Despite the glitz and glitter of the United States, boastfully referred to as the "last superpower" on earth, carnage is strewn across the landscape.

While unemployment is down and the stock market soars to record highs, spiritual leaders complain of a moral decay that rivals those Biblical nations made famous for the destruction delivered upon them by another Superpower.

On July 28, as rush hour traffic built on highways throughout the country, radio news stations blared the latest shock to a nation almost numb to shock by such massacres: An Atlanta man had shot to death nine people in two office buildings and was still at large. Making matters worse, it was later announced that the man’s wife and two children had been found dead in their suburban Atlanta home.

The collective gasp from stunned travelers rivaled the grief expressed at the shootings at Columbine High School near Denver; the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City; the school shootings in Paducah, Ky.; and the recent shootings by a white supremacist that left a Northwestern University basketball coach and several other people in Indiana and Illinois dead.

When it was obvious that his murder spree was over, Mark Barton, 44, a former chemist and stock market day-trader, ended his own life with a bullet to the head as he sat in his van in a Georgia gas station surrounded by police.

"We are a violent society. Period," said Dr. Lynne McClure, a management consultant based in Mesa, Az., and author of "Risky Business: Managing Employee Violence in the Workplace."

Dr. McClure added that violent individuals tend to forewarn, but nobody paid attention to the signals Mr. Barton was sending. And send them he did.

Before he entered the Momentum and All-Tech office buildings on his killing spree, he bludgeoned to death his second wife, Leigh Ann, and his two children from his first marriage, Matthew and Michelle, over a two-day period.

In 1993, his first wife and her mother were found hacked to death near a lake in Alabama. While Mr. Barton was never charged with the crime, he was a prime suspect. [In a suicide note left by Mr. Barton that expressed the loss of hope, he also denied involvement in that crime.]

And even before that, he was fired from a job as president of a small janitorial cleaning supply company because co-workers thought he was paranoid. Angry over unpaid stock options, Mr. Barton broke into the company, crashed computers and stole product formulas, according to Newsweek magazine. He was not charged, however, when he agreed to leave town.

Mr. Barton’s marriage to his second wife became strained last October, when she moved out and rented an apartment in a nearby town. Reportedly there were money issues that deteriorated the relationship, even as Mr. Barton had told his minister he couldn’t stop gambling on stocks.

With debts mounting due to day-trading losses, Mr. Barton was cut off from trading at All-Tech because of unpaid debts. On June 10, he spent $87,500 at Momentum Securities and lost it. On July 27, debts mounted so much that Momentum Securities demanded payment of debt before he was allowed to trade.

That night Mr. Barton killed his wife. The next night he killed his children. The next day he killed four people at Momentum Securities and five people at All-Tech before killing himself.

"When you see suicide, you’re talking about major psychological disorders, not necessarily stock market stress," said noted psychiatrist Dr. Carl Bell in Chicago.

He downplayed Mr. Barton’s losses in stock trading as the breakpoint of Mr. Barton’s rage. "Suicide in the absence of major mental illness is rare," he said.

Valerie Williams, external relations director of the National Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association, said Mr. Barton’s pattern suggests a mental illness that exploded because it went untreated.

"Somebody in the midst of mania will take risky behavior," she said. "I don’t know if the man in Atlanta was diagnosed, but certainly there were symptoms of imbalance going on."

Suicide, she said, is a classic symptom of untreated depression, with two-thirds of the 30,000 reported suicides traced to the mental condition.

But Dr. Bell points out another factor seen in mass killings. "If you look at homicide and suicide or mass murder you’re talking about white males," he said. "And the reason for that is they have a white male entitlement dysfunction—they think they own people. That’s why they take everybody out with them."

When asked what the white science community is doing about it, Dr. Bell responds, "When I mention it, they ignore it because it hits too close to home. But if they would discuss it, they could figure out a way to prevent it."

"The high percentage of men committing lethal violence are white males," acknowledged Dr. Tom Harpley, the clinical director at the National Trauma Service in San Diego. "However, the reason why is pure conjecture because they commit suicide—either they kill themselves or commit suicide by proxy," meaning they set themselves up to be killed by police.

With the emergence of the phenomena of workplace violence, an industry has emerged to address the problem. Dr. James T. Reese is a clinical psychologist and a former FBI profiler who consults Fortune 500 companies on such issues.

"(Corporations) still don’t talk about it, not because they don’t want to. They don’t know how to verbalize their awareness," he said.

Dr. Reese and others said the first thing they look for when a company calls is if the company has a program in place to detect early warning signs—a measure he considers extremely important.

"Today, the average white, middle-class male has no sense of accountability for his behavior. The basic code of behavior for him is, if it feels good, do it," Dr. Reese said.

Dr. Julia Hare, a noted clinical psychologist with the Black Think Tank in San Francisco, said Blacks and whites express retribution differently. "Blacks usually seek out the individual," she said. "But when (whites) went after Saddam Hussein, look at the innocent people they wiped out."

Both she and Dr. Bell expressed concerns that Blacks would begin to mimic white behavior as Blacks try to assimilate into society.

"We’ve stopped disciplining our children for ‘time out’, there’s no prayer in our schools. There are very few things whites come up with that Blacks seeking acceptance won’t do," she said.

Dr. Hare said that whites are beginning to feel the stress of finding out they don’t have all the freedoms they thought they had and the more government moves into their lives, the more they will retaliate.

Not many social scientists ignore the impact of media violence on behavior in society. "Our technology is way ahead of our wisdom," Dr. McClure noted. "Our use of technology spreads violence further and quicker. We’ve made violence normal and a normal way to react to problems," she said.

Nation of Islam Southern Regional Minister Ava Muhammad believes the escalation of violence is a direct result of America’s continual separation from God.

"His (Barton’s) actions are proof of the consequences of the remoteness from Allah (God) in a society where racism and rage go unchecked," said Min. Ava of Atlanta, who last year became the first woman in Islam to head a mosque.

"But the media treats each incident as if it never happened before," she said. "Whenever something like this occurs it is instantly shown to be an aberration. With Blacks it is indicative of our nature, according to the media.

"Susan Smith murdered her children, manufactured a Black suspect, however, her trial was quiet and quick. They are still talking about O.J. Simpson, who was found not guilty. He is now being penalized by white society because he benefited from laws they created," she added.

Rev. Dr. John Chaplin, vice president at large of the Nashville, Tenn.-based National Baptist Convention in Nashville, said, "The American Dream is absent of God. And the cause of the problem goes right to the heart of government. The people in government have not corrected the error of the Constitution that excluded Blacks."

To the quest for material wealth instead of spiritual fulfillment, Min. Benjamin Muhammad, East Coast regional minister, responds: "Prosperity without faith in God is like walking in quicksand with a pocket full of gold. The American economy is facing a serious disintegration … and white people become enraged when they find out that their prosperity is but an illusion.

"The killings in Atlanta are only the latest signs of the times. We must do more than just read the signs and make analysis of the times, we must mobilize and organize ourselves to take corrective action. And that’s why we’re preparing for the October 2000 Million Family March in Washington."