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Those "likely to do this . . . have a common denominator," Lavergne said. "They're very, very frustrated people who are so self-centered they feel the whole world is against them. There are many thousands, maybe millions of people, who fit that description."

With Each Shooting, Common Threads
Easy Gun Access, Deep Frustration Seen
By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 17, 2007; A11

On a hot August day in 1966, a 25-year-old engineering student and ex-Marine named Charles Whitman climbed the clock tower of the University of Texas at Austin's Main Building and began firing. He killed 14 people -- he had killed his wife and mother earlier -- and wounded 31 in what, until yesterday, was the nation's worst shooting rampage on a campus.

So-called spree killings are multiple homicides that erupt for no immediately apparent reason. They are not, by definition, terrorist attacks. They're usually not political.

The University of Texas incident may not have been the first -- some historians consider the 1890 Battle of Wounded Knee a spree killing -- but it was the first that combined two modern elements: mass media coverage and the ready availability of high-powered weapons.

"We've always had people who robbed banks and all that, but until Whitman, we never thought that someone would take the kind of weapons he took and target strangers in a public place," said Gary M. Lavergne, author of "A Sniper in the Tower" (1997).

We have learned a few things about who the killers are. In a New York Times profile of 102 killers in 100 attacks -- from a 1949 incident in Camden, N.J., through Columbine High School in 1999 -- researchers found that at least half showed signs of serious mental problems.