Red flags common before shootings
A cascade of warnings about the person who would carry out this year’s deadliest mass killing did nothing to prevent his attack, which killed 18 people last month in Lewiston, Maine.
It was a scenario America has seen repeatedly.
At least seven of this year’s 10 deadliest mass killings were carried out by attackers who had exhibited behavior that had concerned loved ones, acquaintances or law enforcement in the months or years before the shootings, according to a Washington Post analysis of news reports relying on statements from police and witnesses.
The perpetrators in the shootings in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, Calif., in January; at an elementary school in Nashville, Tenn., in March; and at a mall in Allen, Texas, in May had made previous threats, been violent, alarmed family members or signaled their intentions online. In two other attacks, in Oklahoma and Utah — in which perpetrators killed people related to them — there had been previous criminal charges or allegations of abuse.
In each of those shootings, at least six people were killed. Signals of distress have also preceded other high-profile killings that were not among the year’s deadliest attacks, including those at Michigan State University in February and a Louisville, Ky., bank in April.
“Very rarely do we see someone commit a mass shooting where there were no warning signs,” said Lisa Geller, a senior adviser at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.
Eighty-one people had been killed and 32 injured in the year’s 10 deadliest shootings as of Wednesday. The Post‘s tally is based on a database maintained by USA Today, The Associated Press and Northeastern University. The Post defines a mass killing as an event in which four or more people, not including the perpetrator, are killed by gunfire.
In Lewiston, Maine, multiple warnings about the gunman, Robert Card, reached law enforcement in the months before the Oct. 25 killings, but no system would’ve allowed police to swiftly remove his access to guns.
The case has renewed questions about how to prevent mass killings and how to reach people before they commit violence. It has also drawn attention to red-flag laws, which are intended to help families and police respond to perceived warning signs, and their implementation.
“A very high proportion of mass shooters leak their intentions in advance,” said Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, N.Y. “What that does is it creates opportunities ... for intervention and de-escalation.”