"Hey, world, look at me! I'm a murderer!"

The guy who shot up the college in Oregon wrote this:

Quote :

I have noticed that so many people like him are all alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems the more people you kill, the more your’re in the limelight.

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Dylan said on the basement tapes that directors would be fighting to tell the NBK story. Both boys knew that their names would live on long after their bodies had rotted away.

Are all these guys who go on shooting sprees - Eric and Dylan among them - nothing more than pathetic attention whores? I mean, is that what all of this boils down to in the end? That's what the world thinks. We who have spent years of our lives studying these crimes like to say, "Hold on - there's more to it than that" ... but is there?

"I"m a nobody, but if I go and kill a bunch of folks, then I'm a somebody. Yeah, I end up dead, but isn't it better to be a dead somebody than a living nobody?"

You tell me.

Oh yeah Oregon shooting, was gonna ask aboiut him.

Yeah I think being an attention whore as you put it is not at all a rare thing for shooters, but doesn't seem to be present for each and every one. Maybe its just me (not like I did clinical tests on these people), but it seems that the ones who most seek fame and attention happen to be depressed and feel themselves to be losers. Cho would be the best example, but also Kimveer Gill or even Dylan.

I don;t see much in the way of fame-seeking as far the delusional (aka psychotic) shooters go - Carneal, Kinkel etc. Don't see much of that in the case of Jeff Weise either.

Psychopathic shooters are rare and it would be hard to judge by Eric and Breivik alone, but if we count in other spree killers (Hepnarova for example), then yeah - it seems that shooters who were likley psychopathic did have some thirst for fame.


Still, the next big question is: In the cases where we do see fame-seeking, was it the main or only motive? Certainly not in Eric's case. I'd argue that it was not the main motive in Cho's case either (mental ilness and resulting alienation and maladaptation of the shooter was imho).

The one guy that comes to mind for who it seems to have been clearly the main motive was Kimveer Gill and even in his case we do have evidence taht he suffered from depression.