Shani Henderson's Week 5 Blog Post A02

Shani Henderson
A02
Week 5

This week's reading, "Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence", focuses on the overall concept of violent deaths specifically caused by humans. The article covers the different types of violent killings and why they happen. In the article, the author makes it clear what the differences are between serial killers, mass murderers, snipers, cannibals,etc are and some factual evidence and examples of each type of killers/ killings. What stood out the most to me in this article is the section about serial killers or serial murders. Hamamoto explains that a serial killer has a psychological thirst that compels the killer to quench it allowing for the person to kill many people for what ever reason that allows them to feel satisfied. Although the research they found to synthesize this idea is not completely credible it has some explanation to the increase in deaths and number of murderers identified.  The author also brought up the example of Ted Bundy. He is a well-known serial killer who has charmed many women and took advantage and murdered even more women. Hamamoto expressed what might have been the psychological reasonings and his intentions for do so. I found it really interesting and kind of scary to know that there are people who are actually murdering people especially in disgusting ways. But the section of the article that i felt most related to the the class and the Asian American community was the one about "sniper culture" and mass killings. The author brought up an intriguing concept about how the Texas Tower mass killings has some type of connection to the casual killings of Vietnamese civilians and other Asian civilians. He explained the idea that the violence caused by the U.S. Military influenced potential influence on interest in mass killings of Asian people as well as other people. It was all tied together by the fact that after the Vietnam War homicides increased. This really opened my eyes to how murderers think and it shocked me to think about the millions of deaths caused by the hands of another human.

Question:
Is there a relationship to the different types of  violent killings and why they happen to the history of Asian Americans that was not covered in the article? If so, are we going to talk about it in class?

References:

Hamamoto, Darell Y. (2003) Empire of Death and the Plague of Civic Violence.

Picture retrieved from: https://www.vox.com/2016/12/2/13803158/serial-killers-victims-data