The Violence Project

by Jillian Peterson

  Finally, mass shooters must have the opportunity to carry out the shootings—access to firearms and to the people and places that represent their grievances. Firearms, especially heavy-duty weapons, are readily accessible in the United States at levels much higher than almost any other country. Most perpetrators buy their guns legally. Others lie on their applications or background checks are never run on them. Young shooters take their guns from their family members, most often parents and grandparents who don’t have their weapons safely stored.

  Childhood trauma, an identifiable crisis point, a script to follow and someone to blame, opportunity—Perpetrator A, Perpetrator B, and many more mass shooters share these four factors. Because mass shootings are extreme and comparatively rare crimes, we cannot say these factors are causal, only that they are highly correlated with mass shootings. There is no one profile of a mass shooter, only multiple pathways to a mass shooting, each filled with missed opportunities for intervention. This new framework acknowledges the complexity of the issue from the individual to the societal level and provides us all with concrete actions we can take to prevent the next shooting—actions that have a broad diffusion of benefits beyond mass shooting prevention.

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  We started this research unsure of what we would find. Maybe there was no rhyme or reason to mass shooters’ lives. Maybe they were so set on killing people that there was little we could do to stop them. Maybe mass shooters really were monsters and the best we could do was run, hide, fight.

  But talking to mass shooters and the people who knew them has given us reason to hope. We are not helpless. We don’t have to accept the unacceptable. As individuals, as institutions, and as a country, we can break the cycle of violence, and this book offers a road map for how—because the power to change lives and the course of history in our schools, workplaces, and communities lies with us.

  Mass shootings are not an inevitable fact of American life; they’re preventable. Mass shooters are people who can be stopped before they do monstrous things.

  CHAPTER 2

  AMERICA

  Kathy Whitman, a twenty-three-year-old high school biology teacher, was the first. The youngest was Noah Grace Holcombe; she was eighteen months old. Homemaker Louise Vocht De Kler was the oldest, aged ninety-eight. Professor Liviu Librescu, seventy-six, an Israeli born in Romania, survived the Holocaust and died trying to protect his students in Virginia. Sgt. First Class Danny Ferguson, thirty-nine, served in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan and died shielding his army colleagues in Texas. Lois Oglesby, twenty-seven, a mother of two, was studying to become a nurse. Allison Wyatt, six, wanted to be an artist, and rows of her pictures filled her house. Juan P. Rivera Velazquez, thirty-seven, and Luis Daniel Conde, thirty-nine, were a hairstylist and makeup artist, respectively, who owned a salon together.

  More than twelve hundred people have been killed in mass shootings in the United States since 1966. If you subtract their ages at death from their life expectancies at birth, they represent nearly 40,000 years of life lost. They were men (60 percent) and women (40 percent) as diverse as the nation (64 percent white, 10 percent Black, 17 percent Latinx, 7 percent Asian). They were students and teachers, artists and entrepreneurs. Ten percent were still children, bright flames extinguished much too soon.

  No other comparable nation has produced a list this long or this tragic. In fact, when you compare mass shooting rates in the United States to rates in other countries, you begin to see American exceptionalism at its worst. One study examined the total number of public mass shooters per country from 1966 to 2012 in 171 countries and concluded that, when controlling for national population size, the United States had six times its share of the world’s mass shooters.1 Notably, all five of the countries with the largest number of guns per capita, of which the United States was number one, ranked among the top countries for public mass shootings, including two countries with reputations for safety, Switzerland and Finland.

  At the risk of understatement: Gun rights advocates are uncomfortable with this finding. In 2018, economist John Lott, friend of the National Rifle Association and author of the 1998 book More Guns, Less Crime, published a study trying to change the conversation. Drawing on data obtained from the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database and additional information from foreign news accounts, Lott said that he found 1,491 mass public shootings worldwide in a shorter time frame—between 1998 and 2012—and that fewer than 3 percent were in the United States. Instead of 31 percent of all mass shooters, Lott calculated that the United States produced only about 1 percent of them.2

  The only problem was Lott had used a rather liberal definition of mass shooting that conflated the subject of this book with “battles over sovereignty,” militia or guerrilla attacks, state-sponsored terrorism, and political acts of genocide. He also included a significant number of gang and group attacks, sometimes with twenty or more assailants, which have an entirely different methodology. When consistent definitions were used, Lott’s own data confirmed the original finding: The United States had a disproportionate number of public mass shooters who attacked alone.3 In fact, after merging Lott’s data with ours, we found that with 60 mass shooters from 1998 to 2012 and only 132 foreign cases, the United States had about one third (60/192) of all mass shooters—exactly as the original study had said.

  With 310 million people, the United States made up about 4.4 percent of the world’s population of 7 billion in that same period, which means it had more than seven times (31/4.4) its share of the world’s mass shooters per capita. In raw numbers, the United States had more mass shooters, respectively, than either Africa, South America, or Oceania—entire continents. More still than Europe, even though Europe has twice as many people. Only Asia had more mass shooters than the United States, but its population was thirteen times as large. And after the United States, the individual countries with the most mass shootings were not peer nations but the Philippines, Russia, and Yemen.

