ABSTRACT
Aromoana is a small town in New Zealand with a population of less than 300 individuals, located on the remote Otago Peninsula. On the 13th and 14th of November 1990 it was the location of New Zealand’s worst mass murder (vividly depicted in the 2006 fi lm Out of the Blue). Over a 34-hour period, local man David Gray ran riot through the town with a rifl e, shooting anyone that he came across. By the time that Gray was shot dead by the police he had murdered thirteen residents and police offi cers and had wounded a further three individuals. Why did Gray commit this offence? Although this question is deceptively straightforward, providing a complete and coherent answer is not. There is a suggestion that Gray was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia so perhaps aspects of this mental disorder contributed to his offending. However, as we shall see in Chapter 3, the vast majority of individuals with major mental disorders like schizophrenia do not commit violent offences, let alone the kind perpetrated by Gray. Those who knew Gray also reported that he was socially isolated and was obsessed with weapons, war and survival. Maybe then, something in Gray’s mind set, or thinking patterns, contributed to the shooting spree. Prior to the shooting Gray had also had an argument with his neighbour, Gary Holden, over a dog that Gray spent a lot of time walking but Holden had to put down. Perhaps, then, this was an important precipitating or triggering factor. Certainly if Gray survived the mass murder we could ask him what motivated his shooting spree, but any answer that he could provide us would likely be less than complete. Part of the problem in our attempts to explain this mass murder is that we fi nd it very hard to make the imaginative leap from our own minds to that of Gray (assuming that very few, if any, readers of this book have perpetrated a mass murder!). In order to fully understand this and other, more mundane examples of criminal behaviour we also need to carefully think about the type of explanation that we offer. As we shall see in this chapter and throughout this book, a wide range of (often compatible) explanations have been offered to explain why individuals commit crime. In order to understand criminal behaviour, it will be argued, we need to take all of these types of explanation into account.
