Two more public massacres have occupied the news cycle in the three weeks since YouTube shooter Nasim Aghdam had her 15 minutes. This body camera footage of police interviewing her in her car where she’d been sleeping the night before she shot up the courtyard of YouTube is very interesting.
She shows zero evidence of the violence she would wreak the following day. The police are thorough in their questioning of her. They even ask her if she wants to hurt herself or hurt anybody else or commit suicide. There is nothing else they could have done to prevent her attack, let alone anticipate it.
Nasim was already at the point of no return and had probably had violent ideation for quite some time, according to the 12 steps outlined by leading forensic psychiatrist Dr. Michael Welner.
In Welner’s model, mass killing of all types is the endpoint of a clinical pathway involving a sequence of twelve steps. Clinical intervention to redirect the evolving homicidality of a prospective killer can occur at any time along this path until the end-stage.
1. Externalizing blame — it is always someone else’s fault when things don’t go well
2. High or patchy self-esteem — expectations of greatness
3. Poor characterological resilience — difficulty rebounding from adversity
4. Social rejection, particularly psychosexual rejection
5. Identification with potency of destructiveness—destruction force perceived as power
6. Identification with destructive icons
7. Isolation and psychosexual incompetence — with very few exceptions, solitary mass-murderers are heterosexual men
8. Identifying with alienation — embracing alienation in order to blame the rejecting outer world for failures
9. Failures mount to a degree that they predict further and future failure
10. Anger and alienation directed to destructive fantasy
11. Hopelessness inspires destructive alternative identity and a concrete plan
12. Investment in achieving the destructive mission — the ultimate ambition
Welner states, “In contemporary America and other fame-driven cultures, there is tremendous social incentive for alienated and violently-identified young males who have given up on achieving once-lofty ambition to opt for destructiveness. That incentive is created and perpetuated by 24-hour news media, which conveys a platform for mass killers to refashion themselves into icons for their ideological fellow travelers.”
He suggests that the social incentive to mass killing must be eliminated the same way that bigotry based on race and sexual orientation has been. In the West today, intolerance and insensitivity to such things has been systematically eradicated. He thinks until such forces are marshaled against ideological mass killers, the quest for spectacle through destructiveness will only worsen.
