The twisted mind behind a massacre
Killers may be transfixed with fame, even in death, experts say
As investigators look for a motive in the massacre of 58 people at a country music festival in Las Vegas, one thing is clear to criminologist Adam Lankford: The shooter knew an attack of this magnitude would draw worldwide attention to him.
The pursuit of fame — or infamy — through mass murder has emerged as a factor in numerous mass shootings since two teens predicted on videotape that killing their classmates and teachers at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999 would win them respect and that movie directors would vie to tell their story.
A man who killed nine people at Umpqua Commu-
nity College in Oregon on Oct. 1, 2015 — exactly two years before the Las Vegas massacre — wrote admiringly of other killers in online posts before the shooting: “Seems the more people you kill, the more you’re in the limelight.”
Lankford, a criminology professor and researcher at the University of Alabama who has studied mass shootings, said his research shows that mass killers driven by desire for fame slaughter and wound twice as many people as murderers with other motives, such as workplace revenge crimes.
“The (Las Vegas) shooter’s father was on America’s Most Wanted list, so if ever there was a kid who grew up knowing that crimes can get you a lot of attention, it was him,” Lankford said. “He clearly had a sense of what kind of media attention this would get . ... The offenders realize if they want fame, they have to kill as many as possible.”
Lankford said mass killers are also often suicidal, as was the 64-year-old shooter in Las Vegas, who killed himself as police closed in. The two shooters at Columbine and the killer at Umpqua Community College also committed suicide following their shooting sprees.
“People who want to be famous but care about self-preservation don’t commit these attacks,” Lankford said. “They aren’t willing to die or deal with consequences. (Mass killers) want to go out in a blaze of glory, even if they don’t experience the fame while alive.”
Sunday’s massacre was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, with at least 58 killed and 527 injured by gunfire or while trying to escape. Many remain in critical condition at Las Vegas hospitals.
The gunman, police say, broke out two windows of his hotel room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel to shoot down at a crowd of 22,000 people who were at an outdoor concert.
Before the Las Vegas massacre, a shooting rampage by a lone gunman at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando last year was the deadliest attack in modern America, with 49 killed at the gay club. That puts the country’s two most deadly shootings in modern history within the past 16 months. The four most deadly mass shootings happened within the past 10 years. In 2007, 32 people were killed at Virginia Tech University. In 2012, 26 people — 20 of them children — were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.
Lankford called the increasing frequency and rising death counts a “disturbing trajectory.”
“We are going to keep seeing these attackers try to kill more than anyone else has before, or by killing differently, innovating a new way to get attention,” Lankford said.
David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center and a health policy professor at Harvard University, gives an explanation for the rise in mass shootings.
“These mass shootings are contagious in the sense that one spawns another,” Hemenway said. “That’s one of the reasons we see more in bunches. It’s suddenly on people’s radar.”
Another reason, he said, is the sheer number of guns in the United States. He pointed to the number of guns found in the Las Vegas shooter’s possession: 23 in the hotel room and 19 at his home.
“We just make it so easy to get more and more highly lethal weapons,” Hemenway said. “Other countries would be appalled at how many guns (the Las Vegas shooter) had . ... One of the fundamental principles in economics and psychology is if you make things easier, more people do it.”
The United States has by far the most guns in the world, with 270 million firearms owned by civilians, and the most per capita. Comparatively tiny Yemen had the second most per capita, according to a highly regarded 2007 report by the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva research initiative that tracks guns.
Lankford has found a statistical link between the rates of gun ownership and the number of mass shootings. In a 2016 study, Lankford looked at mass shootings in 171 countries between 1966 and 2012 and found that the higher per-capita rate of gun ownership correlated with more mass shootings.
He found that the United States has 5 percent of the global population but accounted for 31 percent of the global public mass shootings between 1966 and 2012.
Lankford and other experts say the combination of gun availability and the American obsession with fame and notoriety makes the United States more prone to such violence than other countries.
Hans Steiner, an author and professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University who specializes in the psychology of mass murderers, points to America’s Wild West cowboy-and-guns mythology and the belief that men (and mass killers are almost all men) must take forceful action to solve problems as factors in why the U.S. sees such violence.
“Sometimes when people do these mass shootings, there’s a perverse, twisted way of wanting to be famous, or sometimes it’s ills that have been perceived, such an insult of some kind,” Steiner said.
Experts say addressing the rise in mass shootings is complex when it comes to the availability of guns, but many suggest a simple approach to deal with fame-seeking shooters. More than 140 scholars and law enforcement officials signed a letter urging media not to use the names or photos of mass killers, unless the person is the subject of a manhunt.
The group, which includes Lankford, said such a practice would deprive “fame-seeking mass shooters the personal attention they want.”
Lankford said that mass murderers looking to make a name for themselves by breaking a killing record — as many have indicated they wanted to do in messages left behind — might be dissuaded if they weren’t sure their name would be made famous in the coverage of the event.
“Being the recordholder when no one knows who they are doesn’t make sense,” Lankford said.
San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Kevin Fagan contributed to this report.