It seems like every day the news has another story about some guy who guns down the wife and kids, optionally committing suicide. The question, “why?” is too small to ponder in view of the enormity of the evil shown by these types of mass murderers. Lately these guys who kill their kids and optionally themselves and their wives (or girlfriends) are called “family annihilators”.

Yet, unlike serial killers of strangers, researchers have not really gotten to the “why” of family annihilation. There’s not a lot of data here for a number of reasons — first and foremost, mass murder of strangers sells, not mass murder of your family. So the press doesn’t cover these instances, and there is no public outcry.

Lately though there is public interest and there are some preliminary studies dividing up “family annihilators” according to a mad/sad dichotomy.

Some men are angry: motivated by anger toward the wife, and they extract a revenge killing. The wife is blamed for e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g that could be wrong in the guy’s life. There is no self-examination, no insight. This make sme think that the brain cells related to “self-knowledge” are unplugged. The wife is killed, and the children are murdered as an extension of the wife.

Sometimes the children are murdered just to hurt the wife by destroying that which she loves. No thought for the children as humans is given whatsoever — they are mere instrumentalities in a bigger scheme to extract revenge.

Or, the man is despondent, feeling like a failure, and depressed — and see killing off the wife and the kids as a way to avoid their suffering as well as his own.

Both of these have to do with entitlement and control. The father feels entitled to control the fate of his wife (or girlfriend) and children. (See the National Domestic Violence Fatality Review Initiative newsletter Summer 2006 here at pages 4-7 for a discussion).

I’m focusing on male perpetrators because they are by far the most common, according to a recent report (discussed below, HT: Docuticker, yet again). Although there are a few female family killers, they tend to be truly psychotic or have other serious problems connecting with reality.

Although the Violence Policy Center is a non-profit organization focused on anti-gun legislation, it may be the best source of statistics for homicide-suicides in the US. Some statistics:
• Of the 554 murder-suicide deaths, 234 were suicides and 320 were homicides. Ninety-five percent of murder-suicides were committed by men.
•Nine murder-suicide events occurred in the United States each week during the study period.
•Seventy-three percent of all murder-suicides involved an intimate partner (spouse, common-law spouse, ex-spouse, or girlfriend/boyfriend). Of these, 94 percent were females killed by their intimate partners.
•Forty-five of the homicide victims were children and teens less than 18 years of age. Forty-four children and teens less than 18 years of age were survivors who witnessed some aspect of the murder-suicide.
•Most murder-suicides occurred in the home (75 percent).

Here are some excerpts from the most recent report, “American Roulette: Murder-Suicide in the United States (2008)” (footnotes are deleted, but the source materials are cited in the published report):

Most murderers in murder-suicides are male

In this study, 95 percent of the offenders were male. Other studies analyzing
murder-suicide have found that most perpetrators of murder-suicide are male—more than 90 percent in recent studies of the United States. Another study which only looked at murder-suicides involving couples noted that more than 90 percent were perpetrated by men. This is consistent with homicides in general, in which 89 percent of homicides are committed by male offenders. However, most homicides involve male victims killed by male offenders (65 percent), whereas a male victim being specifically targeted by a male offender in a murder-suicide is relatively rare