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| It's all in the head |
| Anand Sankar / New Delhi Mar 15, 2009, 00:34 IST |
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Early testing for mental illnesses might help prevent campus killings.
Yet again, two incidents of gun crime made world headlines. One of the attacks was in Alabama, USA, and the other in a school near Stuttgart in Germany. While events like 26/11 have their own shock value, the shock is magnified when attacks such as these shatter the peace of small communities.
Eventually, the coverage and study of such incidents focuses on the mind of the attacker. These two attacks in particular have reignited the debate set off by incidents like the Columbine High School shootings in 1999 and the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007.
In the Alabama shootings, the man who killed 10 people before taking his own life, allegedly told friends in the days leading up the attack that he was “depressed and felt he was a failure”.
Michael McLendon spoke to friends about being upset that he had not achieved a career as a soldier or a police officer. Nine of the 10 victims were gunned down with a semi-automatic weapon, and the 10th victim was his own mother, who was set ablaze on a couch.
Europe considers itself more immune than the USA to gun crime, due to its strict gun laws. But recently, Finland too was rocked by a shooting.
In Stuttgart, meanwhile, a mental portrait has emerged of the baby-faced 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer. Investigators revealed he was a troubled, depressed teenager with easy access to an unsecured pistol. What is startling is that fact that he shot his former schoolmates point blank in the head and then walked over to the psychiatric clinic where he had discontinued treatment and shot two employees.
Searching Kretschmer’s bedroom, police found violent computer games, brutal videos and play weapons that fire small yellow pellets.
The two cases are intriguing because authorities were aware of the mental instabilities, but no one knew how to treat them. Kretschmer is said to have posted his plans in an Internet chatroom.
Authorities in both countries have said there are times when “someone slips through the net”. The call for prevention has triggered concerns about how people who might harbour no obvious murderous intentions might be profiled mentally and forced into therapy. Clearly, preventing such future incidents will be a challenge for police as well as mental health professionals.
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