But it's incorrect to call it "the First Mass Murder in U.S. History." That horrid distinction took place 22 years prior at the Bath School massacre. It was not only the worst mass murder of the century (until the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing), but also the worst mass murder at a school. Andrew Kehoe used explosives to blow up an elementary school. The disaster killed 38 schoolchildren, 6 adults, and injured at least 58 other people. Kehoe also died in the explosion.
As for the mass murder on Labor Day, 1949, in Camden, I think what Patrick Sauer at The Smithsonian is trying to convey is the beginning to the modern era of guns used in mass shootings.
“There have been notorious killers since America was founded, but you didn’t have the mass shooting phenomenon before Unruh’s time because people didn’t have access to semi-automatic weaponry,” says Harold Schechter, a true crime novelist who has written about infamous murderers going back to the 19th-century.Despite the headline faux pas, I urge you to read it all - particularly in the gut-wrenching wake of the two mass shootings perpetrated during the previous 24 hours, in seperate, seemingly unrelated, incidents by alleged 'lone wolf' killers.
While the terminology is a bit fungible, Unruh is generally regarded as the first of the “lone wolf” type of modern mass murderers, the template for the school and workplace shooters who have dominated the coverage of the more than 1,000 victims since 2013. Unruh was a distinctive personality type, one that has also come to define those who have followed in his bloody footsteps.
< “Unruh really matches the mass murder profile. He had a rigid temperament, an inability to accept frustration or people not treating him as well as he wanted, and a feeling of isolation, all things people accept and move on from,” says Katherine Ramsland, a professor of forensic psychology and the director of the master of arts in criminal justice at DeSales University, as well as the author of some 60 nonfiction books including Inside the Mind of Mass Murderers: Why They Kill. “He had a free-floating anger, held grudges, owned weapons he knew how to use, and decided somebody was going to pay. It’s a typical recipe for internal combustion.”
20 Killed and 26 Injured in Texas Mass Shooting, Suspect in Custody
Dayton, Ohio shooting: Nine dead, 26 injured; suspected gunman killed, police say
