There are many models that suggest the progression to acts of violence. The leakage of intent may be seen, such as pursuing the desire to learn online from others that have committed such crimes of infamy. Further, there is the study to obtain the means of mass murder. In the narrative navigation to violence, there are tipping points that need to be remembered if we are to prevent such heinous crimes.
First, there is the movement from simply wanting to kill yourself, hence being suicidal, to the decision to also take other lives that you blame on for your current emotional state. It could be a group such as women who, you have felt, have always rejected you, or it might be a religious group that you see is causing the sort of problems in the world that have interfered with your capacity for success. It might also be the group of people who have treated you with disdain. This theory is described by Dr. Frederic Wertham in 1937 and is referred to as “Catathymic Homicide”. Prevention involves intervening when the person is suicidal so this flip to deciding to harm others does not occur.
Secondly, this type of homicide occurs when an individual decides to make sure that the person that rejected him will not be able to form a relationship with anybody else as a penalty. This statement, “if I cannot have that person, then no one will be allowed to be seen”, is especially common in interpersonal violence.
Finally, I have seen in mothers that kill their children based on something called “the Golden fantasy”. One believes that in heaven no one could take her children away and they will be together forever. One mother who killed her four children and then shot herself wrote in her suicide note that she wanted the family to be buried in the same coffin, so they would be together forever. In some cases, there is a variant of this in the belief that death secures some form of permanent attachment. Hence, the person believes that the homicide will unite this killer and this rejecting individual in the history books forever.
Understanding the vicissitudes of broken attachments and the explosiveness of deferred dreams assists us in preventing the movement from fantasy to violent action. Part of the work of those of us who try to explain the inexplicable, is to understand these types narratives created by both the vengeful and the broken, so that we might intervene before the story line of destruction becomes a pyrrhic victory that only achieves suffering and death.