Mass murder

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Mass murder

Mass murder is the act of murder

Murder

Murder as defined in common law countries, is the unlawful killing of another human being with intent , and generally this state of mind distinguishes murder from other forms of unlawful homicide....
ing a large number of people, typically at the same time or over a relatively short period of time. Mass murder may be committed by individuals or organizations. Mass murder is also defined to be intentional and indiscriminate murder of large number of people by government agents. Examples are shooting of unarmed protestors, carpet bombing

Carpet bombing

Carpet bombing refers to the tactical bombing of a strategic area usually by the use of large numbers of unguided gravity bombs, often with a high proportion of incendiary devices....
of cities, lobbing of grenades into prison cells and random execution of civilians.

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Encyclopedia

Mass murder is the act of murder

Murder

Carpet bombing

Spree killer

A spree killer, also known as a rampage killer, is someone who embarks on a murderous assault on his victims in a short time in multiple locations....
s, who stage a single assault on their victims. The largest mass killings in history have been attempts to exterminate entire groups or communities of people, often on the basis of ethnicity or religion. Some of these mass murders have been found to be genocide

Genocide

Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.While precise genocide definitions, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide ....
s and others to be crimes against humanity, but often such crimes have led to few or no convictions of any type.

Mass murder by a state

The concept of state-sponsored mass murder covers a range of potential killings. It is defined to be the intentional and indiscriminate murder of a large number of people by government agents. Examples are shooting of unarmed protestors, carpet bombing of cities, lobbing of grenades into prison cells and random execution of civilians. Other examples of state-sponsored mass murder include:

Genocide
Genocide

Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.While precise genocide definitions, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide ....
is the deliberate and systematic destruction of an ethnic, religious or national group. While precise definition varies among genocide scholars
Genocide definitions

This is a list of scholarly and international legal definitions of genocide, a word coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944. While there are various definitions of the term, it should be noted that that almost all international bodies of law officially adjudicate the crime of genocide pursuant to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crim...
, the legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations
United Nations

The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are to facilitate cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, Social change, human rights and achieving world peace....
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948 and came into effect in January 1951....
(CPPCG). Since the CPPCG went into effect in 1951 there have been two genocides found to be so in international courts these were the Srebrenica genocide and the Rwandan Genocide
Rwandan Genocide

The Rwandan Genocide was the 1994 mass killing of hundreds of thousands of Rwanda's Tutsis and Hutu political moderates by Hutus under the Hutu Power ideology....
(see International prosecution of genocide
Genocide

Genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group.While precise genocide definitions, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide ....
. There have been a number of other convictions for genocide under municipal laws
Genocide under municipal laws

The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide came into effect in January 1951. Article 5, 6 and 7 of the CPPCG cover obligations that sovereign states that are parties to the convention must undertake to enact:...
, and a number of genocides in history
Genocides in history

Genocide is the mass killing of a group of people. It is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnicity, Race or religion group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodil...
– such as the Holocaust
The Holocaust

The Holocaust , also known as , Churben is the term generally used to describe the genocide of approximately six million European Jews during World War II, as part of a program of deliberate extermination planned and executed by Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler....
– are widely seen as genocides, but occurred before the universal acceptance of international law
International law

Public international law concerns the structure and conduct of states and intergovernmental organizations. To a lesser degree, international law also may affect multinational corporations and individuals, an impact increasingly evolving beyond domestic legal interpretation and enforcement....
s defining and forbidding genocide was achieved in 1948, so those criminals who were convicted of taking part in these historical genocides were found guilty of crimes against humanity and other more specific crimes like murder.
Political mass murder or the killing of a particular political group within a country, such as Béla Kun
Béla Kun

B?la Kun , born B?la Kohn, was a Hungarian Communist politician who ruled Hungary as leader of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919....
's ethnic cleansing
Ethnic cleansing

Ethnic cleansing is a euphemism referring to the persecution through imprisonment, expulsion, or killing of members of an ethnic minority by a majority to achieve ethnic homogeneity in majority-controlled territory....
against Turkish and Crimean Tatars
Crimean Tatars

