Bloody murderers - mass murderers

National Review, June 3, 1996 by Eugene H. Methvin

Wagner died in an asylum 25 years later. He discussed openly and exhaustively every aspect of his life -- with one exception. He traced his crime back to one or more sodomistic acts which he would never describe, committed while teaching in the village; the psychiatrists wondered if these things had actually happened or were fantasy. Wagner convinced himself that the villagers knew about those acts, that they watched, mocked, and ridiculed him. He lived in such constant dread of arrest that he carried two loaded pistols on his wedding day in 1903.

In his new post he was respected as an outstanding educator, quiet and dignified. But he ''heard'' pointed remarks and convinced himself that the people of Muehlhausen somehow had told people in his new village of his shame. He developed his murderous plan three years after leaving Muehlhausen. In 1913 he interpreted an earthquake as a mystical sign that he must act.

What can ''the global village'' do about such ''weirdos'' and their media-borne psychological contagions? Very little.

The day after the Dunblane massacre, a member of the regional council, Anne Dickson, described how council members tried to get their ''weirdo'' removed from his boys' club, and how police investigations failed because no parent produced evidence that Hamilton had abused a child.

''We tried everything, every channel available to us,'' Mrs. Dickson said. ''But the police can do nothing unless there's a specific charge and you have proof.''

Exactly. As one FBI analyst points out, for every person who exhibits portentous paranoid warning signals and commits a massacre, thousands more exhibit them and do not. Millions of children have biograms virtually identical to those of the few who become mass killers. Here in this opaque fog beyond human knowledge or understanding lies that thing we call ''free will.'' Unless we are willing to turn ourselves into a police state, or until brain research provides more reliable early identification and preventive treatment, every weirdo with a will to act out his Samson fantasy gets one free massacre.

But we must keep our perspective in our struggle to defend freedom despite the random killers among us. Take the related subject of terrorism. Four bus bombings in Jerusalem killed 62 people, evoked world headlines, and produced an emergency conference of heads of state from Clinton to Yeltsin and just about everybody in between. Yet the death toll, horrible as it was, about equaled the monthly death toll from traffic accidents in Israel. Israelis accept more than seven hundred deaths yearly for the freedom of the automobile. Americans accept five hundred every Fourth of July holiday.

The standard work on the subject of paranoid schizophrenia -- The Paranoid, by David W. Swanson, Philip J. Bohnert, and Jackson A. Smith -- is devoted almost entirely to description and leaves the etiology of the disorder largely a mystery. But the good doctors offer some solid advice to the whole family of man: ''Effective methods of protecting society and government from the paranoid individual are lacking . . . Defensiveness must be avoided so that society does not become paranoid about the paranoid.''