Today, I read the current news report about this new book “Born Or Bred? Martin Bryant: The Making Of A Mass Murderer”.
Martin Bryant drove to Port Arthur, Tasmania in Australia and murdered 35 people because “it was a nice day” and “a pretty spot”. That was thirteen years ago in April 28th, 1996. Ironically, he felt like a victim who was driven to do the killing.
Co-author Paola Totaro says in a news interview that, “There’s some great mixture here. You are born with a genetic legacy. But ultimately, it’s the environment and what you live in your early childhood that determines whether you express those genes.” This resonates what I long hold that behaviour is a function of personality and environment. The SAME personality would behave DIFFERENTLY under different environments (or context, as Kevin Hogan would say). That explains why it’s important to choose carefully your friends whom you mix with; choose carefully where do you live. Even when we were poor when we grew up, my mother would choose meticulously a nice neighbourhood to live in, working extra hard to pay for the extra rental.
Co-author Robert Wainwright says in an interview that Bryant was so desperate to find someone befriend with him or even to have a causal conversation that he bought business class ticket to fly to London or Los Angela just to ensure he had someone to talk to. Sometimes, he would just stay at the destination for a few hours before flying back.
Now, let’s have a look at Bryant’s birth date 7th May 1967.
7/5/1967 = 35 = (8)
(7)
Born Characters:
_|_6_|_9_ = Mental & Spiritual Aspect
_|_5_|_ _ = Emotional & Movement Aspects
1 | | 77 = Physical abilities & Idea Manifestation
He’s a negative strong “7” personality: Secretive, introvert, withdrawn, over-protective, possessive, idealist, jealous and a silent type to the extreme.
Single weak “1”: Negative. Inferiority complex. (But the strong “7”, even it’s negative here, still rescues the personality from that complex)
Developing Character
3|__|__0 = Mental & Spiritual Aspects
_ |_ | 8_ = Emotional & Movement Aspects
| | 7 = Physical abilities & Idea Manifestation
His born personality of being a recluse is compounded by his moral lesson of the same number “7”. Instead of learning to override it with spiritual pursuit, he fell into escapism and live in his own dream world. The other moral lesson of “8” is for him to learn through love and emotional support. Instead, it becomes a dominant driving force to air his rage.
Martin = 4+1+9+2+9+5 = 30, adding that finicky, detail mind and mental strain into his secretive life.
His neighbor says Bryant was overly protective of Miss Harvey, a family friend and an elderly spinster, not liking anyone to speak to her. At his New Town High School, he was known as a withdrawn child who never showed his true emotions.
The “5” from birth month May reflects the restlessness within him. As a toddler, his mother, unable to control his energy, used to leash him against the balcony. As he grew older, his father was one of the few who could understand him, kept him busy to absorb his erratic behaviour.
From Wikipedia:
“Professor Paul Mullen, a psychiatrist, says, “It’s very difficult for us to get our heads around this but here was one of the world’s worst mass killers who has ever existed but he saw himself as the aggrieved person. It was the world that had driven him to this. It wasn’t as if he really wanted to [murder] but he had no choice. He felt he had been driven to it.”
“Once you break it down you begin to see a terrible tragedy. Take the suicide [his father’s suicide] out and it wouldn’t have happened, without the [inherited] money it wouldn’t have hapened, take the guns out and it wouldn’t have happened. Provide a little more effective care and it probably wouldn’t have happened.”
The new book does not seem to raise the question: To what extent Bryant did do all the killings? The trial was quite secretive and provided a notorious example of trial by media.
To hear the other side of the story, read THE PORT ARTHUR MASSACRE CONSPIRACY, by Joe Vialls at http://www.whale.to/b/viallspam.html
