Kimveer Gill was a sociopath: Expert

Kimveer Gill, 25, who went on a shooting rampage at Dawson College in Montreal on September 13, killed one person and injured 19 others, and later committed suicide, was a sociopath, says an expert.

Dr Isher-Paul Sahni, an Indo-Canadian Sociologist at Concordia University in Montreal, told rediff.com on Friday that Gill "fits into that profile of a sociopath and for a sociopath, other human beings are like tables, chairs, and boxes and such a person has no empathy for another human being."

"When we analyze his violent character, my answer has a few levels to it: On the one hand the explanation is simple but also complex at the same time. It is simple in the sense that you are always going to have variations within the population that have a relative degree of sociopathy. What we see more recently even if we abstract it and that being we can ask for example about Bosnia as to how do people, who have lived together for generations, who eat at each other's homes, can kill each others in the most horrendous way overnight," this expert noted.

"I think one level is to recognize that there is to a large degree of sociopathy in the society. To a lesser degree or greater degree people are right on the fringe and it is just the matter of opportunity.

"The other is we have to know about his family dynamics. So far it seems he meets all the typical criteria -- at least a couple of them -- to be a sociopath: Firstly he was excluded from the peer group in his own environment. We don't know why he targeted Dawson College. He appears to have no links there. He was already part of fairly marginalized Goth culture, which is really a sub-culture amongst teenagers, people who are often picked upon by other sub-cultures like athletes, etc."

Sahni went on to analyse: "It doesn't appear that Gill had a girlfriend. Teenagers who have girlfriends, who are in this kind of sub-culture, don't go and do this. Many a times, they may shoot their girlfriends or shoot themselves but by a large people who do this, like Gill, are isolated loners who have no girlfriends."

He was not able to analyse as to why and how a normal person could become a sociopath. "It was the same situation in case of Columbine case. Those young students dressed the same way (as Gill), they had a large collection of guns and they seemingly went unnoticed. We don't know (as to why a person turns sociopath) but we can assume there is something odd going on here. We are not paying any attention to this."

This reporter today met an Indo-Canadian Member of Ontario Legislature. He did not want to go on record but wondered as "to what kind of sick mind he (Gill) would be that when the victim (De Sousa) was lying on the floor, and almost dying, he kept on shooting at her…"

To that observation, Sahni explained "standard term we use in sociopath is by definition these people are unable to have an empathy for other human beings. So, it is quite an interesting phenomenon. There are lots of people in the society who may not go on a shooting rampage but they have sociopathic potentials. The potential is there in a much larger degree of human beings than we recognize."

He referred to two experiments conducted recently. One was at Stanford called Zimbardo experiment in which they devised a fake prison and there were graduate students who were part of this experiment. Within one day in this fake prison, many of those graduate students were literally trying to kill each other.

The other experiment is called Stanley Milgram, named after the person who conducted the experiment at Harvard. In this experiment people were asked to shock the respondent. And within no time respondents were screaming and begging the person, who had asked to come to hit the buzzer. Of 77 respondents only one person refused to do it as to press the button, Sahni explained. 

"For sociopath, other human beings are just objects and so he has no empathy for them. And the sad part is if you are at the level, you cannot teach that person to have empathy if they don't already have it. That's the end of it."

According to Sahni these sociopath can't be rehabilitated. "They are like child sex offenders. People in these two categories cannot be cured, cannot be rehabilitated."

When asked whether such actions of Gill had put the Indo-Canadian community on the defensive, as if they as a community are guilty of criminal acts, Sahni disagreed: "I don't think there is any reason for the community to be on the defensive. People who generally commit such acts are young White males. This (Gill) is the only case that I know of immediately, in recent times, that has been done by an ethnic person. So, it has not been prevalent enough among the community yet."

By the same token, Sahni noted, "Muslims are on the defensive simply because people  who are committing acts of terrorism, do under the name of Islam and there has been so many of them that now religion has been linked with the more totalitarian kind of fringe group. That has taken a lot of people kind of associate with Islam with the extremist groups but given that this is the only case (of Gill). I think there's no reason for people to jump to the next level and say ethnic minorities, Indians generally do this."

"For the sake of discussion, if there were 10 other cases like Gill then people will start pointing fingers at the community. We don't have to ask that question yet," he said.