Dr. Marshall N. Heyman, then-director of the Behavioral Assessment Systems Center, in Falls Church, Virginia, back in 1984, published a study of 22 people who were presidential assassins or other similarly dangerous perpetrators.
His investigation explains that as far back as the 1980s, the U.S. Secret Service commissioned an investigation into presidential assassins to identify common psychological characteristics.
Of those in the study, 11 had killed, wounded, or otherwise assaulted presidents; five had killed or wounded others of interest to the Secret Service, either directly or in an effort to attack the president; and five had been placed under investigation as potentially dangerous, three of whom were apprehended while engaged in potentially dangerous attacks on the president or vice-president.
One common theme that emerged was a tendency for these perpetrators to suffer from various deep personality inadequacies, so they kept failing at jobs and relationships throughout their lifetimes.
They were all loners.
The author contends that it was this combination of inescapable inadequacy, and the chronic, frustrating, unrelenting inability to achieve any recognizable goal that eventually rendered them fatally, dangerous.
They had “nothing personal” against their targets. Instead, the president merely symbolized the frustrations they experienced or personified the “system” that was forever letting them down.
The author of the investigation points out that one of the few dependable associations in emotional life is that frustration leads to aggression.
The subjects in this study were generally chronically frustrated people, who were not just unable to derive any satisfaction from life, but, crucially, they never learned........