Crimean Tatars or Crimeans are a Turkic peoples ethnic group originally residing in Crimea. They speak the Crimean Tatar language. They are not to be confused with the Volga Tatars....
and other minorities in 1921-22, Lenin's "Red Terror
Red Terror

The Red Terror in Soviet Russia was the campaign of mass arrests and executions conducted by the Bolshevik government. In Soviet historiography, the Red Terror is described as officially announced on September 2, 1918 by Yakov Sverdlov and ended in about October 1918....
," Stalin's Great Purge
Great Purge

Great Purge was a series of campaigns of political repression and persecution in the Soviet Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin in 1936-1938. Also described as a "Soviet holocaust" by several authors, it involved the purge of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, repression of kulaks, Red Army leadership, and the persecution of unaffiliat...
, Mao
Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong was a China military and politics dictator. Mao led the Communist Party of China to victory against the Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War, and was the leader of the People?s Republic of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976....
's "suppression of counterrevolutionaries,"
Mao Zedong

Mao Zedong was a China military and politics dictator. Mao led the Communist Party of China to victory against the Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War, and was the leader of the People?s Republic of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976....
Pol Pot
Pol Pot

Saloth Sar , widely known as Pol Pot, was the leader of the Cambodian communist movement known as the Khmer Rouge and was Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea from 1976–1979....
's Killing Fields
The Killing Fields

The Killing Fields were a number of sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried by the totalitarian communist Khmer Rouge regime, during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979 ....
, massacres at the partition of India
Partition of India

File:Brit IndianEmpireReligions3.jpgThe Partition of India was the Partition of British India that led to the creation, on August 14, 1947 and August 15, 1947, respectively, of the Sovereignty states of the Dominion of Pakistan and the Union of India ....
, or the Hama
Hama massacre

The Hama massacre occurred on February 2, 1982, when the Syrian army bombarded the town of Hama in order to quell a revolt by the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood....
, Jallianwala Bagh
Jallianwala Bagh massacre

The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre , alternatively known as the Amritsar Massacre, was named after the Jallianwala Bagh in the northern Indian city of Amritsar where, on April 13, 1919, while doing a peaceful demonstration on occasion of Punjabi New Year, British Indian Army soldiers under the command of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer open...
, and Tlatelolco
Tlatelolco massacre

The Tlatelolco Massacre, also known as The Night of Tlatelolco , took place during the afternoon and night of October 2, 1968, in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco section of Mexico City....
massacres,
Deliberate massacres of captives during wartime by a state's military forces, such as these committed by the Empire of Japan
Empire of Japan

The Empire of Japan was a Japanese political entity that existed during the period from the Meiji Restoration in 1868 until its defeat in World War II in 1945....
, the Soviet Union
Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a Constitution of the Soviet Union socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.The name is a translation of the , romanization of Russian Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated ????, SSSR....
and Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany

Nazi Germany and the Third Reich are the colloquial English names for Germany under the regime of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party , which established a Totalitarianism dictatorship that existed from 1933 to 1945....
during the Second Sino-Japanese War
Second Sino-Japanese War

The Second Sino-Japanese War was the largest Asian war in the twentieth century. From 1937 to 1941, it was fought between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan....
and World War II
World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global military conflict which involved a Participants in World War II, including all of the great powers, organised into two opposing military alliances: the Allies of World War II and the Axis powers....
: the Nanjing Massacre, the Katyn Forest Massacre of Polish
Poles

The Polish people, or Poles , are a West Slavs ethnic group of Central Europe, living predominantly in Poland. Poles are sometimes defined as people who share a common Polish culture and are of Polish descent....
citizens in 1940 and the massacres of political prisoners after the launch of Operation Barbarossa
Operation Barbarossa

Operation Barbarossa was the code name for Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that commenced on 22 June 1941. Over 4.5 million troops of the Axis powers invaded the USSR along a 2,900 kilometer front ....
, the Three Alls Policy
Three Alls Policy

The Three Alls Policy was a Japanese scorched earth policy adopted in China during World War II, the three alls being: "Kill All", "Burn All" and "Loot All"....
and the massacre of Soviet Jews
History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union

