New research reveals striking commonalities among the perpetrators of mass shootings and suggest a data-backed, mental health-based approach to ID and stop the next mass shooter before he pulls the trigger.
This according to researchers who constructed a database of every mass shooter since 1966 who shot and killed four or more people in a public place, and every shooting incident at schools, workplaces and places of worship since 1999.
Funded by the research arm of the Department of Justice, researches Jillian Peterson and James Densley, published their findings in a recent book, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic.
What Creates a Mass Shooter?
Peterson: There’s a consistent pathway.
Early childhood trauma seems to be the foundation, whether violence in the home, sexual assault, parental suicides, extreme bullying.
Then you see the build toward hopelessness, despair, isolation, self-loathing, oftentimes rejection from peers.
That turns into a really identifiable crisis point where they’re acting differently. Sometimes they have previous suicide attempts.
What’s different from traditional suicide is that the self-hate turns against a group. They start asking themselves, “Whose fault is this?” Is it a racial group or women or a religious group, or is it my classmates? The hate turns outward. There’s also this quest for fame and notoriety.
A good guy with a gun can be an incentive for these individuals.
According to the research, shootings are almost always acts of violent suicide.
Peterson: I don’t think most people realize that these are suicides, in addition to homicides. Mass shooters design these to be their final acts. When you realize this, it completely flips the idea that someone with a gun on the scene is going to deter this. If anything, that’s an incentive for these individuals. They are going in to be killed.
It’s hard to focus on the suicide because these are horrific homicides. But it’s a critical piece because we know so much from the suicide prevention world that can translate here.
So, what are the solutions?
Peterson: Then we really need resources at institutions like schools. We need to build teams to investigate when kids are in crisis and then link those kids to mental health services.
Densley: Too often in politics it becomes an either-or proposition. Gun control or mental health. Our research says that none of these solutions is perfect. We have to do multiple things at one time and put them together as a comprehensive package. People have to be comfortable with complexity and that’s not always easy.