  The United States is a lonely island when it comes to mass shootings. The question is: Why? As many people believe, America’s gun culture is undoubtedly a major factor, but there is also something about America itself that is to blame.

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  One shooter in our study named his guns. He slept with them. He even simulated sex with them in a video sent to a former classmate a few weeks before his crime. “Look at the size of this thing,” he told the camera, euphoric. “Weapons are not like people,” he said. “They don’t reject you. They need you. I wanted something that could not reject me.” As he lay on his bed and caressed the Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun he had bought at Walmart, he added, “I love weapons. I love ’em with all my heart.”

  This shooter is not alone in loving guns. America’s gun manufacturers doubled their annual output during the Obama years, sales fueled in part by fears of a federal crackdown on gun ownership after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, a crackdown that never materialized. And in 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic and civil unrest in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, a Black man choked to death on camera by Minneapolis police officers, background checks, a metric for gun sales, hit an all-time high.4 Since 2006, Americans have acquired an estimated 150 million new or imported firearms on top of the 250 million guns already in circulation. There are now more guns than people in the country—120 guns per 100 civilians. (For comparison, England and Wales have fewer than five.)5

  Studies have found a correlation between local gun ownership rates and deaths from shootings.6 There are exceptions to the rule—some Latin American countries with high levels of firearm homicide, like Colombia and Honduras, show low levels of (legal) gun ownership. The rate of gun violence in the United States is not the highest in the world—approximately thirty counties in Central America, Africa, and the Middle East rank much higher. However, those countries with high levels of gun violence, such as El Salvador, the Philippines, and Iraq, are not like the United States in terms of GDP, life expectancy, or education. Amer
icans are ten times more likely to be killed by guns than people in other, similar high-income countries. At 4.5 per 100,000 people, the U.S. gun homicide rate is about eight times higher than the rate in neighboring Canada, eighteen times higher than in the United Kingdom, and twenty to thirty times higher than in Scandinavian Europe.

  Americans sometimes see this as an expression of deeper problems with crime. In the 1990s, they blamed “super-predators,” young, violent, cold-blooded street criminals who never existed,7 and gangs, which did and were very much Made in America, as the title of Stacy Peralta’s 2009 documentary about the Bloods and Crips of Los Angeles implies.8 But the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries. A landmark 1999 study by criminologists Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins of the University of California, Berkeley, found that American crime is simply more lethal.9 A New Yorker and a Londoner are equally likely to be robbed, but a New Yorker is fifty times more likely to be killed in the process. After controlling for other possible factors, Zimring and Hawkins found that the discrepancy came down to guns.

  America is one of the few countries (including Mexico, Haiti, and Guatemala) where the right to bear arms is constitutionally protected, and much like it contributes to the lethality of American violence, the widespread availability of firearms also contributes to the country’s mass shooting problem. However, guns and gun culture alone are not enough to explain why mass shootings happen so much more often here than anywhere else. There are other social forces at work.

  First, America was built on violence and has always been tolerant of it.10 Violence against Native peoples; slavery rationalized a culture of violence against Black people, especially in the old Confederate states, where murder rates are still highest; a bloody Civil War; the revered violence of revolutionaries, frontier outlaws, and Prohibition-era gangsters; violence against women; violence against children; violence against immigrants; police violence; capital punishment; serial killers. America’s history is a history of violence.11

  Mass shootings are not some invasive species that infiltrated our lives from elsewhere. They have been part of the American landscape since at least 1903, when, on August 14, a war veteran deliberately fired into a crowd of people in Winfield, Kansas, killing nine and wounding twenty-five before turning the revolver on himself. Three more mass shootings shocked the country in the 1940s, including an infamous “walk of death” in Camden, New Jersey, that killed thirteen people and severely wounded at least five others, but it was not until the summer of 1966 that mass shootings truly entered the American consciousness.

  On a hot Monday in August, a former Eagle Scout and marine stabbed his wife and mother to death, then shot and killed fourteen people from a twenty-eighth-floor observation deck at the University of Texas campus in Austin. At first, stunned witnesses thought the gunshots were construction noise and the falling bodies were part of a staged protest against the Vietnam War. They quickly learned that the devastation was real. Law enforcement took more than ninety minutes to stop the shooting, eventually reaching the tower using underground maintenance tunnels. Reporters on the scene described the events as they happened, and the American public watched every excruciating minute thanks to the new medium of television. The modern mass shooting was born. Made in America.

  Our database starts with this event and shows that American mass shootings are perpetrated by Americans—85 percent of perpetrators were born and raised here. Only 15 percent of mass shooters were immigrants from other nations, people who first came to this land of opportunity in search of a better life. We use this phrase deliberately because, in addition to a culture of guns and mass violence, America has a unique set of values—rugged individualism, the “American Dream,” and the “pursuit of happiness.” And these, too, may contribute to America’s problem with mass shootings. For example, rugged individualism was forged on the frontier, far from civilization and the reach of laws, where gunslingers took justice into their own hands and where people pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Firearm possession is perhaps its ultimate expression, but individualism assumes that you determine your destiny. It affords people undue credit for personal successes and undue blame for personal failures. By its very nature, therefore, individualism exacerbates the sense of injustice that anyone aggrieved feels. If an American, especially a white man born with all the advantages conferred by race and gender, can’t make it here, it’s his own fault.