The vast territories of the Russian Empire at one time hosted the largest Jewish diaspora in the world. Within these territories the Jewish community flourished and developed many of modern Judaism's most distinctive theological and cultural traditions, while also facing periods of intense antisemitism discriminatory policies and persecutions....
at Babi Yar
Babi Yar

Babi Yar is a ravine in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. It is located at the juncture of today's Kurenivka, Lukianivka and Syrets subdivisions of Kiev, between Frunze, Melnykov and Olena Teliha streets and St....
.
Mass killing of civilians during total war
Total war

Total war is a war of unlimited scope in which a belligerent engages in a mobilization of all available Factors of productions at their disposal, whether human, industrial, agricultural, military, natural, technological, or otherwise, in order to entirely destroy or render beyond use their rival's capacity to continue resistance....
, especially via strategic bombing
Strategic bombing

Strategic bombing is a military strategy used in a total war with the goal of defeating an enemy nation-state by destroying its economic ability to wage war rather than destroying its land or naval forces....
, such as the Bombing of Chongqing
Bombing of Chongqing

The bombing of Chongqing was part of an Imperial Japanese Army Air Service and Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service terror bombing operation on the China provisional capital of Chongqing authorized by the Imperial General Headquarters....
, the Blitz
The Blitz

The Blitz was the sustained bombing of United Kingdom by Nazi Germany between 7 September 1940 and 10 May 1941, in World War II. While the "Blitz" hit many towns and cities across the country, it began with the bombing of London for 57 consecutive nights ....
, the bombing of Dresden
Bombing of Dresden in World War II

The Bombing of Dresden by the British Royal Air Force and United States Army Air Force between 13 February and 15 February 1945, 12 weeks before the German Instrument of Surrender of the Armed Forces of Nazi Germany, remains one of the most controversial Allied actions of the World War II....
and Hamburg
Bombing of Hamburg in World War II

The large port city of Hamburg, Germany, was very heavily bombed many times by the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Forces during World War II....
, or the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuclear warfares near the end of World War II against the Empire of Japan by the United States at the executive order of President of the United States Harry S....
.
Actions in which the state caused the death of large numbers of people, which political scientist
Political science

Political science is a social science concerned with the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behavior....
R. J. Rummel
R. J. Rummel

Rudolph Joseph Rummel is professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii. He has spent his career assembling data on collective violence and war with a view toward helping their resolution or elimination....
calls "democide
Democide

Democide is a term coined by political scientist R. J. Rummel for "the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder." Rummel created the term as an extended concept to include forms of government murder that are not covered by the legal definition of genocide, and it has found currency among...
," which, in addition to the cases above, may include man-made disasters caused by the state, such as the Holodomor
Holodomor

The Holodomor refers to the famine of 1932?1933 in the Ukrainian SSR during which millions of people were starved to death because of the Soviet policies that forced farmers into Collectivization in the Soviet Unions....
in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a Constitution of the Soviet Union socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.The name is a translation of the , romanization of Russian Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated ????, SSSR....
, and the disastrous effects of the Great Leap Forward
Great Leap Forward

The Great Leap Forward of the People's Republic of China was an economic and social plan used from 1958 to 1961 which aimed to use China's vast population to rapidly transform China from a primarily agrarian economy dominated by peasant farmers into a modern, agriculturalized and industrialized communist society....
and the Cultural Revolution
Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in the People?s Republic of China was a period of widespread social and political upheaval that led to nation-wide chaos and economic disarray, which would engulf much of Chinese society between 1966 and 1976....
in the People's Republic of China
People's Republic of China

The People's Republic of China , commonly known as China, is the largest country in East Asia and the List of countries by population in the world with over 1.3 billion people, approximately a fifth of the world's population....
.

For further historical examples of mass murder, both state-committed and in wartime, see here

Violence

Violence is the expression of physical force against self or other, compelling action against one's will on pain of being hurt. Variant uses of the term refer to the destruction of non-living objects ....
.

Mass murder by individuals

The term "mass murder" refers to the killing of four or more people during a particular event. Examples would include killing several people in the course of a robbery, or setting a crowded nightclub on fire where four or more deaths occur. Two of the first mass murderers in modern American times were Richard Speck

Richard Speck

Richard Franklin Speck was a mass murderer who systematically killed eight student nurses from South Chicago Community Hospital in Chicago, Illinois on July 14, 1966....
and Charles Whitman

Charles Whitman

Charles Joseph Whitman was a student at the University of Texas at Austin who killed 14 people and wounded 32 others during a shooting rampage on and around the campus of the University of Texas at Austin....
.

