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mass murderer


n.
  1. A person, especially a political or military leader, who is responsible for the deaths of many individuals.
    1. A person who kills several or numerous victims in a single incident.
    2. A serial killer.

 
 
WordNet: mass murder
Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: the savage and excessive killing of many people
  Synonyms: slaughter, massacre, carnage, butchery


 
Wikipedia: mass murder
This article deals with mass killings that are not considered genocide.
Homicide
Murder

Assassination
Child murder
Consensual homicide
Contract killing
Felony murder
Honor killing
Human sacrifice
Lust murder
Lynching
Mass murder
Murder-suicide
Negligent homicide
Proxy murder
Ritual murder
Serial killer
Spree killer
Torture murder
Vehicular homicide

Manslaughter

In English law

Non-criminal homicide

Justifiable homicide
Capital punishment

Other types of homicide

Democide
Familicide
Femicide
Feticide
Filicide
Fratricide
Gendercide
Genocide
Infanticide
Mariticide
Matricide
Parricide
Patricide
Prolicide
Sororicide
Suicide
Regicide
Tyrannicide
Uxoricide
Vivicide

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:

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:

More examples are:

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

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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Copyrights:

Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
WordNet. WordNet 1.7.1 Copyright © 2001 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Mass murder" Read more

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