If the three factors predisposing people to perpetrate violence are mental illness, neurological damage and childhood abuse, why are most of the violent criminal act perpetrators men rather than women? Are women less likely to suffer from one, two or all three of these factors than men?
-- Radhika Rajan
Unfortunately, the capacity for murder is part of human nature and one does not have to resort to "disease" to explain it. In every mass war, governments train hundreds of thousands of randomly selected young people to kill other human beings, with a very high degree of success. Does Pincus really think that infantry soldiers are selected only from abusive homes? Our close animal relatives such as chimpanzees murder other chimps in the wild. Homicide has existed in almost all human societies studied. Writing off murder as a "disease" caused by "brain lesions" leads us to forget the capacity for evil that exists within us all.
-- Marcus Stanley
Perhaps Pincus' thesis is more compelling in book form, but statements such as "I bet that all of [the half-million German killers] were abused in some way as children" and "sexual abuse was suggested" by Jeffrey Dahmer's mother do not convince me that he is using actual science in forming his conclusions.
Pincus says every murderer he has met has at least two of the three factors that cause someone to become a killer -- neurological damage and child abuse. He admirably eschews the logical fallacy of bogus causation by saying such things as "horrendous child abuse is not enough to cause violence because most people who are abused that way are not violent." But he also acknowledges that "not everybody who has all three of these things is violent." This would seem to suggest at least one other factor that "causes" murderous behavior, but Pincus declines to even speculate about what that might be (at least in this interview).
While he is clearly an expert on the neurological leg of his tripodal theory, I'm not sure that the other two legs are stable enough to say that he has significantly advanced the understanding of the human ability (or inability) to kill. I would be interested to know if he has ever examined people who have killed but were not "murderers" -- police officers, soldiers, etc. -- and if he is familiar with the analyses of battlefield behavior by Richard Holmes ("Acts of War") and Dave Grossman ("On Killing"). Most studies of soldiers' killing have concluded that the vast majority of people are unable to consciously slay a visible human being, even when faced with imminent death themselves, and that most wartime killing is done by a very small percentage of troops. A mainstream examination of this phenomenon is long overdue.
-- Bob Greiner
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