Copyright © 2021 Jillian Peterson and James Densley
Infographics by Liam Flanagan
Cover © 2021 Abrams
Published in 2021 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021934851
ISBN: 978-1-4197-5295-7
eISBN: 978-1-64700-227-5
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For the victims
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: Monsters
CHAPTER 2: America
CHAPTER 3: Trauma
CHAPTER 4: Crisis
CHAPTER 5: Relationships
CHAPTER 6: Proof
CHAPTER 7: Hate
CHAPTER 8: Opportunity
CHAPTER 9: Hope
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
AFTERWORD
NOTES
INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS
CHAPTER 1
MONSTERS
Nearly six hours into the interrogation video of the Parkland shooter, there is a moment: The teenage boy has just confessed to killing seventeen people at his former high school. He sits slumped in a chair, barefoot, hands cuffed behind his back, one leg shackled to the floor. He’s dressed in a pale blue hospital gown that billows open in the back whenever he leans forward, revealing a frame so slight that it seems impossible it could even hold a semiautomatic rifle, let alone use one to wreak the kind of terror this town has just witnessed.
“What do you think Mom would think right now if she was . . . ?” his younger brother asks. The police have permitted him into the interrogation room, hoping he might solicit a motive. His brother can’t finish the sentence. Their mother, who adopted the boys as children from the same birth mother, died of pneumonia just three months ago.
“She would cry,” both boys agree unanimously.
“People think you’re a monster now,” the brother says.
“A monster?” The shooter starts to shake.
“You’re not acting like yourself,” the brother goes on. “Why? Like we’ve—this is not who you are. Like, come on. Why did you do this?”
The perpetrator starts to cry. “I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“I know what you did today,” the brother continues. “Other people look at me like I’m crazy for even—and I don’t, I don’t care what other people think. Like, you’re my brother. I love you. I want—I want you to—”
The shooter completely breaks down. There is a prolonged high-pitched cry before his body collapses in violent sobs.
The brother puts his head in his hands, then slams his hand on the table. He turns to the detective off-camera. “Can I hug him?”
The perpetrator, hysterical now, leans in. The brother quickly stands, walks over to his wailing sibling, and wraps him up in both arms.
—
It’s instinct to cast aside mass shooters as monsters—their destruction is horrific and beyond comprehension. Collectively, they have claimed thousands of innocent lives and destroyed many more. Mass shootings are senseless, and they terrorize so deeply because they are so unpredictable, so inhuman.
That’s why our societal response to mass shootings has been to wage war on the monsters. We’ve tried locking the monsters out. We’ve turned our schools into secure fortresses with metal detectors, bulletproof windows, and impenetrable doors. We’ve installed high-tech security systems in our workplaces, even stationed police outside our concerts and casinos to spot the monsters before they get in.
We’ve tried running from the monsters. Teachers time their students as they race through hallways single file to designated meeting spots where frantic parents will wait. We scan for exit points at the movie theater and sit in a seat on the aisle so we can be the first ones out the door.
We’ve tried hiding from the monsters. Hushed children huddle in fear in dark supply closets or hide behind bulletproof backpacks. Text messages alert employees to “shelter in place.” Our workplace drills test how quickly we can stack chairs, dive under our desks, or crouch inside cabinets.
And we’ve even tried fighting the monsters. We’ve turned off the lights and practiced throwing our makeshift weapons—chairs, sharpened pencils, staplers, textbooks, binders, canned goods. We’ve named and shamed them on national television. We’ve hired good guys with guns to protect us from them.
America has been hunting monsters—even though they were among us before this—for more than two decades, ever since two high school seniors from Littleton, Colorado, murdered twelve students and one teacher before dying by suicide in what, at the time, was the worst high school shooting in U.S. history. Since that fateful day in April 1999, we’ve spent countless hours and billions of taxpayer dollars drilling, training, and preparing.
And still we are losing. The monsters aren’t going away. In fact, there are more and more of them. And they are killing more and more people with each passing year. All the running, hiding, and fighting has failed.
It has failed because the monsters are not them. They are us—boys and men we know. Our children. Our students. Our colleagues. Our community. They’re walking in and out of the same secure doors we are, past the same armed guards every day, like the rest of us. They’re standing next to us when we rehearse for the next shooting. They’re reading and watching the same media stories we are. They are not outsiders. They are insiders.
This fact may make mass shooters seem harder to stop. The reality is quite the opposite: It means we know where to find them, and with our research, we have learned how to reach them before they ever pick up a gun.
—
It was March 2, 2020, when we sat down with the childhood girlfriend of one of the most notorious mass murderers of all time. Little did we know that in just two short weeks, the entire world would be in the grip of a global pandemic and that the remaining interviews for this book would be conducted remotely. We did social distancing around the table as a precaution, but that only made the interview more difficult, because all we wanted to do was give this person a hug.
