Are Americans Predisposed to Murder-Suicides?

Another day, another murder suicide. According to today’s news reports, Nathaniel Brown, a 51-year-old custodial worker aggrieved at his performance evaluation report killed a manager before killing himself. What is it with Americans and murder suicides? And what is it within the American psyche which makes these incidents so regular here and not in Europe?

A cursory trawl through the Internet yields a frightening number of incidents in the US but significantly less anywhere else in the Western world. America seems to be literally addicted to violence. It is part of the country’s national fabric — America celebrates violence. This country is one of the few industrialized nations that still puts criminals to death. Of course, America also has a ridiculous gun culture which may be partly to blame; however, Canada has similarly easy access to guns as does that bastion of neutrality, Switzerland.

Malcolm Gladwell insists that the consistent violence it is a fad among the subculture of depressed people with violent fantasies; they do it because they’ve seen a television story about someone else doing it. Similarly, America seems often defined by hate and opposition. The recent upsurge in the popularity of the right-wing Tea Party is startling as the movement appears to be founded upon what it opposes as to what it stands for. Fox News programs its viewers with FEAR, HATE and ANGER.

So would changing, say, the gun laws actually fix anything? Perhaps the horror stories of murder suicides are more indicative of a deeper scar on the American psyche…America is still an adolescent nation. Isn’t it about time it started to grow up?