I bet you all heard about the Amish girls, and other things happened before that.


What drives those people to do such things? Have they no conscience, or?


Share what you think about it and explain why

I don't know if it's a matter of no conscience... although, I suppose that's a discussion of how to define that. "No conscience" strikes me as just a bit too subjective.

I truly think that most of these people are seriously miswired. Mental illness, something genetic, something learned through their parents or childhood experiences- something creates that kind of mentality. Somehow, their view of the world is skewing terribly off the mainstream.

What really annoys me, though, is that so many of these killers get described as "devoted fathers" (i.e. the Amish killer). It's like calling attention to the treatment of his own family is supposed to soften the reality of his violence.

That is almost like what happens with people who commit incest and get convicted. Sure I DO understand that they were almost certainly abused themselves, but.. in my eyes that is no excuse. Maybe I am "wired" differently, but I would try my hardest to prevent it from happening to my kids if it had happened to me.

Or maybe it is a "you have to have lived that to know it" kind of thing though.. in any case.. it almost always gets thrown on that to make it better.. somehow.

It just strikes me as sort of similar.

I think that is supposed to show surprise, not to soften the reality of his violence, like the neighbors who say about a guy who just committed mass murder "he was a nice and sweet guy", it's not meant to justify, it's meant to show how shock those people are that a seemingly normal and even nice person was able to do such thing (that's also a kind of excuse that they didn't "guessed" him and were not able to stop him somehow)

As for why, there are many things (Eadwine, you'll not get rid of my "depends" very soon), but the common thing is that those people don't think about people they kill as "people" they have an image about them as objects (objects of their revenge, object of abuse for pleasure, etc) they don't identify with them and they think about them in line of "strange people, what do I care about them?"