Forensic psychiatrist Paul Mullen sounds the alarm on the digital roots of modern mass murder. Photo / Getty Images
Forensic psychiatrist Paul Mullen sounds the alarm on the digital roots of modern mass murder. Photo / Getty Images
THE FACTS
Paul Mullen explores the mindset of lone mass killers, linking them to societal scripts and online influences.
He proposes a Threat Assessment and Response Centre to identify and treat potential threats.
Mullen emphasises the importance of dampening publicity and treating threats as public health issues.
Paul Mullen has spent years trying to understand the internal world of the lone mass killer: the sort of person who draws their weapon in a school, on a factory floor or at a supermarket.
A forensic psychiatrist, Mullen is well-known for his research into the link betweencommon-or-garden jealousy and the obsessional, sometimes homicidal, behaviour of stalkers.
He takes a similar tack in Running Amok, a devastating compendium of mass killings arranged by locale and severity.
Above all, Mullen says, remember that everyone has the odd unpleasant impulse from time to time. It’s part of being human. Many of us feel undervalued. Many of us feel in possession of skills and attributes that, in a better world, would bring us the recognition we deserve.
Who hasn’t, at some point, looked in the mirror and seen resentment and unhappiness?
Lone mass killers, Mullen says, are often persistent whiners along those lines: “querulants” is his term-of-art. At this point, you might suddenly be feeling nervous. Not only is malcontent pretty normal, but potential murder weapons, from knives to vehicles, are everywhere. Yet the fact remains: few people do, in fact, turn to slaughter. So what explains the awful exceptions?
Mullen, who has met a wide range of criminals across his professional career and was the first non-military defence expert to enter the detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, points the finger first at what he calls a “social script”.
In his experience, mass killers are invariably fixated on reports of previous massacres and on their fictional depiction. This gives the killer something they can, in a more or less faithful way, emulate in the real world. Rambo is a fine movie, intelligently written, but there’s a reason the DVD keeps turning up on such people’s shelves.
As societies change, so do the scripts they make available to the despondent, the despairing, the rejected and the humiliated. In the 1970s and early 1980s, homicidal people used to fixate on a belief; now they’re more likely to kill in the name of a group. Omar Mateen, who in 2016 killed 49 people in a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, claimed allegiance to both Isis and Hezbollah: a neat trick, given how violently these groups are opposed to each other.
In such a shift from ideology to tribe, Mullen detects the influence of the internet, with its pseudo-communities of extremists desperate to represent some persecuted minority.
The other essential characteristic of these scripts is that they’re self-perpetuating. Killers inspire killers. (It’s why Mullen won’t mention by name the killers about whom he’s writing.)
This seems a desperately intractable problem. Mullen notes in particular the inflammatory influence of online “incel” culture, the depredations of the attention economy and the addictiveness of certain video games. The violence or otherwise of the latter isn’t the issue. Much more important is their ability to offer the pathologically lonely some social validation: “Look at me, top of the leaderboard!”
The lone killer wants to belong – and not just to belong but to then reach the top of some specious hierarchy. “I’ve got the record, haven’t I?” was practically the first question Martin Bryant asked after killing 35 people and injuring 23 others in the Tasmanian tourist town of Port Arthur in 1996.
Combine all the factors above and you have the necessary – not sufficient in themselves, but necessary – factors for mass murder to be born.
In 1996, Martin Bryant killed 35 people at Port Arthur, a historic tourist town in Tasmania. Photo / Getty Images
So how do we avert the next slaughter? This is where Mullen turns to discuss, of all people, Queen Victoria. Across her long reign, she was the victim of eight assassination attempts. By the time she died, entirely peacefully, the Metropolitan Police had learnt that the most effective strategy for avoiding or mitigating attacks on a permanently public target was, as far as possible, to dampen down publicity.
Ever since, would-be regicides have been arrested without fanfare and often ushered into psychiatric treatment. Thus, within the bounds of law, a security issue has been turned into a public-health one.
Mullen would like to see potential lone mass killers spotted and treated in much the same way. He proposes the creation of a Threat Assessment and Response Centre (TARC), modelled on the Met’s existing Fixated Threat Assessment Centre, which handles the security of known targets.
Faced with a credible threat, the TARC would be given access to the suspect’s police and medical records and their internet history. But it’s less clear how, in the absence of such joined-up intelligence, we are to spot credible threats in the first place.
However you cut it, total security can only ever come at the price of total unfreedom and it would be easy – if a bit of a cheap shot – to accuse Mullen of advocating for the sort of surveillance system you see in Minority Report.
Those issues aside, the rest would be comparatively simple, as identification would be followed by treatment and, in Mullen’s experience, obsessives on the path to atrocity are remarkably co-operative and frank with those who’ve managed to stop them before they start.
At the time of writing, there have been just over 300 mass shootings in America so far this year and while gun-control laws may have preserved Britain and other Western countries from that specific plague, a spate of vehicle-ramming attacks in Nice, Berlin, London, Barcelona, Stockholm and other European cities have left us, and our security services, in a state of hypervigilance. Mullen wants us to take seriously the threats made by miserable obsessives. False alarms will be raised but it will all be to the good.
Still, I closed Running Amok with some lingering doubts. I fear public awareness won’t do much good in a world that seems to be brimming with grievances and resentments, and encouraging more.
At the same time, the online world has deprived contentious speech of the context we used to understand intuitively. Civic society has declared war on nuance and arrests people for what some – just ask Graham Linehan – would argue are jokes.
Even if we accept Mullen’s proposals, how can we be expected to hear the one true signal in all that noise?
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