The Mystery of the Lone Wolf Killer

by Unni Turrettini

  The article, written by contributing editor Janet Reitman and titled “Jahar’s World,” is a well-crafted piece that takes the reader into Jahar’s family and how they began as assisted immigrants, father, mother, two sons, and two daughters, living in a small apartment at 410 Norfolk Street in Cambridge.

  Early on, it seems the brothers, especially Jahar, had found a real home.

  Reitman wrote at the end of her article how different the family unit had become. “It’s hard to understand how there could be such disassociation in that child,” said Larry Aaronson, a former teacher at Cambridge Rindge high school, who had taken pictures of Dzhokhar wrestling. He was stunned when he learned about what had really been going on. “They supposedly had an arsenal in that fucking house! In the house! I mean, he could have blown up my whole block, for God’s sakes.”

  According to the indictment, the brothers went to a firing range on March 20, 2013 where Jahar rented two 9-mm handguns, purchased two hundred rounds of ammunition, and engaged in target practice with Tamerlan. On April 5, Tamerlan went online to order electronic components that could be used in making Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). Jahar’s friends would later tell the FBI that he had once mentioned that he knew how to build bombs. But no one seemed to really take his claims all that seriously.

  “People come into your life to help you, hurt you, love you and leave you and that shapes your character and the person you were meant to be,” Jahar tweeted on March 18.

  Two days later: “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.”

  April 7: “If you have the knowledge and the inspiration all that’s left is to take action.”

  April 11: “Most of you are conditioned by the media.”

  Four days later, the bombs went off.

  Dr. Puckett indicated a post on Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s Facebook page: “I do not have a single American friend.”

  He didn’t say that in triumph, Dr. Puckett pointed out. “No, he said it in the ongoing consternation he was feeling. The extremist ideology gave him something he wasn’t getting any other place. What you see are repeated attempts at connection. McVeigh repeatedly tried. He was known as a weirdo, as was Breivik.”

  “A DANGEROUS EXAMPLE”

  Shortly after the Boston Marathon bombings, former White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke gave a warning, in which he pointed out how the most dangerous impact of the Boston bombings could be repeated by radical copycats. “Now that people have seen what two men can do with easily obtainable materials—close down a city, get the President of the United States to show up,” Clarke said on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, “other people around the country who have been radicalized have watched this, and they’re going to wonder, is there a way now that I can do this?”

  Clarke said the events in Boston provided a dangerous example for “self-radicalized” extremists, who may have previously thought carrying out such an act was too difficult to attempt alone.

  We are now dealing with a different type of copycat than ever before. Clarke and other advisers on radical racism point to some facts that changed the dynamics in the Tsarnaev family before the brothers changed drastically from being fairly well assimilated with their American peers. Their father, a former bookstore owner, had become disenchanted with his auto-mechanic job. Blaming customer prejudice and the bad economy in the United States, he left for his home country to stockpile some money. Their mother lost her job as a hairdresser and was arrested for shoplifting. The two sisters had entered into disastrous arranged marriages. Tamerlan had married an American woman, had a child, but he was starting to fall apart. His dream of becoming a U.S. Olympic boxing champion would never be realized due to a new Olympic committee rule stating that he must be an American citizen to compete. He became immersed in the Koran and tried to get his mother, sisters, and brother to join him in praying at the local mosque.

  Then the family’s government funding ran out. No more cash vouchers, and no more food stamps. The mother left to join her husband across the Atlantic. Dzhokhar had used up his $2,500 college scholarship and was selling marijuana on campus to make ends meet. His close friends began to wonder what had happened to their “cool” buddy. Many remarked to investigators later how much he had latched on to his brother, the “intense” one. The metamorphosis was then complete. Left alone to serve his older brother, he set out to blow up as much of his world as possible. The question now remains, how many more Jahars are out there?

  Poverty is a strong motivator, and so is feeling powerless. Indeed, that helpless feeling of having no way out, no way to change one’s circumstances, is a major ingredient in the lethal cocktail that can lead to the creation of a mass murderer or a lone wolf killer. That is why Anders Breivik is such a perfect example. Being raised in Norway, land of the Law of Jante, he was taught from an early age that he didn’t matter. Yet, unlike other Norwegian children who accepted their fate, or fewer children who left it and their country of birth behind, Breivik raged in silence, unable to find an outlet or anyone he felt would listen. So he turned to an extremist ideology. And then he struck.

  How many more, in how many other countries, will follow his path or a similar path? And how can we detect them before they do?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  GUN LEGISLATION:

  AN INADEQUATE PREVENTIVE

  You can’t really allow yourself to be stopped by any of them as it will lead to your collective death. You will do anything to put out that fire despite of [sic] the fact that they are trying to stop you. Anything else would be illogical.

  —ANDERS BREIVIK MANIFESTO

  The murders of July 22, 2011 would not have been prevented with stricter gun legislation. The heavily emotional and financed gun-control debate distracts focus from the real issues. When many people are murdered and injured in one day by one perpetrator, citizens naturally seek something to blame, and the weapon is the first suspect. Yet there is no logical connection between removing access to guns and removing the problem.

