The Psychology of a Jared Loughner

Kassin, Saul. "The Psychology of a Jared Loughner." CNN. Cable News Network, 18 Jan. 2011. Web. 11 Apr. 2013.

This CNN article talks about Jared Loughner and what makes people, men specifically, so aggressive.  Jared Loughner is the man responsible for the Tucson, Arizona massacre.  A question that many people had, including me, was why.  What would motivate a human being to want to inflict pain onto others?  In this article, author Saul Kassin discusses how human behavior is complex and that many factors together cause tragedies like school shootings and massacres to happen.  According to Kassin, people are entitled to be aggressive, it is a natural human instinct.  But there are certain types of people who don't know how to handle all that aggression, and they end up with serious consequences.  Individuals prone to violence usually portray antisocial behavior, and as adults they lack empathy or anything close to a conscience.  And sure enough Loughner isolated himself from his friends in high school and turned to alcohol and drugs for his escape.  His behavior also indicated paranoia and deep-seated mistrust towards the government.  Kassin further explains how statistically men are more violent than women, and that may be due to the fact that men have testosterone, but that isn't certain yet.  Yet one person doesn't just wake up one morning and plan on killing a numerous amount of people.  A trigger needs to occur.  A trigger could be anything from being socially rejected to jealousy to loss of self-esteem.  Note that people learn from example and that human nature is a complex web that still has many unknown areas.

I was very impressed with this CNN article.  It covered many of the different topics that I was looking for.  The article was very informational and contained scientific data that supported the topic being discussed.  I'm glad that instead of focusing just on Jared Loughner, like the Saddam article did, the author chose to write about the type of person Loughner is, and how that type of person comes to want to kill a large number of people.  I would most defiantly recommend this article because it is very well-written and the author knows what he is talking about.