English Quiz 197

(English Quiz 197)

1. That does not seem to be the case with a mass murderer who kills at once. Few people who are in a position to observe a Dahmer at work survive to talk about it, but plenty of people present at shootings like those at Virginia Tech or Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., in 1999 make it out alive. And what they describe about the killer's mien as the shooting is taking place sounds nothing like a person who's thrilled by--or even much enjoying--what he's doing. There is, survivors report, a cold joylessness to the proceedings, something that in its own way is a lot harder to parse than the perverse pleasure of a serial killer.
Q: 試翻 "There is, survivors report, ... of a serial killer."

2. What makes mass murderers do it? Trying to find the much-looked-for snapping moment--the one inciting incident that pushes a killer over the edge--rarely gets you very far. Cho's lethal outburst, by all accounts, may have been simmering for months, if not years. In 2005, after Cho sent harassing messages to two female students, a Virginia court ruled him a danger to himself and others. His package of angry, self-pitying videos, stills and text, sent to NBC News on the day of the killings, probably took days to prepare. "Snapping is a misnomer," says Dr. Michael Welner, associate professor of psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine. "These people plan to carry out a mass killing without any indication of when they will do it. Instead of snapping, imagine a cage that someone has the capacity to unhinge. They simply decide that today is the day."
Q: 試翻 "Trying to find ... rarely gets you very far."

3. Mass murder, in short, is not a random act. There are things that explain it. Psychosis, for one, can never be ruled out. Russell Weston, a 41-year-old killer who went on a shooting spree in the Capitol Building in Washington in 1998, was a paranoid schizophrenic. Brain injury in an otherwise healthy person can lead to similar violence. Damage to the frontal region of the brain, which regulates what psychologists call the observing ego, or the limbic region, which controls violence, reflection and defensive behavior, can shut down internal governors and trigger all manner of unregulated behavior. "Somebody who had damage to both regions would be a bad player for sure," says forensic psychiatrist Neil Kaye, a faculty member at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia. From everything we know so far, however, Cho was suffering from none of these things. Any wounds that he carried were deeper, psychic ones--and in all likelihood, he shared them with most of the mass shooters who have gone before him.
Q: 試翻 "Damage to the frontal region ... unregulated behavior."