People who kill

[Lagmonster]

A question I've always wanted answered: What percentage of the human population would murder if there were no legal repercussions to doing so, and in fact, legal acceptance of their actions? And I want to temper this by saying that I'm *NOT* talking about basic gut instinct revenge, greed and passion middle-of-the-night, caught-my-friend-with-my-wife crimes at all. No, I'm specifically talking about killings based purely on popular, religious or political philosophies.

For example, if killing gays became legally and morally acceptable in America, can we estimate what percentage of the gay-hating population would actually go through with pulling a trigger? Or, in a broader sense, what percentage of the population is capable of murder in a similar environment?

[Darth Wong]

How large were lynch mobs back in the era when this used to happen regularly?

[Lagmonster]

Is a lynch mob comprised of people, any one of whom would perform the execution, or is it comprised of a group who support the execution and only one or two who would actually go through with it? Not that I've ever lynched anything, but I would assume there's an actual difference between a killer and a person who wishes you were dead.

I suspect there's no cumulative historical data to answer my question, honestly. I'd bet that, say, in Canada a media polling group could search all day without finding a single person who would admit that they'd kill someone they were prejudiced against, but the actual number of people who would do it in practice must be frighteningly higher.

[wolveraptor]

People are much more prone to be violent in a crowd, I would think, mostly because they're spurred on by one passionate psycho.

[Darth Wong]

I've heard stories from Rwanda about classmates butchering former friends. I'd say that hate can spread like a contagion once it reaches critical mass, especially if it's fueled by a sense of righteous indignation against some real or imagined past grievance. As one person said about Rwanda, the people who had no shoes killed the people who had shoes. Poverty is an instant grievance (something for the greedy wealthy class in the US to remember).

[Big Phil]

Based on studies done among soldiers in the Korean War and before, less than 10% of all infantrymen in combat were actually willing to pull the trigger and shoot at another person to kill them. Many soldiers were willing to fire in the general direction of an enemy, over their heads, or go through the motions, but actual soldier-v-soldier killing was only done by a small percentage of soldiers.

Distance was a great help in increasing the willingness to kill. Artillerymen, bomber pilots, machine gunners, etc., were almost always willing to shoot, because they often could not see who they were aiming at, or they weren't really aiming at a particularly target - they were area shooting.

It's hard wired into humans not to kill other humans - only the particularly aggressive among us are naturally able to do so. For most humans, pointing a gun at another human and pulling the trigger, or stabbing them, or beating them to death, takes desensitization and conditioning.

Based on this, my best guess is that maybe 5% of the population would actually kill another person, although a whole ton of people would stand around and watch rather than get involved on one side or the other. This is often what happened with lynchings - only a couple of people actually carried out the murder, while everybody else was there watching, cheering them on, etc. Those watching could justify their behavior because they "didn't get their hands dirty."

[wolveraptor]

^That's exactly what happens in gladiatorial arenas. Few would actually do the things they watched.