Quote:
Originally Posted by afc wimbledon
The problem with these cases are they are utterly inexplicable, which tends to scare the bejusus out of us, fairly brutal and strange, which gets them a crap load of press and really really rare.
While this is going on we tend not to worry about the vastly higher rates of deaths by drunk driving or over prescription of pain killers or badly built cars.
And yes pretty much any utterly random gruesome murder where the offender appears to make no attempt to evade capture and appears to have little connection to the victim and nothing to gain is probably a psychotic break.
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This pretty much sums it up. The notion that some evil ####### stabbed a bunch of fellow-students to death at a party because he's an evil #######? Awful, but it fits into our understanding of the world. Evil ####### does evil things, we catch and punish him for being so evil. But an otherwise fairly normal young man rapidly descends into psychosis and brutally stabs five people to death more or less at random? That's horrifying. Horrifying in a way that we have no real narrative for. So we recoil from that horror and try to fit it into category A. Malevolence is easier to cope with than random madness.