Review of “Why Rampage Killers Emerge: Conditions and Characteristics” by Dr. S. Lee Funk

​Score: 95/100 (9.5 out of 10)

What a morbidly fascinating subject matter.
And what a well-researched book concerning it!

Why Rampage Killers Emerge: Conditions and Characteristics is a serious, research-heavy criminology/psychology book arguing that sudden public mass violence is usually not a spontaneous “snap,” nor the product of one easy explanation such as video games, psychiatric medication, bullying, or mental illness alone. Funk calls the offenders he studies “autogenic” rampage killers: largely lone attackers whose violence is public, compressed in time, aimed mostly at arbitrary victims, not motivated by financial gain, and not primarily a tactical act for an organized ideological cause.

The book’s central framework has four broad preconditions: perceived physical inadequacy; destructive or oppressive environments; neuropsychological impairments; and pathological personality traits. Funk repeatedly emphasizes that these are not causes or excuses. They are vulnerabilities or developmental conditions that may combine with grievance, isolation, distorted thinking, resentment, fantasy, and personal choices over time. The book uses case histories, perpetrator writings, biographies, research studies, and a purposive appendix sample of 112 offenders to argue that the overlap among these conditions matters more than any one factor by itself.

The book’s biggest strength is that it refuses simplistic scapegoats. It does not blame violent media, SSRIs, mental illness, bullying, bad parents, guns, or ideology by themselves. That is a genuinely important corrective. Funk is most persuasive when he shows how isolation, grievance, perceived humiliation, distorted beliefs, access to weapons, personality dysfunction, and a growing revenge fantasy can feed one another.

It is also impressively thorough. The amount of case material is enormous, and the author does more than summarize headlines. He looks at journals, recordings, court statements, warning signs, personal histories, and repeated behavioral patterns. The appendices, notes, tables, and figures make it clear that this was a major research undertaking rather than a casual true-crime book.

Actually, the tone of this book is surprisingly unbiased and measured, especially given the emotionally charged subject matter. In fact—you know what?—it's quite detached. It doesn't sound like the author has a motive. It doesn't sound like the author wants to glamorize the violence or put a spotlight on the killer(s). Instead, it really feels like the author is just presenting matter-of-fact information as is. That's quite impressive.

Funk does not sensationalize these perpetrators, turn them into dark celebrities, or use their crimes as an excuse to push one simplistic political, cultural, or ideological narrative. He is careful to distinguish explanation from excuse and to remind readers that the overwhelming majority of people who struggle with trauma, depression, social isolation, disability, bullying, family instability, or psychiatric disorders never become violent.

That restraint gives the book real credibility. Rather than insisting that one troubled childhood, one medication, one video game, one gun, one rejection, or one diagnosis explains everything, Funk consistently returns to convergence: the dangerous accumulation of grievance, entitlement, distorted cognition, social withdrawal, emotional deterioration, violent fantasy, and, in some cases, access to the means to carry out an attack. It is a far less convenient answer, but it is probably much closer to the truth.

When a horrifying act of public mass violence occurs, people understandably want one clear answer.

It was the video games.

It was the medication.

It was bullying.

It was bad parenting.

It was mental illness.

It was ideology.

It was guns.

It was social media.

It was society.

And, to be fair, every one of those things may sometimes be part of a larger conversation. But one of the greatest strengths of Why Rampage Killers Emerge: Conditions and Characteristics is that it refuses to pretend that an atrocity can be explained away with one neat, politically convenient, emotionally satisfying answer.

This book runs through numerous examples of mass murderers throughout history. It explores these examples in exhaustive detail.

You know what? We're really tempted to just not mention these killers by name. In our minds, they're horrible, terrible, despicable people who did horrible, terrible, despicable things. They robbed people of their happy endings. They robbed people of their lives. They robbed families of their loved ones. They traumatized neighborhoods and communities.

Let' challenge ourselves to do that. But let's talk vaguely about some of the examples from the book without mentioning names.

One example involves an academically accomplished professional who appeared to spend years accumulating personal and professional grievances. Setbacks were not processed as disappointments, frustrations, or unfair moments that could be survived. Instead, they seemed to become proof that other people were conspiring to deny this person the recognition, status, and treatment they believed they deserved. Funk traces a long pattern of explosive reactions, entitlement, interpersonal conflict, and blame that existed well before the eventual act of violence. The point is not that professional rejection “caused” murder. The point is that rejection became another brick in a wall of grievance that this person had been building for years.

Another case involves a young person whose life contained a frightening convergence of troubling behavior, social withdrawal, family dysfunction, violent interests, alarming communications, and access to a weapon. This may be one of the book’s most heartbreaking examples because it does not feel like a story in which absolutely nobody could have seen anything coming. It feels like a story in which warning signs accumulated, adults missed opportunities to intervene, and a dangerous internal world was allowed to keep developing in the shadows.

