- This article deals with mass killings that are not considered genocide.
Mass murder (massacre) is the act of murdering a large number of people,
typically at the same time or over a relatively short period of time. Mass murder may be committed by individuals or
organizations.
The term may refer to spree killers, who stage a single, horrific assault on their
victims, or to serial killers, who may kill many people, but not necessarily all at the
same time.
The largest mass killings in history have been attempts to exterminate entire groups or communities of people, often on the
basis of ethnicity or religion. In modern times such events are sometimes described as genocide. Although some consider that "genocide"
may exist where there is merely an intention or plan to exterminate a particular group, and that killing is not a necessary
condition, by contrast "mass murder" involves the actual killing of a large number of people.
Mass murder by individuals
Outside a political context, the term "mass murder" refers to the killing of several people at the same time or not at the
same time. Examples would include shooting several people in the course of a robbery, or setting a crowded nightclub on fire.
This is an ambiguous term, similar to serial killing and spree killing.
The USA Bureau of Justice
Statistics defines a mass murder as "[involving] the murder of four or more victims at one location, within one event."
[citation needed]
Mass murderers may fall into any of a number of categories, including killers of family, of coworkers, of students, and of
random strangers. Their motives may range from revenge to financial gain to religious fanaticism to mental illness.[citation needed] Many other motivations are
possible.
Workers who assault fellow employees are sometimes called "disgruntled workers," but this is often a misnomer, as many
perpetrators are ex-workers. They are dismissed from their jobs and subsequently turn up heavily armed and kill their
former colleagues. In the 1980s, when two fired postal workers carried out such massacres in separate incidents in the US, the
term "going postal" became synonymous with employees snapping and setting out on murderous
rampages. One of the 1980s most famous "disgruntled worker" cases involved computer programmer Richard Farley who, after being fired for stalking one of
his co-workers, a woman by the name of Laura Black, returned to his former workplace and shot to death seven of his colleagues,
although he failed in his attempt to kill Black herself.
In massacres by students, such as the Columbine High School Massacre
and the Virginia Tech massacre, alienated youth(s) rampage through their schools
killing fellow students and teachers alike before turning the guns on themselves.
There have also been mass killings that may have been unintended, at least in terms of formal premeditation to kill many
people. In 1990, Julio González set fire to a New York City nightclub after having a fight there with his girlfriend. Eighty-seven people died in the
blaze (Gonzalez's girlfriend survived).
Some financially-motivated mass-killings are either unintended, a result of a robbery going wrong, or are incidental to the
primary crime of theft. One of the most bizarre cases was that of Sadamichi Hirasawa,
who poisoned twelve bank workers by cyanide during a robbery.
Unlike serial killers, there is rarely a sexual motive to individual mass-murderers,
with the possible exception of Sylvestre Matuschka, an Austrian man who apparently
derived sexual pleasure from blowing up trains with dynamite, ideally with people in them. His lethal sexual fetish claimed 22
lives before he was caught in 1932.
According to Loren Coleman's book Copycat Effect, publicity about multiple deaths tends to provoke more, whether workplace or school shootings
or mass suicides.
Mass murder by terrorists
- See also: List of mass car bombings,
List of terrorist incidents, and Suicide bombings in Iraq since 2003.
In recent years, terrorists have performed acts of mass murder to intimidate a society and
draw attention to their causes. Examples of major terrorist incidents
involving mass murder include:
- August 20, 1929 - The
Hebron Massacre in Hebron, Israel - 67 killed
- July 22, 1946 King
David Hotel bombing in Jerusalem - 91 killed
- May 17, 1974 Dublin and Monaghan Bombings in Ireland - 35 killed
- March 11, 1978 Coastal Road massacre in Israel - 37 killed
- June 23, 1985 Air India
Flight 182 bombing over the Atlantic Ocean - 329 killed
- December 21, 1988 Pan
Am Flight 103 bombing over Scotland - 270 killed
- July 6, 1989 Tel Aviv Jerusalem bus 405 massacre in Israel - 14 killed
- March 12,1993 Bombay
bombings - 257 killed
- July 5, 1993 Basbaglar Massacre [1] in Turkey - 30 killed
- July 18, 1994 Jewish
center bombing in Argentina - 85 killed
- April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in the United States - 168
killed
- August 7, 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania - 224 killed
- August 15, 1998 Omagh
bombing in Northern Ireland- 29 killed
- September 11, 2001 attacks in the United
States - 2,973 killed
- March 27, 2002 Passover
massacre in Israel - 30 killed
- October 12, 2002 Bali
bombing in Indonesia - 202 killed
- March 2, 2004 Ashura massacre in Iraq - 170 killed
- 11 March 2004 Madrid train bombings in Spain - 191 killed
- August 24, 2004 Russian aircraft bombings in Russia- 89
killed
- September 4, 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis in Russia - 344 killed
- February 28, 2005 Al Hillah bombing in Iraq - 127 killed
- 7 July 2005 London bombings in England
- 52 killed
- 11 July 2006 Mumbai train bombings in India - 207 killed
- March 27, 2007 Tal Afar bombings and massacre in Iraq - 152 killed
According to unofficial sources: 67% of all Mass Murders are religious 20% are acts of terroism The remaining 13% are
undefined[citation needed].
