Report: Most mass shooters exhibit prior traits of concern
FBI agents walk through items left behind when concert-goers ran from the Route 91 Harvest Country Music Fest last October in Las Vegas. Fifty-eight people died and more than 500 were injured in the mass shooting.
The attacks have taken on a numbing familiarity in recent years: Five shot to death at an airport in south Florida. Twenty-six slain at a church in Texas. Five killed by a gunman rampaging through northern California.
These violent outbursts last year, and others like them, had key things in common. Chief among them: Long before the violence, the people identified as attackers had elicited concerns from those who encountered them, red flags that littered their paths to wreaking havoc.
This is a common thread in most of the mass attacks carried out in public spaces last year, the majority of which were preceded by behavior that worried other people, according to a report released Thursday by the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center.
“Regardless of whether these attacks were acts of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock carried more than 20 suitcases filled with weapons into the Mandalay Bay Resort over several days before opening fire on concert-goers Oct. 1 from his hotel windows. He fired more than 1,000 rounds in about 10 minutes. This image was taken from a Mandalay Bay elevator camera.
workplace violence, domestic violence, school-based violence or terrorism, similar themes were observed in the backgrounds of the perpetrators,” the report stated.
Every person blamed for a mass attack was a man, the report said. All of them “had at least one significant stressor within the last
five years, and over half had indications of financial instability in that time frame,” the report found.
That included issues with family relationships, being fired or suspended from work and facing unstable living situations. More than half of them had histories of mental-health issues, criminal charges and substance abuse, the report said. And nearly half were fueled by some kind of personal grievance. Half of the attackers had patterns of making threats; a third made specific threats to their eventual targets, the report found.
“Direct threats should be investigated, because a threat unchecked could escalate into an act of violence,” said Matthew Doherty, who formerly led the National Threat Assessment Center. “But the mere absence of a threat doesn’t mean somebody is not a danger. And that is a learning curve that many in law enforcement still need to grasp.”
The new report comes as the February school shooting in Parkland, Florida, has prompted intense scrutiny of how law-enforcement officials handled warnings about the alleged shooter before 17 people were slain in that massacre.