer said that she was sexually abused by her father and forced to share his bed until she was fourteen. The rifle with which she shot the children was a Christmas gift from her father, though she’d asked for a radio. She felt he wanted her to use it to hill herself, but whatever the reason, it’s an odd gift for a 16-year-old girl. She claimed that she was drunk and on PCP at the time and was hallucinating that a group of commandos was coming in her direction from the school when she began shooting. (Drug tests evidently came back negative, but she claims those tests were faked.)
Spencer also claimed that she was kept on mind altering drugs after she was arrested and was kept in a sort of zombie state doing and saying whatever investigators wanted. In fact, she claimed she is active with a group of 50 female inmates who were all allegedly kept on mind-altering drugs until their trials were over and are planning a lawsuit, though surely they have little hope of success even if it is true.
Sure, she could just be making all of that up hoping to win parole. Though I have to say, if that’s the way she was hoping to win parole it was an odd way to go about it. As I realize every time I even venture to write about these topics, this sort of thing is not taken seriously, least of all by parole boards. However, it is hard to imagine any other explanation that makes sense. Perhaps we could assume she was taking PCP voluntarily and then just snapped, but to me, a history of abuse seems very likely. Her father has never spoken out about the shooting.
Several school shootings are described in fairly substantial detail in the book Deadly Lessons: Understanding Lethal School Violence (2003) . Two of them are of interest here.
In April of 1998, at age 14, Andrew Wurst came to a school dance at his Pennsylvania middle school with a pistol. He shot one teacher to death and wounded a few more students. Here is what he said when he was apprehended by the owner of the facility hosting the dance:
‘I died four years ago. I’ve already been dead and I’ve come back. It doesn’t matter anymore. None of this is real.’ (p. 73)
In later conversations with a psychiatrist, Wurst said he’d been knocked unconscious when “caught between two swings” at age 8. This would be 6 years previous. But by age 10, he was already having suicidal thoughts. Here is what a psychiatrist says was Wurst’s belief about other people.
Other people are “programmed to act and say what the government, mad scientists, or a psycho want them to say.” Andrew elaborated later, saying that people are like robots, programmed with “time tablets” that give them differing levels of intelligence and different personalities.
“If I can think, I am free—the last freedom are my thoughts.” (p. 77)
Wurst suffered from many seemingly irrational fears. His mother said that he was still afraid of monsters in the closet or under his bed. In addition, he was a bedwetter till age 9, and though this can have many causes, it can be a reaction to sexual abuse. Wurst also admitted that he heard voices in his head. In fact, he’d written to a friend that “the voices are coming again.”
Wurst felt he had been brought here from the future and had a special task to carry out:
At another point, Andrew stated he had returned from the future and has “a mission to prevent something terrible that has happened or that will happen in the future.” He wasn’t certain what that mission was, but he did know that he had an “arch enemy” who would try to prevent him from accomplishing it. He had never seen this arch enemy but knew that everyone has one, which meant that he had to be on guard. (p. 78)
And Andrew had told his former girlfriend some months before the murders:
“We are all in reality in hospital beds being monitored and programmed by these mad scientists, and this world is not real for them…. The scientists watch over us to see what we’re doing.”
The following year, the film The Matrix was released. The following year.
Just a few months prior to Wurst’s rampage, in December of 1997, Michael Carneal entered the lobby of his Paducah, Kentucky high school and began shooting students in a morning prayer circle. He’d brought several guns with him, as well as several sets of earplugs, which caused some to think he expected others to join in. Like Wurst, it would later emerge that he was deeply affected by mental health issues. He gravitated toward the “goth” crowd, some of whom wore the long black coats that Columbine would soon make famous.
Although he brought several guns with him that day, bundled up in a blanket as “props” for a skit, he told everyone, he chose to do the shooting with a .22 pistol. This was probably the least powerful weapon of the bunch. Not to worry, however, for Carneal, like Cho, had an amazing proficiency with this weapon that left even one military expert stunned
-Tyrannosaurus rex
