Quote:
Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
Humans are violent. But murdering multiple people at close range is not something that comes easily. Soldiers and police have to be trained to fire to kill, and even in combat a great many soldiers can't pull the trigger. Most humans have strong innate barriers against killing, especially killing strangers up close. The ones who don't are sociopaths.
I'm not saying someone who fires dozens of rounds into helpless strangers is without any doubt mentally ill. But the odds are pretty good that he's not wired right.
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I don't really want to derail the thread Cliff, but it seems to be already there. But I would argue that the ability to kill and kill easily is an innate part of human nature. Its just there.
Training a soldier to kill isn't about creating a new and violent persona of a person, its about making them ask the question, if need be can I kill. Usually the answer is yes, its not a reconditioning its an accepting of the cost of an action.
If you had to force recondition every soldier, all of the scientists at the manhatten project and the soldiers for example that participated in the rape of Nanking to kill or brutalize or mass murder then you'd have an argument that you need to create a condition of basically mental illness to carry out these acts.
I firmly believe that every person has a violent monster somewhere in their head just in case we ever need it, but we've put this thin layer of civilization over it in the last few thousand years to make the use of that monster unacceptable by creating laws and social conditions. But its there.
I would be willing to bet that this goof knew that what he was doing wasn't right by societal norms, but frankly he didn't care because of his level of hatered or shame that might have been created or pushed by someone else, to me that's a rational mind. I don't think he had voices in his head telling him to kill, or he saw his victims as werewolves or vampires which made a self created threat.
He just hated, for whatever reason he just hated, and he let that monster that's in all our heads out, and probably enjoyed doing it. That to me makes him not mentally ill.
Like I said I feel sorry for people with real mental illnesses that look at people easily attaching that label to this piece of garbage, because why would you want to come forward and have people think, hey maybe he's one small step from being a mass murderer.