A leading mental healthcare expert says the three Oklahoma teens who hunted down and killed Australian college student Christopher Lane last Friday were much more than just "bored" when they committed the crime.
According to an op-ed appearing on FoxNews.com, psychiatrist Keith Ablow, M.D., says accused killers Chancey Luna, Michael Jones and James Edwards didn't choose to kill Lane out of boredom, but because they are "severely psychologically disordered".
"When normal people are bored, they go to the movies, go shopping or skateboarding or take a drive to the beach," Ablow writes. "Only when people are severely psychologically disordered do they think up murder as an antidote to boredom. Only when extraordinarily disordered patterns of thought, feeling or perception fill one’s mind does the vacuum of boredom draw someone to the idea of using a gun to shoot a stranger in the head."
But we shouldn't be surprised that the teens self-reported that they killed out of boredom because that is the kind of excuse that can come out of the mind of someone who is psychologically shattered.
"My 20 years as a forensic psychiatrist tell me that, in all three cases, it will be found that traumatic life events, perhaps coupled with head trauma, drug use and disordered brain chemistry from birth, left these young men detached from their own thoughts and feelings – and those of others. I would venture that on August 16, 2013, more than one of Chris Lane’s assailants was, for all intents and purposes, psychologically dead."
This explains why one of the alleged assailants said they killed out of boredom, Ablow writes.
" . . . (B)ecause his very disordered mind was like an echo chamber that allowed his feelings of being annihilated, dehumanized and dead to boomerang back to him as an impulse to kill."
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