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Why do people do the things they do? Sometimes it’s not that difficult to understand a person’s motivation; A father may choose to work a second job, which may take him away from his family for long periods of time. He doesn’t want to be an absent father, but he believes that his actions will eventually benefit his family. He is motivated by his love for his wife and children. A mother may choose to forego buying herself new clothes or jewelry so that she can be sure her children have enough to eat, nice clothes, and toys. Her motivation is also her love of her family. But when it comes to people whose motivations are a mystery to us, it is always important to try and decipher their feelings so as to help them (or keep them from hurting anyone else).
What motivates certain people to kill? If we can answer that question, we may be able to identify such inclinations in others and so prevent them from acting out their anger. For surely it is anger that frequently leads to violence. A political assassin, for example, is typically infuriated by the way his country is being run by the current leaders. If there had been some way to know how outraged Lee Harvey Oswald was, or SirhanSirhan, or James Earl Ray, there might have been some way to prevent the deaths of John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. If only someone had been able to gain some insight into the workings of Timothy McVeigh’s maddened mind, the tragedy of Oklahoma City in 1995 might have been averted.
In other cases, it is not anger, necessarily, but more likely despair that motivates people to commit desperate acts. In 1995, Susan Smith was convicted of the unspeakable act of drowning her two young sons by rolling her car into a lake with them strapped inside. Later, authorities found out that she herself had had a terrible childhood (she was regularly molested by her stepfather) and twice had tried to commit suicide. If anyone could have understood this tormented woman’s mentality, those two little boys might have been saved.
It is easy to condemn a person for committing a despicable act. It is much harder to discover what their motivation was for acting in such a tragic way, but it is worth the effort.