Mass murder by a state
The concept of state-sponsored mass murder covers a range of potential killings. Some people consider any deaths in combat to
be mass murder by the state,[citation needed] though this is not a generally held position. Clear examples of
state-sponsored mass murder include:
- Genocide of a particular ethnic
or religious group, whether internal or external to the state, such as the debate over
Tibet, Armenian Genocide, The Holocaust
against the Jews, the Burundi Genocide, the
Rwandan Genocide, and the Darfur
conflict.
- Political mass murder or the killing of a particular political group within a country, such as Béla Kun's ethnic cleansing against Turkish and Crimean Tatars and other minorities in 1921-22, Stalin's
Great Purge, The Killing Fields of
Cambodia, or the Hama, Jallianwala Bagh,and Tlatelolco massacres.
- Deliberate massacres of captives during wartime by a state's military forces, such as the Katyn Forest Massacre of Polish citizens, the Nanjing Massacre during World War II, The Wounded Knee
Massacre by the U.S. 7th Cavalry.
More examples are:
- Mass killing of civilians during total war, especially via strategic bombing, such as the Blitz, the bombing of Dresden, or the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. According to the doctrine of
total war, civilians are legitimate military targets because they contribute to the war
effort.
- Actions in which the state caused the death of large numbers of people, which political
scientist R. J. Rummel calls "democide," which, in
addition to the cases above, may include man-made disasters caused by the state, such as the Holodomor in the Soviet Union, and the disastrous effects of the
Great Leap Forward in China.
Mass murder in warfare
During war, a military force commits mass murder when it wrongfully kills large numbers of
civilians or prisoners. Such wartime murder may be called a war crime, although it may also be genocide. Genocide is a form of mass murder that is
distinguished by the intent to destroy an ethnic, religious or national group, as in the The
Holocaust, the killings which occurred in the breakaway republics of the former Yugoslavia (e.g. Srebrenica
massacre), in the killing of the Pequot in colonial America, the killing of hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of
Hindu and Muslim Bengal is by
armed forces of Pakistan in 1971.
Mass murderers
- John D. Lee (Mountain Meadows
Massacre, southern Utah, 1857)
- John Filip Nordlund (Mass murder on the ferry Prins Carl, Sweden, killing 5 wounding 8, 1900)
- Simone Pianetti (Camerata Cornello,
Italy, 1915)
- Andrew Kehoe (Bath, Michigan, Blew up school,
killing 45 (mostly children), 1927)
- Mutsuo Toi (killed 30, Tsuyama massacre,
Okayama, Japan, 1938)
- Howard Unruh (Camden, New Jersey,
1949)
- Albert Guay (Canadian Pacific aircraft
bombing, killing 23, Canada, 1949)
- Tore Hedin (Hurva, Sweden, killed 9, 1952)
- Jack Gilbert Graham (bombed an aircraft taking off from Denver, Colorado, 1955)
- Edgar Ray Killen (Mississippi civil rights worker murders, June
21 1964)
- Charles Whitman (University of Texas
Shootings, Austin, Texas, August 1 1966)
- Harry Roberts (police killer, London, 1966)
- Richard Speck (murdered eight student nurses, Chicago, 1966)
- Victor Ernest Hoffman (Shell Lake
murders, Saskatchewan, Canada. August 15, 1967)
- John Linley Frazier (killed five, including four members of a family, in Santa Cruz, CA, 1970)
- John List (Westfield, New Jersey,
1971)
- Edward Charles Allaway (killer of 7 people at the library of California State University-Fullerton on July 12
1976)
- Jim Jones (Jonestown, Guyana) (909 people drank or were injected with Flavor-aid laced with