  These tragedies sadly cannot be prevented that easily. The lone wolf will find any way to unleash his wrath; with new technology, the possibilities for disaster are endless.

  Both sides of the debate, however, share one goal. They want to save lives. They can accomplish that only when they understand the killers and look at the true elements contributing to their crimes. Gun legislation would not have stopped the Boston bombers. Nor will it stop the next McVeigh, regardless of where he lives. More than a problem of laws and control, it is a problem of visibility, a question of paying attention to that odd young man who can’t seem to fit in anywhere. While there are many issues pertaining to gun control in the United States that could doubtless be improved upon, it will not specifically prevent men like McVeigh or Breivik from attacking.

  Norway has one of the toughest firearm laws in the world. Traditionally a country of farmers and hunters, it allows shotguns and rifles to be purchased with a license. Storage and transportation of guns are strictly regulated, and no one—even police officers, unless they’re on a specific mission—is allowed to carry handguns, concealed or not. Some types of guns, such as automatic weapons and big handguns, are outlawed. Norway, along with most European countries, is the ideal society that many in the United States and elsewhere long for.

  This did not prevent Breivik from legally obtaining the weapons for his attack in 2011. With his hunting license and by his membership in a pistol club, he easily got the necessary approval. The new type of mass murderer does not have a criminal record. He is intelligent and appears as normal as everybody else, and even small warning signs slip by until it is too late. He can speak for himself and even appears sympathetic and trustworthy. He is meticulous and takes his time to plan.

  This type of killer is not restricted to one type of weapon. Breivik managed to produce a powerful car bomb similar to McVeigh’s that could have killed hundreds more had he been able to park where he had planned to, or if he had exploded i
t earlier that day when more people were at work. With his farm as cover, he ordered huge amounts of fertilizer and chemicals used in agriculture or, in his case, to produce a bomb.

  The Columbine killers had planned to bomb the school and take out more than five hundred people. The Columbine High School massacre is still the deadliest mass murder committed on an American high school campus, and it is noted as one of the first and most serious of a series of high school shootings. Both Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold wanted to commit suicide and top McVeigh’s bombing in Oklahoma. Had their bombs not failed, they would have succeeded. Their attack with guns was Plan B.

  When something as tragic as the shootings in December 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School occurs, it is easy to blame the weapon that caused so many deaths, especially as Adam Lanza had stolen his mother’s weapons. Most Europeans believe that American culture and attachment to guns are part of the problem. If Lanza hadn’t had access to guns, some people reason, the lives of the twenty children between the ages of six and seven would have been spared. This argument is only partly correct. Lanza’s psychology was so warped, he would likely have turned to a bomb, like Breivik did, someone Lanza admired.

  Study these different killers, and patterns begin to emerge, regardless of culture or country. Mass shootings in Europe usually have many more victims than in the United States. In countries such as Norway with strict gun control, killers like Breivik still easily obtained guns legally. Because the targets were unprotected and vulnerable, and because none of the bystanders carried guns, the ramifications of the massacre were much greater. Anders Breivik would not have been allowed to walk around, in a calm and systematic manner, and shoot sixty-nine young adults on the island for approximately ninety minutes if someone on that island other than the killer had had a gun. In the United States, a mass shooter is usually shot down or apprehended after a few seconds or minutes. In Europe, the killer has more time to accomplish his mission before he is stopped.

  Criminals with guns, even mass murderers, are deterred from killing if a policeman or a bystander also brandishes a gun. If they are insane (or suicidal) enough not to be deterred, they are shot down quickly.

  Killers act rationally: they will go for the easy targets, those who cannot defend themselves. As soon as they are confronted by armed law enforcement or armed citizens, they usually try to escape, surrender, or commit suicide.

  Most gun owners are law-abiding citizens, and statistics prove that their guns will rarely be used to harm anyone. Allowing them to carry concealed guns has a deterring effect on criminals. Some believe it actually reduces crime, and that they and not the killers will be the ones affected by gun control. This may be true, but when it comes to mental illness, the legislation could be improved to prevent disturbed citizens from buying weapons.

  However, mass murderers such as the lone wolves are not typical criminals. They are the exception to the rule. They do not have previous criminal records, nor do they have significant documented mental issues that would prevent them from legally obtaining guns.

  The legislation debate has escalated, along with outrageous tactics on both sides. President Obama had the families of the Sandy Hook victims flown in the Presidential Air Force One jet to Washington as a strategy to help push the gun bill on background checks. In April 2013, a 225-page report on school safety funded by the National Rifle Association recommended properly trained armed employees to provide “an important layer of security in schools.” The task force recommended that schools designate willing staff to be armed and trained, and it proposed a model training program of forty to sixty hours per person. The American Federation of Teachers called the report “a cruel hoax.”

  Whether to arm schoolteachers is not a debate for this book. However, compelling research supports the theory that stricter gun laws, which disarm law-abiding citizens only, will not prevent mass killings, or even reduce crime.