Our interviewee was understandably nervous—this was the first time she’d told her story to anyone other than her immediate family. It didn’t help that we were meeting under the fluorescent light of a sterile university conference room, the type of place reserved for benign faculty meetings, not outpourings of emotion. Our interviewee was guarded, teary-eyed, her voice cracking. “When you label them monsters, you erase the ability for anyone to think someone in their life could do this,” she told us.
She gripped the awkward teenage photographs and handwritten letters that she and the perpetrator had exchanged when they were young, years before he murdered more than a dozen people. They painted a very different picture from that in the newspaper clippings she also presented about the perpetrator—that he was born to kill, a maniacal psychopath, less than human. “We have to counter this narrative, realize and understand that people who commit acts of mass violence are human beings, human beings like you and me. Society needs to come to terms with that. Nothing will change until we do. We need to be able to recognize that someone in your life could do this.”
For years now, we’ve been studying the people who commit these horrific mass shootings, the insiders who do monstrous things. We’ve interviewed five perpetrators of mass shootings in prison. We’ve met the families of mass shooters; their spouses, parents, and siblings; their childhood friends and work colleagues; social workers and schoolteachers. We’ve sat down with surviving shooting victims, grieving parents, and first responders. We’ve even spoken to people who planned a mass shooting but changed their minds. In total, we’ve interviewed nearly fifty people directly involved in mass shootings. We’ve also pored over press and social media “manifestos,” suicide notes, trial transcripts, and medical records—tens of thousands of pages of transcripts.
Our research is driven by a single, urgent, question: How do we stop the next mass shooting?
There is no one miracle cure, but there are things we can do today, and things we must do tomorrow, to end the mass shooting epidemic. That is why we wrote this book, and why we have genuine hope for a future where we can stop running, hiding, and fighting for our lives.
—
Throughout this book, we define a mass shooting as any event in which four or more victims (not including the shooter) are murdered with guns in a public location such as a workplace, school, house of worship, or restaurant. Four victims killed sounds somewhat arbitrary when you consider that all shootings are tragedies, that all victims deserve justice, and that what separates injury from death is often just a matter of aim or inches—but this is the threshold agreed upon by criminologists and the FBI.1 Excluded from this definition are domestic shootings and gang-, drug-, and organized crime–related shootings—not because they are unimportant, but because the perpetrators of these crimes tend to target family members or intimate friends exclusively and have different profiles, motivations, and methods compared with shooters who select their victims more indiscriminately.
Using this definition, we find two things that are alarmingly clear about mass shootings in America: They are becoming more frequent, and they are getting deadlier. More than half of mass shootings have occurred since 2000, one-third since 2010. The deadliest year was 2018, with nine incidents, followed by 2017 and 2019, with seven each.
The death count per shooting is also rising dramatically. Sixteen of the twenty deadliest mass shootings in modern history occurred in the last twenty years, eight of them in the last five years—San Bernardino in 2015 (fourteen dead), Orlando in 2016 (forty-nine dead), Las Vegas in 2017 (sixty dead), Sutherland Springs in 2017 (twenty-six dead), Parkland in 2018 (seventeen dead), Thousand Oaks in 2018 (twelve dead), Virginia Beach in 2019 (twelve dead), and El Paso in 2019 (twenty-two dead). The names of each of these cities is now forever connected to scenes of death and destruction.
For decades, the toll of mass shootings has also risen. During the 1970s, mass shootings claimed an average of eight lives per year. In the 1980s, the average rose to fifteen. In the 1990s, it reached twenty-one; in the 2000s, twenty-four. The last decade has seen a far sharper rise. Today, the average is fifty-one deaths per year. At a time when the number of homicides overall was declining, the number of mass shootings was increasing.
Every mass shooting we experience eerily recalls the last. Initial media reports focus on the “tragic shock” of the crime and the chaos of the scene:2 the rush of SWAT officers; the parade of ambulances and satellite trucks; bloodied and screaming survivors running through the streets; bodies on the ground; chains of survivors in the parking lots; families screaming out the names of their missing loved ones; friends hugging each other and sobbing. Then follows the “first witness reports,” when survivors are interviewed for details of the crime and share raw, riveting, often contradictory accounts, which stations replay over and over again in the name of ratings.
Next comes the “identification of the shooter,” dead or alive, from official sources, and the first appearance of talking head experts: researchers and retired police officers called on to speculate on motive or compare and contrast the “profile” of this shooter with the last. They respond to the public’s need for a narrative with reasoning that feels digestible and holds the shooter individually responsible.
