this is awful

Sad.

When men kill their offspring, they are more likely to commit suicide, experts say. Women often attempt suicide, as did the Chicago and Ventura County mothers, but fail, as they did.

Motives also differ.

Contemporary family stresses -- financial pressures, marital conflicts, substance abuse, a history of childhood abuse -- often play a role in paternal homicides, experts say.

"Men almost always have experienced a tremendous loss, lost their jobs, lost the ability to control the family," says Charles Patrick Ewing, a law professor and psychologist at the University of Buffalo and author of "Fatal Families."

"These are narcissistic, self-centered guys who see themselves as the glue of the family. They feel they have to take their own life, but first, they have to kill the children. To them, it seems rational. They think they can't manage and the family can't manage without them."

By contrast, he says, women more often kill their offspring because of extreme psychological disturbances.

This Slate article is also interesting.

I'll try to cheer up now.

Published case descriptions suggest that two rather different sorts of familicide sce-
nario recur, differing with respect to die killer’s motivation, yet both reflecting a mas-
culine uxorial proprietariness.
In the first variety the killer professes a grievance against his wife, usually with re-
spect to alleged infidelities and/or her intending or acting to terminate the marriage.
Overt and even public expressions of his aggrieved hostility are often conspicuous, and a history of violence may be noted. In a 1984 Canadian example, a man killed his
estranged wife, his 5-year-old daughter, his infant son, his wife’s parents, and himself.
The couple had been residing apart for several months after a 10-year marriage; the
wife had launched divorce proceedings. During the separation the killer had assaulted
and threatened his wife repeatedly. One neighbor volunteered that “one minute he’d
have a knife at her throat and the next he’d be at her feet asking for forgiveness”;
another neighbor described him as “bitterly jealous” about his wife’s having found
part-time employment outside the home (Calgary Herald, March 2, 1984, p. 43). In
another Canadian case, a man killed his wife, his two daughters aged 6 and 4, and then himself. Close friends said the marriage was rife with violence and the killer was obsessed with controlling his wife. The friend alleged the killer had once said to his wife “I’ll kill you and the kids if you ever leave me” as he couldn’t picture her with anyone else. Apparently, he had shown no signs of depression (Winnipeg Free Press, Dec. 27, 1989, p. 10). In a 1986 British example, an ex-policeman killed his wife and her four sons (the elder two his stepsons, the younger two his own), then shot himself, upon his wife’s return from a rendezvous at which she and a lover had been working out her divorce plans (The Times, Aug. 21, 1986, p. 3). In an Australian case described by Goldney (1977, pp. 18-19), a man shot his wife, his sons aged 8 and 6, and his daughter aged 4, but spared his 15-month-old son, then drove to a nearby quarry and shot himself, after making a series of public (and apparently delusional) accusations of his wife’s infidelity. These cases appear similar to many nonfamilicidal uxoricides [Campbell, 1992, Crawford and Gartner, 1992; Wilson and Daly, 1992a, 1993a].

