Wanting world to notice

With yet another young white man in police custody and charged with first-degree murder after a mass shooting – this time at a supermarket in Buffalo on Saturday – the police and the public are again asking: Why?

Law enforcement officials were quick to label the massacre, which left 10 people dead, a hate crime. The suspect, who has pleaded not guilty, is believed to have posted a manifesto online articulating fascist hate and far-right ideas. He also allegedly drove for more than three hours to the predominantly black neighbourhood where he unleashed his terror.

This is all eerily reminiscent of the August 2019 mass shooting in El Paso, in which the shooter posted a racist screed full of white supremacist talking points on social media, then drove more than 10 hours to a border community from his hometown near Dallas to fire at shoppers inside a Walmart. Most of the 23 people killed were Latinx. The shooter confessed he was targeting ‘‘Mexicans’’.

It’s easy to focus on the hateful ideology underpinning these shootings. But our research has shown that hate and ‘‘terrorism’’, as they are commonly understood, are not what drives most mass shooters.

These perpetrators aren’t subject-matter experts in politics, ideology or religion. Their understanding of the ‘‘cause’’ said to motivate their actions is typically shallow and contradictory – and is simply convenient.

Our dozens of interviews with perpetrators and the people who knew them do reveal, however, that shooters often have the same motivation: to cause as much death and destruction as possible so that a world that had otherwise ignored them would be forced to notice them and feel their anguish. Thus, the Buffalo shooter livestreamed his actions.

Our research shows that mass shooters walk a common route to violence through early childhood trauma. If they fail to achieve what they’ve been socialised to believe is their destiny – material wealth, success,

All we can say with some degree of certainty is that noone living a fulfilled life perpetrates a mass shooting.

AP Tending to a makeshift memorial outside the supermarket that was the scene of a mass shooting in Buffalo, New York on Saturday.