by VPCinfo Violence Policy Cent
PA: Family annihilator shoots and kills wife, two daughters, self with .357 handgun. http://fb.me/ZT2NLwEV
The Violence Policy Center posted the above Tweet about 15 minutes ago. It would appear that Josh Sugarman, Kristen Rand, and their crew are trying to make up for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence’s suspension from Twitter by dancing in the blood of a family tragedy.
It involves a murder-suicide that happened sometime on Sunday in the Pittsburgh area. A man killed his wife and two young daughters and then himself. The family had recently moved to the rented house in Shaler Township 3-4 weeks ago.
Shaler Township Police Chief Jeff Gally said, “We have no indication as to what caused this tragedy.”
As Chief Gally says further in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the only people who know for sure are gone.
This is most certainly a tragedy. Why it happened we probably will never know for sure. The tool was a .357 revolver but it just as easily could have been a baseball bat, a kitchen knife, or even the bathtub in the master bedroom. However, if it had been any one of the later items, VPC would not have seen fit to Tweet about it. They are selective on the violence they wish to publicize. They certainly are not reticent in using inflammatory language when they refer to the murderer as the “family annihilator”.
H/T J. D. Berger
They did not invent the term "Family Annihilator." It's a term that criminalogists use to describe people who do what he did.
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/02/10/inside-the-minds-of-family-annihilators.html
They are usually really crazy people who are so wrapped up in their own shame that rather than face it, they kill their whole family. I wish I remember where I read about them, but suffice it to say that they are total losers. They are usually the worst sort of narcissists.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11143/1148596-100.stm
I did a search on this guy's name in the PA records, and I found someone with the same name in the same area who had a DWI conviction, but nothing else. I imagine that something else will come up and explain what it was that made this guy crazy. Rest assured, he was crazy long before he pulled the trigger.
@Sean: I just learned something. I never knew there was such term as "family annihilator".
Never thought of them in terms of narcissism but it makes sense.