cyanide, 1978)
- Woo Bum-Kon (Gyeongsang-namdo,
South Korea, killing 57, 1982)
- Denis Lortie (National Assembly of
Quebec, May 8, 1984)
- James Oliver Huberty (McDonald's massacre, San Ysidro,
California, 18 July 1984)
- Jeremy Bamber (farmhouse family murders, Tolleshunt D'Arcy, Essex, England,
1985)
- Andrew Walker (killed 3 army colleagues, Scotland, 1985)
- Iñaki de Juana Chaos (Spain, 1985-1986)
- Patrick Sherrill (killed 14, then himself, Post Office, Edmond, Oklahoma 20 August,1986)
- David Burke, (PSA Flight 1771,
San Luis Obispo, California, 1987)
- Michael Ryan (Hungerford massacre,
Berkshire, UK, 1987)
- Ronald Gene Simmons (16 family members, Russelville,
Arkansas), 1987)
- David Brom (Killed four family members with an axe, 1988)
- Patrick Edward Purdy (Cleveland Elementary School
Shootings, Stockton, California, 17 January 1989)
- Jeffrey Don Lundgren (Kirtland Cult Killings,
April 17th, 1989)[1]
- Marc Lépine (École Polytechnique
Massacre, Montreal, Quebec, 1989)
- Julio González (87 people were killed, arsonist at Happy Land Social Club in the Bronx, NY, March,
1990)
- David Gray (Aramoana massacre
(Otago, New Zealand, 13 & 14 November 1990)
- George Jo Hennard (Luby's massacre,
Killeen, Texas, 1991)
- Juan Luna (Brown's Chicken
massacre, Palatine, Illinois, January 8, 1993)
- Kenneth French, Jr. (North Carolina,
USA, 1993)
- Colin Ferguson (Long Island Railroad
Massacre, Long Island, New York, USA, 1994)
- Mattias Flink (Falun, Sweden, killed 7, 1994)
- Baruch Goldstein (Hebron, West Bank 1994)
- Germain Nabeneza (Grande Montée, Réunion Island, France, killed 8, 1994)
- Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma, USA 1995)
- Thomas Hamilton (Dunblane massacre,
Dunblane, Scotland, 1996)
- Martin Bryant, killed 35, (Port
Arthur massacre, Australia, 1996)
- Mohammad Ahman al-Naziri (Sanaa
massacre, Sanaa, Yemen, 1997)
- Mitchell Johnson and Andrew
Golden (Jonesboro massacre, Jonesboro,
Arkansas, 1998)
- Matthew Beck (Newington, Connecticut, 1998)
(killed five at Connecticut Lottery Headquarters, Newington, Connecticut, 1998)
- Larry Gene Ashbrook (Wedgewood Baptist Church,
Fort Worth, Texas, USA, 1999)
- Susan Eubanks (Vista, California,
1999)
- Buford O. Furrow, Jr. (Los Angeles,
California, 1999)
- Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (Columbine High School Massacre, Littleton,
Colorado), 1999)
- Byran Uyesugi (Xerox Murders, Honolulu, Hawaii, 1999)
- Michael McDermott (Wakefield
Massacre, Edgewater Technologies, Wakefield,
Massachusetts, 2000)
- Dipendra of Nepal (Nepal, 2001)
- Mamoru Takuma (Osaka school massacre,
Osaka, Osaka, Japan, 2001)
- Robert Steinhäuser (Erfurt massacre,
Erfurt, Germany, 2002)
- Richard Durn (Nanterre massacre, Nanterre, France, March 26, 2002)
- Jeff Weise (Red Lake High School
massacre, Red Lake, Minnesota, 2005)
- Terry Ratzmann (Brookfield, Wisconsin,
killed 7, March 12, 2005)
- Kyle Huff (Capitol Hill
massacre, Seattle, Washington, March 25,
2006)
- Charles Carl Roberts IV (Amish School
Shooting, Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, October 2, 2006)
- Cho Seung-hui (Virginia Tech Massacre,
Blacksburg, Virginia, April 16, 2007)
- Nikola Radosavljevic (Jabukovac
massacre, Serbia, killed 9, July 27,
2007)
- Tyler Peterson (Crandon,
Wisconsin shooting, Crandon, Wisconsin, killed 6, October 7, 2007)
Mass murder cases not yet closed
These are mass murder incidents where the perpetrator(s) have not been determined or arrested, where one or more suspects has
been charged but not yet convicted.
See also
References
External links
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