Of course the question arises as to why these perpetrators always use public or civic spaces as the setting for their acts. Public spaces are spaces where not only actions are carried out, but also where symbolic actions are carried out, in which each person takes on a certain role. The perpetrator is concerned with creating a public setting, and he is also making a desperate attempt to attain fame through infamy. Here at an exemplary location, the perpetrator declares himself to be the unconditional enemy of everyone, an enemy of the entire society.

The amok runner lives in disturbed contact to a world that doesn’t fit him. “Reality, as it presents itself to others, in other words a normal day in a normal world,” says psychiatrist Lothar Adler, “is something that he never really experiences.” Thus the perpetrators do not stage their expanded suicides in remote places, but in the midst of peaceful everyday life, in the place where the break with reality appears most glaringly: in schools, businesses, pedestrian zones, libraries, office buildings or churches. It is here, in the zones of public order, that the amok runner can take on and play out his final role as the negative instance. He alone designates where and when his sudden theater of cruelty will begin and whom it will strike. Just as with regular theater, his theater only works with an audience. When the media report live from the scene of the crime, the amok runner momentarily becomes completely unified with his image. As the protagonist of his own fiction, he transfers his inner scenario onto the victims. Analogously, many survivors describe their experience of such massacres with the total loss of their sense of reality.