  In a 2001 study of homicide rates across forty-four countries, Jeffrey Miron of Harvard University found that the differences in violence rates cannot—as previous analysis might have concluded—be attributed to the differences in gun control or availability.

  Miron takes diverse factors into consideration that have not previously been accounted for in cross-country comparisons, and he uses data for a large set of countries rather than subjectively selecting a half-dozen or a dozen as is normally done. According to his findings, each year there is roughly one homicide per 100,000 people in England or Japan, countries with relatively strict gun legislation, but nine per 100,000 in the United States. Several countries, including Israel, Switzerland, and New Zealand, have relatively lax gun-control laws and high firearms availability, just like the United States, yet have homicide rates that differ little from those in England or Japan. The difference in the rates of violence might then be attributed to differences in culture, as well as economic and social factors. Miron’s paper also suggests that differences in the enforcement of drug prohibition can explain the different violent rates across countries, and that the elevated rate of violence in the United States compared with Europe is perhaps due to greater drug prohibition enforcement.

  Others agree with Miron that stricter gun legislation does not reduce violence. Joyce Lee Malcolm, professor of law at George Mason University Law School, in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in December 26, 2012, wrote that “Great Britain and Australia, for example, suffered mass shootings in the 1980s and 1990s. Both countries had very stringent gun laws when they occurred. Nevertheless, both decided that even stricter control of guns was the answer.”

  The homicide rates, however, did not go down in either country. Malcolm claims the results have not been what advocates of the stricter legislation wanted. “Within a decade of the handgun ban and the confiscation of handguns from registered owners, crime with handguns had doubled according to British government crime reports. Gun crime, not a serious problem in the past, now is.” Neither has the new gun legislation had a favorable impact on mass murder, she states. In June 2010, Derrick Bird, a taxi driver in Cumbria, shot his brother and a colleague, and then drove off through rural villages, killing twelve people and injuring eleven more before killing himself.

  After the Dunblane massacre in Australia in 1996, where thirty-five people were killed, the Australian government banned most guns and made it a crime to use a gun defensively. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in the next four years, armed robbery increased by 51 percent, unarmed robbery by 37 percent, assaults by 24 percent, and kidnappings by 43 percent. Murder fell by 3 percent, but manslaughter rose by 16 percent. In Sydney, handgun crime rose by 44 percent from 1995 to 2001. “Strict gun laws in Great Britain and Australia haven’t made their people noticeably safer, nor have they prevented massacres. The two major countries held up as models for the U.S. don’t provide much evidence that strict gun laws will solve our problems,” Malcolm concludes.

  On April 13, 2013, the Daily Mail reported that crime had soared in Great Britain between the 1950s and today. Homicide rates are more constant, but violent crime has increased the most. At the same time, the number of legally owned handguns has decreased. Since 2006, violent crime has declined, but this might be due to the fact that more resources were injected into law enforcement and more criminals are in prison.

  Great Britain and Australia are ideal places for gun control as they are surrounded by water, making gun smuggling relatively difficult. However, stricter gun laws did not deliver the promised reductions in crime.

  In the United States, crime has decreased while the number of handguns has increased. Total violent crime from 1973 to 2009 in the United States decreased by 65 percent, or is only about a third as high, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, based on FBI data. The U.S. murder rate has fallen every year since 2006, and decreased 8.1 percent between 2008 and 2009.

  Luxembourg, according to the Canadian Center for Justice Statistics, Homicide in Canada, Juristat—having banned handguns—has nine
times the murder rate of Germany, where handguns are restricted but allowed.

  Adam Lanza, along with most of these killers, chose a “soft” target, a place where they knew no one would be armed and able to stop them before they had finished what they came for. James Eagan Holmes, the Aurora shooter who killed twelve people in 2012, had a choice of seven movie theaters that were showing the Batman movie he was obsessed with. All were within a twenty-minute drive of his home. “The Cinemark Theater the killer ultimately chose wasn’t the closest, but it was the only one that posted signs saying it banned concealed handguns carried by law-abiding individuals,” John Fund wrote as online national-affairs columnist for National Review. “All of the other theaters allowed the approximately 4 percent of Colorado adults who have a concealed-handgun permit to enter with their weapons.”

  According to Don Kates and Gary Mauser, in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, “The political causation is that nations which have violence problems tend to adopt severe gun controls, but these do not reduce violence, which is determined by basic sociocultural and economic factors.”

  Kates and Mauser maintain that “International evidence and comparisons have long been offered as proof of the mantra that guns mean more deaths, and that fewer guns, therefore, mean fewer deaths. There is a compound assertion that (a) guns are uniquely available in the United States compared with other modern developed nations, which is why (b) the United States has by far the highest murder rate. Though these assertions have been endlessly repeated, statement (b) is, in fact, false and statement (a) is subsequently so.” This is not to say that tougher gun legislation “causes nations to have much higher murder rates than neighboring nations that permit handgun ownership,” Kates and Mauser emphasize. Instead, as they show on the table below, nations with stringent gun controls tend to have much higher murder rates than nations that allow guns.