Mass murderers may fall into any of a number of categories, including killers of family, of coworkers, of students, and of random strangers. Their motives for murder vary. Many other motivations are possible, including the need for attention or fame .

Workers who assault fellow employees are sometimes called "disgruntled workers," but this is often a misnomer, as many perpetrators are ex-workers. They are dismissed from their jobs and subsequently turn up heavily armed and kill their former colleagues. In the 1980s, when two fired postal workers carried out such massacres in separate incidents in the US, the term "going postal

Going postal

Going postal is an American English slang term, used as a verb meaning to suddenly become extremely and uncontrollably angry, possibly to the point of violence....
" became synonymous with employees snapping and setting out on murderous rampages. One of the 1980s most famous "disgruntled worker" cases involved computer programmer

Programmer

A programmer is someone who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software....
Richard Farley

Richard Farley

Richard Wade Farley is an United States convicted mass murderer. A former employee of Electromagnetic Systems Labs in Sunnyvale, California, he stalking co-worker Laura Black for four years beginning in 1984....
who, after being fired for stalking one of his co-workers, a woman by the name of Laura Black, returned to his former workplace and shot to death seven of his colleagues, although he failed in his attempt to kill Black herself.

In some rare cases mass murders have been committed during prison riots and uprisings. During the February, 1980 New Mexico State Penitentiary riot

New Mexico State Penitentiary Riot

The New Mexico Penitentiary Riot, which took place on February 2 and February 3 1980 in the state's Penitentiary of New Mexico south of Santa Fe, New Mexico, was one of the most violent prison riots in the history of the American correctional system: 33 inmates died and more than 200 inmates were treated for injuries....
, 33 inmates were killed. Most of the dead, 23, lived in the Protective Custody Unit, and were killed by other inmates using knives, axes and being burnt alive over a 48-hour period.

Unlike serial killers, there is rarely a sexual motive to individual mass-murderers, with the possible exception of Sylvestre Matuschka

Sylvestre Matuschka

Sylvestre Matuschka , a former officer in the Austria-Hungary army, was arrested in October 1931 and charged with arranging the derailment of several trains....
, an Austrian man who apparently derived sexual pleasure from blowing up trains with dynamite, ideally with people in them. His lethal sexual fetish claimed 22 lives before he was caught in 1932.

According to Loren Coleman's book Copycat Effect, publicity about multiple deaths tends to provoke more, whether workplace or school shootings or mass suicides.

Mass murder by terrorists

.

In recent years, terrorists

Terrorism

Terrorism, according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, is the systematic use of terror, "violent or destructive acts committed by groups in order to intimidate a population or government into granting their demands." At present, there is no internationally agreed upon definition of terrorism....
have performed acts of mass murder to intimidate a society and draw attention to their causes. Examples of major terrorist incidents involving mass murder of more than 100 individual include:

June 23, 1985: Air India Flight 182
Air India Flight 182

Air India Flight 182 was an Air India flight operating on the Toronto-Montr?al-London-Delhi-Bombay route. On 23 June 1985 the Boeing 747#747-200 operating on the route was blown up in midair by a bomb in Irish airspace in the single deadliest terrorist attack involving an aircraft to that date....
bombing over the Atlantic Ocean
Atlantic Ocean

The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's oceanic divisions; with a total area of about 106.4 million square kilometres . It covers approximately one-fifth of the Earth's surface....
- 329 killed
December 21, 1988: Pan Am Flight 103
Pan Am Flight 103

Pan Am Flight 103 was Pan American World Airways' third daily scheduled transatlantic flight from London's Heathrow International Airport to New York's John F....
bombing over Scotland
Scotland

conventional_long_name = ScotlandAlba|common_name= Scotland|image_flag = Flag of Scotland.svg|flag_width = 130px...
- 270 killed
March 12, 1993: Bombay bombings - 257 killed
April 19, 1995: Oklahoma City bombing
Oklahoma City bombing