“Reports of the character of the shooter” follow, with the media going in search of anyone and everyone willing to comment on the life and crimes of the perpetrator, from his first-grade teacher to their next-door neighbor. By now, all major national news anchors and staff are on location, reporting on air with the crime scene in the background. The massacre is later “packaged” for syndication and broader consumption. Elaborate visuals such as maps and time lines are added, and the networks create their own “brand” for the incident, “breaking news” alerts complete with titles and a transition song.
Eventually, we get the “official response and official report,” which brings some clarity to earlier conjecture, but in the absence of mystery, attention starts to wane. People stop asking “Why?” or calling for action. The news cycle moves on, and we move on—until the next shooting.
Mass shootings have become routine events in our lives. On October 1, 2015, following the shootings at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, when a student shot and killed his professor and eight students in a classroom, President Barack Obama went to the James S. Brady Briefing Room in the White House—a room named after a victim of gun violence—and said as much: “Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine.”3
Our emotional reactions to mass shootings are dulled by repetition. Daily tragedy becomes ambient noise until, eventually, we grow numb to the pain. However, our fear of mass shootings is ever present. A 2019 poll found that a third of adults say they feel they “cannot go anywhere without worrying about being a victim of a mass shooting” and that they avoid certain places like movie theaters and grocery stores for this reason.4
For the younger generation, it is even worse. Born during the first few years of the twenty-first century, the youngest Americans, from high-schoolers on down, have never known a world without mass shootings. More than half of American teenagers worry about a shooting at their school, and a lifetime of active shooter drills, locker searches, and locked school doors has engendered in them an overwhelming fear of imminent death.
The active shooter drills are especially troubling. “This is not a drill,” relays the voice over the PA system—despite the fact that it is. Suddenly, faculty and staff receive text messages warning of an active shooter on campus. They lock their classroom doors, pull down the shades, and turn off the lights. They instruct students to quickly, quietly, stack chairs and desks, to barricade themselves in. Fearful students then take shelter—in a closet, or on the classroom rug, positioned away from the windows should any bullets fly through. Many of the younger students cry. The older ones will text their last good-byes to their parents, who, in return, will flood the principal and the police with frantic calls. Then, when it’s over, it’s back to your regularly scheduled programming, like nothing happened.
In some lockdown iterations, a teacher or a police officer will engage in role-play, taking on the part of an active shooter, advancing through the hallways, attempting to open doors as children lie in wait. In the most extreme examples, paid actors covered in prosthetics and fake blood, will also role-play dead, or scream bloody murder.5 Students may run past them in a zigzag pattern down the hall, so as to evade imaginary bullets; or defend themselves from a shooter by hurling textbooks, flip-flops, and sports equipment. Students in younger grades are primed by singing lockdown-themed adaptations of their favorite nursery rhymes.6 Some are lied to that they’re sheltering in place because a wild animal is loose. At an elementary school in Indiana, “four teachers at a time were taken into a room, told to crouch down and were shot execution style with some sort of projectiles—resulting in injuries to the extent that welts appeared, and blood was drawn.”7
Resigned to this routine, some schoolchildren now affix a sticker to their ID o
r cell phone that reads, IN THE EVENT THAT I DIE FROM GUN VIOLENCE, PLEASE PUBLICIZE THE PHOTO OF MY DEATH.8 Started by students at Columbine High School, the site of the shooting that ushered in the lockdown generation, the My Last Shot campaign was inspired by the graphic posthumous image of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being accused of offending a white woman. Till became a civil rights icon when his mother insisted upon leaving his casket open at his funeral: “Let the people see what they did to my boy,” she was quoted as saying. Students involved in the My Last Shot campaign hope that a horrific photo of their dead bodies will send a message and lead to an end of mass shootings.
We can’t leave our children to wage this struggle alone. And we can’t allow mass shootings to continue to be a normal part of our lives. The more we partake in these familiar routines, the more they become part of our identity, and the harder it becomes to break them. But we must break this one.
—
On Valentine’s Day 2018, we caught a glimpse of a turning point. Something seemed different in the country’s outpouring of grief and outrage after a former student opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing fourteen students and three staff. The response was rapid and far-reaching, uniting voices across the country who demanded that leaders take action to create real change instead of offering their, by now, routine “thoughts and prayers.” Confronted with an overwhelming and compounding sense of loss, America vowed that Parkland would be the last mass shooting. The public was finally fed up with seeing funerals and candlelight vigils on the evening news; of seeing families and communities shattered beyond repair.
Organized with the support of several Hollywood celebrities, including George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey, more than a million people took to the streets to “March for Our Lives” in the biggest youth-led demonstration in a generation. For a time, lawmakers around the country had seriously discussed gun law restrictions and other comprehensive measures on the legislative floor, and it looked as though things might really be changing.
The Violence Project Page 1