What do mass shooters have in common?
It is now just two weeks into September and the month has already seen its share of mass shootings in America. At a Dallas Cowboys watch party in Plano, Texas, a woman’s estranged ex-husband murdered her and seven of her friends; and in Rockford, Wash., a gunman opened fire at a high school, killing at least one and injuring at least three.
For the past two years, I’ve covered such killings for the Trace, a journalism nonprofit dedicated solely to tracking gun violence.
I’ve become accustomed to the standard public discussion that follows mass shootings: what could have possibly motivated such senseless acts of violence?
School shootings in particular tend to generate plenty of political debate, either about the shooters’ beliefs (occult activity in Christopher Harper Mercer’s case; violent video games and music in Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s; misogyny, masculinity and entitlement in a host of others) or the role of firearms in their lives.
But my experience suggests that the outsize attention paid to the shooter’s particular beliefs obscures the real connections between mass shooters.
What binds them together and elevates their likelihood of killing in this particular fashion is not any particular belief set but a history of antisocial, sometimes violent conduct.
The Trace launched just 48 hours after the 2015 Charleston church massacre. Since then, my colleagues and I have covered similar shootings perpetrated by failed business owners, wayward veterans, troubled teenagers, jihadist dabblers, disgruntled employees, antiabortionists, estranged spouses, Black Lives Matter supporters, sovereign citizens and many others. It’s usually difficult to decide just which label best describes the perpetrator: often, several seem to apply, or none at all. The difficulty of interpreting motivations is compounded by the fact that at the end of these rampages, the shooter is typically among the dead.
What is clear, however, is that regardless of ideological motivation, or even in the complete absence of any such drive, these kinds of attacks are usually presaged by some clear warning signs.
“Most people who commit serious crimes, that’s not where they began. They didn’t just start committing gun homicides,” Duke University psychiatrist Jeffrey Swanson told me after the 2016 Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, Fla.
Before shooters actually kill, they usually assault, abuse or threaten people close to them, such as spouses or co-workers.
They are often profoundly alienated from society. James Hodgkinson, who opened fire last summer on Republican lawmakers practicing at a Virginia baseball field, for instance, threatened his daughter with a knife, punched his neighbour in the face and struck his neighbour’s boyfriend with a shotgun before firing a round at the man as he fled. In the months before the shooting, he lived out of a van nearly a thousand miles from his Illinois home.
Likewise, Omar Mateen, who committed the Orlando shooting, routinely beat his first wife, threatened co-workers and could barely hold down a job. Even those shooters without violent histories, such as Dylann Roof, Elliot Rodger or Seung-Hui Cho, were known by friends, family or teachers to make disturbing threats and had withdrawn from normal social life.
In any case, a propensity for anger is not, strictly speaking, mental illness and the mentally ill are far more likely to be victims of violence or to harm themselves than they are to harm others.
But if we want to stop mass shootings before they happen, it isn’t extreme beliefs or motives we should be focusing on – it’s the antisocial, violent and threatening behavior, ideological or not, of those around us.