Elsewhere, the book explores two deeply troubled young men whose friendship became a destructive feedback loop. One appears more calculating, controlling, and energized by deception. The other appears more depressed, isolated, and emotionally lost. Together, however, they helped build each other into something worse. They reinforced rage, fantasy, alienation, and revenge until those things became more real to them than the human beings around them. Funk does not treat this as a dark buddy story or some kind of twisted legend. He treats it as a warning about manipulation, secrecy, and what can happen when damaged people begin validating each other’s worst impulses.

There is also the example of a young man whose loneliness, envy, romantic frustration, and grandiose sense of entitlement hardened into a belief that other people owed him affection, admiration, sex, and validation. That distinction is crucial. The book does not blame loneliness itself, nor does it blame the people who rejected him. It shows how a person can take personal pain, refuse accountability, turn disappointment into resentment, turn resentment into hatred, and eventually convince himself that innocent people deserve punishment for not giving him the life he imagined he was entitled to have.

And then there are the cases involving people whose lives seemed to be unraveling through isolation, instability, perceived failure, paranoia, substance abuse, family strain, employment problems, or untreated psychological distress. Again, the book never argues that people experiencing these hardships are destined to become violent. Most never do. But Dr. Funk shows how, in certain individuals, these factors can combine with pathological personality traits, violent fantasy, grievance collecting, and a willingness to blame everyone else for their misery.

That may be the most haunting thing about this book.

It does not present these atrocities as random lightning strikes out of a clear blue sky. It presents them as terrible storms that can gather over time.

Not every storm becomes a tragedy.

Not every warning sign means someone is dangerous.

Not every lonely, depressed, bullied, rejected, traumatized, socially awkward, mentally ill, or angry person will ever hurt another human being.

But when warning signs begin to overlap with obsession, entitlement, escalating threats, violent fantasies, manipulation, secrecy, access to weapons, and an increasingly hostile worldview, we cannot simply shrug and assume it is nothing.

We do not need to make these people famous to learn from the devastation they caused. We do not need to repeat their names, celebrate their notoriety, or treat them as fascinating antiheroes. The victims deserve more of our attention than the people who took so much from them.

But we do need to understand the patterns.

Because understanding the patterns may help us recognize danger before another family loses someone they love.

We also learned a few things we didn't realize after years and years of reading about these mass-death/mass-shooter stories. For example, we didn't realize how led along and submissive one of the Columbine shooters was. We were under the impression that it was an equal partnership in a death pact.

Perhaps the part of this book that interested us the most were the defenses that mass-killers sometimes use to try to play the courts. This book does a surprisingly good job at running down the realities of the insanity defense and what it means to be incompetent to stand trial. There's actually a pretty big difference. And the author, thankfully, highlights how rare and unsuccessful these usually are.

The book also covers topics like BPD, paranoia, narcissism, antisocial tendencies, obsessive behavior, delusions, dissociation, depression, and other pathological or neuropsychological conditions. But, once again, one of the book’s strongest qualities is that it does not treat any diagnosis as a crystal ball.

Now, with all that said, this book is naturally going to be incredibly upsetting to some people. The details, even presented factually and unglamorously, are still grim, shocking, tragic, and sad.

There is one example that upset us a lot personally, and that is the example of the grocery-store shooter who became obsessed with Ember’s Ghost Squad, a fictional animated world. If you know, you know. We're not going to name this murderous piece of crap.

Anyway, what bothered us about this section is that the killer, who is biologically male—cis male—is constantly referred to by female pronouns. Under most circumstances, we'd be cool, respectful, and accepting of that. However, this individual is not trans. This individual was sick, deranged, mentally ill, confused, and out of touch with reality. To refer to him by female pronouns seems wrong and disingenuous. It gives all trans people a black eye because it puts this piece of crap--this murderous fraud--this fake--in the same category as genuinely trans people, who AREN'T violent, murderous, or deranged like this individual was. We'd say the same thing about the 2007 Connecticut home invasion killer who Wikipedia lists by a chosen female name and female pronouns. Yeah, we push back against that. So, this guy had a choice? You know who didn't have a choice? The innocent woman he strangled to death. The two innocent daughters he and his accomplice poured gasoline over and burned alive-- two innocent girls whose lives and innocence they took. These pieces of crap--this grocery store killer and this Connecticut home invasion killer--are not trans; they are frauds who suffered from gender dysphoria and mental illness. They are fakes. And we don't validate fakes. We don't give credibility to fakes. True trans and queer people do not act like this. They don't harm people. They aren't dangerous. They aren't murderers. In fact, most of them are some of the kindest, most generous and gentle souls out there.

Ok, that's something we needed to get off our chest.

The research in this book is exceptional.

Check it out on Amazon!