America Burning
Publish Date: April 17, 2026
Author: Dr. Jeffrey A. Lieberman
Source: Shrink Speak substack
Curing Our National Epidemic of Personal Deviant Violence
For most of human history, deadly violence was a common and accepted part of life. Wars, tribal conflict, political murder, organized crime, gang battles, theft, and crimes of passion were frequent and often inevitable. Yet over time – with the advent of laws, religious precepts, political systems, social norms, and advances in science, technology, and economic systems – these traditional forms of lethal violence have dramatically declined.
But there is one form of violence that has not declined – rather, in the modern era, it has exploded. We call this phenomenon personal deviant violence.
Personal Deviant Violence
Personal deviant violence, which emerged in the twentieth century and continues to rise with alarming rapidity, encompasses serial murders, familicide, violent stalking, and mass murder. While these forms of violence are ostensibly different, they share common characteristics and an underlying basis. These crimes are not carried out by armies, tribes, gangs, or organized movements. Rather, they are committed by solitary individuals – often against strangers, sometimes against family members – against targets of a distorted obsession or delusional fixation. The motives are often mysterious, incoherent, theatrical, imitative, or nihilistic.
Personal deviant violence is not a random accident of history, nor is the phenomenon an incomprehensible mystery. Rather, it is the predictable outcome of cultural and social changes that took hold in the latter half of the twentieth century and have accelerated in the twenty-first. These forces exploit psychological vulnerability and act in concert with deficient and dysfunctional mental health policies and care systems. They are further enabled in an environment with liberal access to addictive recreational intoxicants and high-powered firearms. And they are spurred on by eroded restraint, the potential for glorification of grievance, and the celebration of notoriety. The recipe for this volatile brew is unmistakable: The brain supplies the vulnerability. Culture inflames it. Society tolerates it. And the mind unravels, leading to violence.
Consequently, we face a national crisis approaching epidemic proportions that demands insightful analysis, unflinching understanding and reasoned action – not slogans, denial, political exploitation, or moral evasion.
Violent Stalking
The least lethal and most infrequently described form of personal deviant violence is violent stalking, defined as an obsessive fixation on a specific person, frequently a public figure.
Perhaps the archetype of the violent stalker is John Hinckley, Jr., whose assassination attempt of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 was driven by his delusional infatuation and relentless efforts to gain the attention and win the affection of the actress Jodie Foster after seeing her in the movie “Taxi Driver.” Thankfully, violent stalking is usually accompanied by enough broadcasting from the perpetrator that it can be stopped before it results in fatalities.
Serial Murder
Serial killers have long existed in human societies. From Jack the Ripper to Albert De Salvo (the Boston Strangler), the Zodiac Killer, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and David Berkowitz – the "44 caliber killer" – these offenders kill repeatedly over time, often for reasons rooted in sexual attraction, paraphilia, psychopathy, or delusional belief. These types of crimes are sensational and incite extreme emotional reactions from the public. Their frequency has waxed and waned over time, and DNA evidence has proven an inhibitor in the modern era.
Intrafamilial Homicide
Familicide or intrafamily violence can take a variety of forms including parricide (children killing parents), fratricide (killing siblings), and infanticide (parents killing children). This type of personal deviant violence has become more common of late, although it rarely makes the headlines. Motives are often fueled by substance abuse, psychosis, or psychological vulnerability.
Personal Mass Violence
The most visible – and fastest growing – form of personal deviant violence is personal mass violence. As defined by the FBI, personal mass violence is the killing of multiple people by a single perpetrator for irrational, exaggerated, or grievance-fueled motives.
The rise in this terrifying form of violence began in 1966, when Charles Whitman murdered his wife and mother before he armed himself with his hunting rifle, climbed to the top of the University of Texas Tower, and shot at strangers for 96 minutes, killing 16 and wounding 49 people. Since the tragedy of the "Texas Tower Sniper," the United States has experienced an accelerating rate of such incidents – indeed, they have become so frequent that they begin to blur into each other. Each additional massacre shocks the nation anew, is etched in our collective national memory, and adds to our growing psychic toll. We don’t become inured to news of these events, however. On the contrary, we become sensitized, meaning that the next attack hits harder because it lands atop accumulated fear and worry.
The following is a representative list of the range of carnage that personal mass violence has inflicted on American society.
The Paradox of Fear
The rise of personal deviant violence goes against the grain of human history. It is at once anomalous and paradoxical – an aberration that defies civilization’s long march toward greater safety and civility. For even as the objective risk of dying violently has fallen to historic lows, our collective fear of violence has never been more acute. The paradox sharpens further when one considers that these acts account for less than a fraction of 1% of all lethal violence, yet they exert influence far beyond their statistics. Their power lies not in their numbers, but in their nature.
Striking without warning, in places once considered ordinary and safe, they select victims at random and often without discernible motives. In doing so, they introduce a pervasive uncertainty into daily life – the unsettling sense that danger is no longer bounded by place, time, or reason.
The effect is disproportionate and profound: communities are terrorized, public spaces elicit phobic fear and apprehension, and a steady drumbeat of media-driven spectacle leaves the national psyche on edge, its sense of safety insidiously eroded.
Breaking the Cycle: Diagnosing and Curing the Problem
The forms of personal deviant violence appear different in their outcomes, and their perpetrators differ in biography and ideology. Some wrap themselves in religious or political rhetoric. Others are consumed by grievance. Still others have descended into psychosis. But beneath the surface distinctions lies a shared mental architecture: distorted thinking, emotional dysregulation, grievance magnification, and the erosion of internal restraints – interacting with a culture that amplifies outrage, rewards spectacle, and makes lethal tools easily accessible.
Personal deviant violence in America is no longer rare enough to shock us into sustained action, yet it is not common enough to feel preventable. Each new attack ignites outrage, debate, and paralysis – until the next one arrives. As incidents accelerate in frequency and lethality, public spaces feel increasingly fragile and institutional responses increasingly reactive. We are trapped in argument while the pattern intensifies. We continue to treat each attack as an isolated tragedy when they are not. Personal deviant violence is a repeated pattern that can be understood, foreseen, and prevented.
For sixty years, we have debated guns, media, ideology, and policing. Those debates matter. But they orbit a deeper question we have avoided: why do certain vulnerable individuals in modern America cross the line from alienation to annihilation? Until we confront that question directly – socially, culturally, clinically, and systemically – the cycle will continue.