  In America, if you work hard, you are entitled to your success. At least, that’s the myth. In a landmark 1938 study, sociologist Robert Merton argued that the American Dream guaranteed a level of success that was largely unachievable through hard work and sheer willpower. According to his “strain theory,” society had fed people with false promises and had denied them opportunities to succeed in legitimate work. Writing just after the Great Depression, when hard work wasn’t paying off, Merton argued that the very structure of American society pressured people to commit crimes.12 People who failed to achieve what they were socialized to believe was their destiny, who found their aspirations for status and wealth blocked, were forced to adapt.

  While millions of Americans feel these strains and never commit a crime, some lower-class men, who feel these strains most, may take what they feel they should have by stealing or being involved in other crimes. Others breed the kind of resentment and rage that can explode into mass violence.13 In May 1927, in Bath Township, Michigan, a local farmer and school board treasurer was frustrated with what he felt were unfair taxes being levied on town residents to pay for a newly constructed school. He became further disgruntled when he was defeated in the township clerk election. Then his wife fell chronically ill with tuberculosis, a diagnosis that was terminal at the time. Facing foreclosure on his family farm, the farmer decided to take vengeance.

  He first murdered his wife at their farmhouse by burning down the building. Next, he detonated several hundred pounds of dynamite and Pyrotol, an incendiary combination used by farmers during the era for excavation, which he had planted underneath the school. After the explosion, he pulled up alongside the gathering crowd in his truck as they frantically searched for their children beneath the rubble of the partially destroyed building. He then exploded the truck, which was loaded with metal debris, killing himself and sending shrapnel flying into those assembled. Forty-five people died that day, including thirty-eight elementary-schoolers, in what still stands as the deadliest mass murder at a school in U.S. history. When police and investigators arrived at the farmer’s burning property, they found a wooden sign wired to a fence with the killer’s last message stenciled on it: CRIMINALS ARE MADE, NOT BORN.14

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  The Bath School disaster wasn’t a mass shooting because no firearms were involved, but the perpetrator has much in common with many contemporary mass shooters, including that he took his own life. Merton’s strain theory, in fact, stands on the shoulders of a seminal study on suicide. Suicide tends to be viewed as a very individualistic and personal act, but French sociologist Émile Durkheim, widely regarded as the father of the field, offered a different take.15 He found that the characteristics of communities influenced suicide rates, independent of who was living in those communities. Writing at the height of the Industrial Revolution, Durkheim argued that suicide was related to the amount of social integration and moral regulation one experiences, such that when society undergoes rapid change, the rules become unclear, people’s aspirations run wild, and they no longer feel connected or fulfilled, suicide follows.

  America’s mythical code of self-reliance is implicated in high suicide rates, because there is a point where self-reliance becomes isolation.16 Our research shows that mass shootings are linked to suicides and may even be a form of them. One in three mass shooters is actively suicidal prior to the shooting and 40 percent specifically plan to die in the act. It’s rare for a mass shooter to flee the scene in disguise or execute a well-thought-out getaway plan to run for the border. The majo
rity die by suicide after their attacks—around 40 percent by their own hand and another 20 percent by provoking law enforcement into shooting them (known as “suicide by cop”).

  The 1979 Grover Cleveland Elementary School shooter’s infamous explanation of her motive, “I don’t like Mondays,” inspired Bob Geldof and Johnnie Fingers to write the Boomtown Rats’ song. At a 2009 parole hearing, she explained the real motive behind her crime:

  “I wanted to die. I was trying to commit suicide” she said.

  “Why pick the school across the street?” the commissioner asked.

  “Because I knew that if I fired on the school the police would show up, and they would shoot me and kill me. And every time I had tried suicide in the previous year I had screwed it up.”

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  A third of shootings in our study occurred in just the last decade. In that same period, the United States has witnessed an equally troubling increase in deaths by suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related conditions, which Princeton economists Anne Case and Nobel Memorial Prize winner Angus Deaton call “deaths of despair.”17 Few other countries have seen a similar explosion in deaths of despair, just as few other countries have seen a similar explosion in mass shootings. Perhaps the two are conceptually linked?

  Deaths of despair occur when people fail to find meaning in life. In Case and Deaton’s words, “People kill themselves when life no longer seems worth living, when it seems better to die than to stay alive.” Deaths of despair have pushed down overall life expectancy in the United States by roughly three years, scientists report.18 This is a trend not seen since World War I and the Spanish flu pandemic, or in other wealthy nations, which experience continued progress in extending longevity. During the first half of 2020, U.S. life expectancy dropped another year owing to COVID-19, but the disease itself was only part of the cause. Many people lost their jobs due to the pandemic. People in lockdown also were more likely to eat poorly, drink more alcohol, and use drugs. Relatedly, as people stayed home, social isolation and loneliness grew, and people took their own lives. The United States now leads the world in per capita spending on health care yet has the worst midlife mortality rate among high-income countries.