Apparently rather different are cases in which the killer is a depressed and brooding
man, who may apprehend impending disaster for himself and his family, and who sees familicide followed by suicide as “the only way out.” Expressions of hostility toward the victims are generally absent (or at most ambiguous) in such cases, and the despon dent killer may even characterize his deed as an act of mercy or rescue. In a 1984 Canadian case, for example, a man drove his wife and two daughters, ages 9 and 1, to a quiet creekside “lover’s lane,” where he strangled all three, set fire to his car, and shot himself. In this case, no previous assaults or expressions of hostility were noted in newspaper reports; on the contrary, neighbours and relatives alike af-
firmed that the killer had been a loving husband and father. He had, however, be-
come increasingly depressed about having lost a series of jobs (Toronto Star, June
2, 1984, p. Al, A4). Similarly, a 55-year-old American man who killed his wife
and son in their beds with a hammer, and then bungled a suicide attempt, gave this
account: “I kept thinking about the bills coming, the house taxes. Piling up, piling
up in my mind ...I thought everything was going to fall around my head. I know
it could be a catastrophe in a short time. My son wouldn’t be able to stand the
stigma, my wife wouldn’t have the things she was used to” [MacDonald, 1961, p.
222]. Similar cases have been described by Guttmacher [1960, p. 105]; West [1965,
pp. 53, 71], Scott [1973, p. 122], Hirose [1979, pp. 212-213], and Bénézech [1991,
pp. 159-162]. The prevalence of these despondent/depressive cases in the psychi-
atric literature is especially striking when one considers that the many successful
suicides escape psychiatric scrutiny.
Even those who complete their suicides sometimes leave accounts of their motives,
and these accounts often echo what the failed suicides tell the psychiatrists. Here, for
example, is an excerpt from a letter left by a South African businessman who, facing
bankruptcy and a probable prison term, shot his sleeping wife and children with a cross-bow, set fire to his house, and then shot himself with a pistol [Graser, 1992a, p. 77]: “I lost the business due to a legal technicality, but, in the process, lost my house, my cars—just everything...I cannot let my family suffer the degradation of losing everything we possess and being thrown penniless onto the street.” The killer’s claim to be rescuing his victims may also invoke impending disasters of broader scope than the private consequences of the killer’s own failures, as in this excerpt from a suicide note left by a 52-year-old English librarian who killed his wife, his daughter, and his mother, before shooting himself: “For some years now I have wished to die. However, this would have meant leaving the three persons dearest in the world to me without my protection. I can’t leave them to the threat of death from radiation sickness after the coming atomic war...I have been dead professionally for 12 years, of which the last 10 have been a nightmare. More important, I have felt this more since reaching 50. I am a man who thought himself a poet and wished to be nothing more, yet I have not succeeded in having published as much as a single line” (The Times, April 28, 1984, p. 3).
The despondent nonhostile killer may constitute a reliably distinct category of
familicide from the hostile accusatory familicidal killer. Unfortunately, data in the Ca-
nadian and British homicide archives do not permit any straightforward test of the general applicability or utility of a simple dichotomy between hostile, accusatory familicides and nonhostile, despondent ones. Suicide clearly cannot be treated as the defining criterion, both because accusatory killers can be suicidal, too, and because despondent killers’ suicide attempts may fall. Nevertheless, suicide may be expected to be less prevalent in the hostile cases than in the despondent ones, and the rarity of suicide in cases involving stepchildren may be interpreted as supporting this idea, since the presence of stepchildren is a strong correlate of hostile violence against both wives and the children themselves [Daly and Wilson, 1988a,b, 1994b; Daly et at., 1993].

In any event, as different as these two proposed categories of familicides appear, they
have this in common: the killer’s professed rationale for his actions invokes a propri-
etary conception of wife and family. The hostile, accusatory familicidal killer is often
enraged at the alienation of his wife, and may declare that “If I can’t have her, no one
can.” The despondent familicide perpetrator instead appears to believe that his victims could not persist or cope in his absence, and that their deaths are therefore necessary, perhaps even merciful, corollaries to his suicide. In either case, the killer apparently feels entitled to decide his victims’ fates. Such proprietary constructions of the marital relationship are conspicuous and germane in a large proportion of nonfamilicidal uxoricides, too [Wilson and Daly, 1992a, 1994a,b], but what inspires a minority of these proprietary wife-killers to murder their children as well remains unknown.

What's important, in my opinion, is not just to lament the human condition, but to think about how such occurrences might be stopped. In this case, if the couple's debt problems would've been alleviated, they probably would've gone over the edge. Or, if their mental problems would've been noted and attended to, none of this might've not happened. Finland has a pretty comprehensive and free-for-all health care system, including psychiatric treatment, but it has gone through sizable budget cuts during the last few years. Cases like this might be what those budget cuts have cost us.

There is a difference between welfare systems here, I think. In Finland there's a wide selection of government subsidies and welfare services, and everyone's entitled to them, so they aren't particularly stigmatizing. I guess it's different in the US.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8610491.stm

yes, that is awful

read this yesterday, can't believe it!
A 2009 law setting the minimum age at 17 was repealed after some lawmakers said it was un-Islamic.

Musha isn't everything only awful