‘They’re not wolves – they’re sheep’: the psychiatrist who spent decades meeting and studying lone-actor mass killers: From Port Arthur to Hoddle Street, Paul E Mullen has had a front-row seat to the men behind some of the worst public massacres. He says it’s possible to ‘disrupt the script’ for future violence (Walter Marsh, 8 Nov 2025, The Guardian)
Things changed, Mullen says, after a shooting in Austin, Texas in August 1966, when a 25-year-old male student climbed to the 28th-floor observation deck of a University of Texas building and opened fire, killing 15 and injuring another 30.
“He was in every major newspaper in America, on the front page the next day with his photograph and his name, and he was covered worldwide over the next few days – they later made a film,” he says, referring to 1975’s The Deadly Tower, starring Kurt Russell as the red bandana-clad gunman.
“It was the Texas university tower massacre that created the script, which has now grown and grown and grown,” Mullen reflects. “And the first imitator of the Texas killer was only five weeks [later].”
ike the Port Arthur killer, these are often friendless men fuelled by a mix of resentment and a sense of weakness, drawn to the promise of infamy, publicity, and a noteworthy death enjoyed by previous mass killers. Some even dress like their predecessors, from Russell’s red bandana to the all-black attire of the teenage Columbine school shooters.
“They gather grievances, grievances, grievances,” Mullen says, echoing the common complaints he has heard across his career. “‘People mistreated me’; ‘I was cheated’; ‘they’re not fair’; ‘no one likes me’. All these things, but they also feel that they should have fought back.
“The resentment builds up and builds up, and it becomes your whole attitude to the world, which is angry, which is full of a sense of grievance. But it’s much worse, because you never did anything. And this, in a sense, is your final reply.”
And Populism and Identitarianism are nothing but te politics of resentment.
