Fewer than 2 percent of all suicides in this country are preceded by murder.
The motive behind most mass shootings falls into one of four types: mercy, justice, duty, and glory.
Many shooters kill themselves to avoid facing the consequences of their actions.
Last week, a 23-year-old man who, according to police, was obsessed with previous mass shooters, opened fire at a school in Minneapolis, killing two children and injuring 18 others. It was the latest mass shooting to make headlines, and it ended the way most of them do, with the gunman killing himself.
In highly publicized cases, the horror looms large in the public consciousness. Most people don’t think of these as murder-suicides, however. They think of them as murders, and the fact that the perpetrator kills himself (nearly all mass shooters are male) before being apprehended is relevant only in so much as it spares victims’ families from the emotions of a drawn-out trial, and taxpayers from the cost of years of incarceration.
Fewer than 2 percent of all suicides in this country—about 800 per year—are preceded by murder.[1] Most occur away from the spotlight, with relatively few people knowing about them.
Thomas Joiner is a psychology professor at Florida State University. In his book, The Perversion of Virtue, he writes that most murder-suicides conform to one of four perceived virtues—mercy, justice, duty, and glory.
Most common is mercy, for example the husband who shoots his chronically ill wife to take her out of her misery before he shoots himself. To others it’s murder, but to him, it’s a mercy killing. A variation of this is the spouse who kills her child before killing herself. The justification is that she is sparing the child from a lifetime of pain and hardship at the hands of society in general or the child’s father in particular.
Second is the wife who murders her abusive husband before killing herself. In her mind, she may be righting the many wrongs that he committed against her, thus there is justice in the act.
Third is the soldier who jumps on a live grenade in order to save others in his unit, or kamikaze pilots who deliberately crash their planes into enemy warships to try and sink them. Both sacrifice their lives out of a sense of duty.
Last are individuals who seek glory and adulation. Terrorists and suicide bombers, for instance, may be motivated by religious doctrine that life on earth is merely a prelude to the eternal afterlife, and they will be revered forever for what they have done.
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Some murder-suicides, Joiner notes, involve more than one type of virtue. The two teenage boys who killed 13 people at Columbine High School in 1999 before killing themselves were reportedly bullied by other students, particularly athletes, thus justice in the form of revenge seemed to be their motive. Yet none of the people they killed were athletes. Based on journals and videotapes that they left behind, their primary goal was glory—to kill more people than the Oklahoma City bomber, who was responsible for 168 deaths in the worst, non-military massacre in the United States prior to 9/11.[2] (That might have happened at Columbine if the bombs they planted around the school hadn’t malfunctioned.)
Not all murder-suicides conform to these four types, Joiner notes. A few mass murderers, for instance, seek neither justice nor glory, aren’t duty-bound, and have no sense of compassion or mercy. They also don’t intend to die. After realizing that they can’t escape, however, and not wanting to face the consequences of their heinous acts, they kill themselves. This makes them different from the norm, if it’s possible to consider any norm for murder-suicides, because in other cases, the perpetrator knows well in advance that he will die in the course of carrying out his plan. Moreover, he accepts it, after which he may give it only fleeting thought. His focus, after all, isn’t on self-preservation but on the deaths of others.
If you or someone you love is contemplating suicide, seek help immediately. For help 24/7 dial 988 for the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or reach out to the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741. To find a therapist near you, visit the Psychology Today Therapy Directory.