The Oklahoma City bombing was a domestic List of terrorist incidents on April 19, 1995 aimed at the Federal government of the United States in which the Alfred P....
in the United States
United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
- 168 killed
August 7, 1998: U.S. embassy bombings
1998 United States embassy bombings

In the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings , hundreds of people were killed in simultaneous car bomb explosions at the United States embassy in the East African capital cities of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya....
in Kenya and Tanzania - 224 killed
September 11, 2001: September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States
United States

The United States of America is a Federal government constitutional republic comprising U.S. state and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its Contiguous United States and Washington, D.C., the Capital districts and territories, lie between the Pacific Ocean and Atlantic Oceans, Borders of the U...
- 2,998 killed
October 12, 2002: Bali bombing
2002 Bali bombing

The 2002 Bali bombings occurred on 12 October 2002 in the tourist district of Kuta on the Indonesian island of Bali. The attack was the deadliest act of terrorism in the history of Indonesia, killing 202 people, 164 of whom were foreign nationals, and 38 Indonesian citizens....
in Indonesia
Indonesia

The Republic of Indonesia , is a transcontinental country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Comprising Islands of Indonesia, it is the world's largest Archipelago state....
- 202 killed
March 2, 2004: Ashura massacre
Ashura massacre

The Ashura massacre of March 2, 2004 in Iraq was a series of planned terrorism explosions that killed at least 178 and injured at least 500 Iraqi Shi'a Muslims commemorating the Day of Ashura....
in Iraq
Iraq

Iraq , officially the Republic of Iraq , is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros Mountains, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....
- 170 killed
March 11, 2004: Madrid train bombings in Spain
Spain

Spain or the Kingdom of Spain , is a country located in Southern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula.The Spanish constitution does not establish any official denomination of the country, even though Espa?a , Estado espa?ol and Naci?n espa?ola are used interchangeably....
- 191 killed
September 4, 2004: Beslan school hostage crisis
Beslan school hostage crisis

The Beslan school hostage crisis began when a group of armed terrorists, demanding an end to the Second Chechen War, took more than 1,100 people hostage on September 1, 2004, at School Number One in the town of Beslan, North Ossetia-Alania, an autonomous republic in the North Caucasus region of the Russian Federation....
in Russia
Russia

Russia , or the Russian Federation , is a list of countries spanning more than one continent country extending over much of northern Eurasia....
- 344 killed
February 28, 2005: Al Hillah bombing
2005 Al Hillah bombing

The 2005 Al Hillah bombing killed 127 people on February 28, 2005 in Al Hillah, Iraq.A suicide bomber drove an explosive-laden vehicle into a line of people queueing outside a police recruiting centre and exploded it, killing 127 people and injuring hundreds more....
in Iraq - 127 killed
July 7, 2005 - 2005 London Bombings in London, England - 52 killed
July 11, 2006: Mumbai train bombings in India
India

India, officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and outlying territories by total area country by geographical area, the List of countries by population country, and the most populous liberal democracy in the world....
- 207 killed
March 27, 2007: Tal Afar bombings and massacre
2007 Tal Afar bombings and massacre

The 2007 Tal Afar bombings took place on March 27, 2007, when two truck bombs targeted Shia areas of the town of Tal Afar, Iraq, killing 152 and wounding 347 people....
in Iraq - 152 killed
August 14, 2007: Yazidi communities bombings
2007 Yazidi communities bombings

__NOEDITSECTION__The 2007 Yazidi communities bombings occurred at around 8pm local time on August 14, 2007, when four co-ordinated suicide attack attacks detonated in the Iraqi towns of Qahtaniya and Jazeera , near Mosul....
in Iraq - 796 killed
November 26-28, 2008 - 2008 Mumbai attacks
2008 Mumbai attacks

The 2008 Mumbai attacks were more than ten coordinated shooting and bombing terrorist attacks across Mumbai, India's financial capital and its largest city....
in India
India

India, officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and outlying territories by total area country by geographical area, the List of countries by population country, and the most populous liberal democracy in the world....
- 185 killed

Mass murder

Mass murder by a state

Mass murder by individuals

Mass murder by terrorists

See also

External links