… in the wake of the cinema massacre. Of the three kinds of mass murderers (“psychopaths, the delusionally insane, and the suicidally depressed”) Dave Cullen writes about here, Professor Rainer K. Reinscheid of the University of California Irvine med school sounds to UD like the suicidally depressed. His fourteen-year-old son killed himself after being disciplined by his high school, and since then Reinscheid’s been homicidally vengeful, committing arson and making death threats. As Cullen writes:
Most vengeful depressives blame their girlfriend, boss, or schoolmates. Some just aim to kill those targets. But the eventual mass murderer sees it differently: it wasn’t one or two mean people who drove him down, it was all of us. Society was brutal, the whole teeming world is mean. We all need to understand what we did to him; we all need to pay.
In Reinscheid’s case:
Detectives on Friday discover[ed] e-mails on Reinscheid’s cell phone from April, when he allegedly discussed with his wife plans to burn down Uni High School, commit sexual assaults, purchase firearms and murder school officials and students before killing himself.
“Most mass murderers intend to die in the act,” writes Cullen, and although Reinscheid – who’s in custody – now seems unlikely to be able to carry out any killings, he’s obviously a profound suicide risk.