The many frequencies of violence, By Hal M. Brown, MSW

Whether it is the man who shot Charlie Kirk or the person who shot the people at the Dallas ICE facility we do not know with certainty their exact motives. In instances like this partisans and others often jump to conclusions and sometimes attribute motives to advance their own political narratives. What should be incontrovertible is that in these cases and most others we don’t know precisely what was in the minds of those who decided to act on violent thoughts and impulses.

This is from Wikipedia (~here):

On October 4, 1986, while walking along Park Avenue to his New York apartment, Rather (those who don’t know who Dan Rather was click here) was attacked and punched from behind by a man who demanded to know “Kenneth, what is the frequency?” while a second assailant chased and beat him. As the assailant pummeled and kicked Rather, he kept repeating the question. In describing the incident, Rather said “I got mugged. Who understands these things? I didn’t and I don’t now. I didn’t make a lot of it at the time and I don’t now. I wish I knew who did it and why, but I have no idea.” Until the crime was solved years later, Rather’s description of the bizarre crime led some to doubt the veracity of his account, although the doorman and building supervisor who came to Rather’s aid fully confirmed his version of events

The answer came 10 years later:

In 1997, a TV critic writing in the New York Daily News solved the mystery, publishing a photo of the alleged assailant, William Tager, who received a 12.5-to-25-year prison sentence for killing NBC stagehand Campbell Montgomery outside The Today Show studio in 1994. Rather confirmed the story: “There’s no doubt in my mind that this is the person.” New York District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau said “William Tager’s identity as the man who attacked Mr. Rather was established in the course of an investigation by my office.”Tager claimed he thought television networks were beaming signals into his brain. When he murdered the stagehand, Tager was trying to force his way into an NBC studio with a weapon, to find out the frequency the networks were using to attack him, so that he could block it. Tager was paroled in October 2010.

My point in recounting this incident is that while we don’t always initially understand why people act violently, there’s always a reason, whether it is due to a brain tumor as was speculated in the case of mass murderer Charles Whitman (see article) or people being members of a death cult like the Manson family. Some people that commit violent crimes or engage in inhumane acts are mentally ill. There’s no one size fits all when it comes to explaining such behaviors. It is instructive to look, not at only medicine, psychiatry, and psychology, but also to social psychology (defintion) and sociology to understand why people participate in or condone violence.

The people who act violently usually aren’t going around shooting, stabbing, or mugging people. They can be like the ICE agent who felt he had every justification for throwing Kat Abughazleh to the ground (see article with video).

To understand man’s inhumanity to man for example, you can look to the social science experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram at Yale in the ealy 1960 (see Wiki article) or read “How The Milgram Experiment Showed That Anyone Could Be A Monster.”

Another experiment was Phillip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment where students played prison guards and they ended up being cruel, though not violent, to the other subjects who played the prisoners.

You can also look at the work of Daniel Goldhagen, a former associate professor of government and social studies at Harvard University turned author. He is best known for writing 1996’s “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” . In that book, to quote Wikipedia, he “posits that the vast majority of ordinary Germans were ‘willing executioners’ in the Holocaust because of a unique and virulent ‘eliminationist antisemitism’ in German identity that had developed in the preceding centuries.” He argued that this form of antisemitism was widespread in Germany and that it was unique to Germany. His conclusion is that because of this ordinary Germans willingly killed or informed on Jews. Wikipedia notes that “Goldhagen asserted that this mentality grew out of medieval attitudes with a religious basis, but was eventually secularized.

To understand why we have shootings in a country awash in guns we have to understand that, while there are outlier cases including those who, it seems every other day open fire on groups of people to psychopathic serial killers, the majority of violent acts are committed, dare I suggest “merely,” by those who lack a moral sensibility of what is right and wrong, and they believe that what they are doing advances a righteous cause. They are like the subjects in the Migram experiments and those described in Goldhagen’s book. They are,to put it succinctly

In both of my examples, for different reasons, the ordinary people who inflicted pain, or in the Milgram experiment thought that they were inflicting pain on people, believed they were doing it for the right reasons.

The fact is that much of humanity, has not evolved far enough to rise above the prejudices and pressures which lead people to say a clear and unambiguous “no” when an inner or outer voice tells them to harm someone.

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