The Violence Project

by Jillian Peterson

  There are examples of SROs on campus reducing the severity of school shootings. One example is the officer at the Santa Fe High School shooting in Texas in 2018, in which ten students were killed: That school resource officer drew attention away from the perpetrator while students and teachers escaped. Another example comes from one of our key case studies. When Perpetrator B arrived at the site of his crime, his former high school, and opened fire, his 9mm carbine jammed. He was apprehended by a deputy sheriff assigned to the school and a retired highway patrol officer who taught driver’s education. Lacy, the object of Perpetrator B’s affections, whom we met in chapter 5, tells us this intervention took everyone at the school by surprise, because students would make fun of the SRO for being so “dopey.” High school students can be cruel, but, she says, “Seriously, we never thought he could even run,” let alone tackle an active shooter.

  By definition, however, armed security was no deterrent to violence in cases in which a shooting still happened. We think this has something to do with the fact that so many mass shooters are actively suicidal and intend to die in the act. A shooter may actually be drawn to a location like a school precisely because there is an armed officer on scene, given that they wish to be killed. In December 2019, a gunman killed two people at a church in White Settlement, Texas, before an armed volunteer, a firearms instructor, shot and killed him six seconds later. It was the perfect test case for the “good guy with a gun,” but what was lost on the gun rights advocates who celebrated this act of heroism was that having a concealed handgun failed to deter the crime in the first place and was no advantage to the first guard who engaged the gunman; he was killed. Most people in life-or-death situations freeze or shut down entirely, even the good guys. (Case in point: Parkland.) The chances that a regular armed civilian will shoot an innocent person by accident are high; so, too, are the chances of arriving officers’ mistakenly shooting the good guys because they are seen with a weapon in the aftermath of a shooting incident.

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  Gun safety advocates balk at the idea that the solution to guns is more guns. They argue that, in much the same way the coronavirus pandemic proved that there can be no mass shooting without masses, there can be no shooting at all without guns. And study after study finds that ready access to lethal weapons in the United States creates opportunity for lethal violence to occur,18 including mass shootings with excessive casualties. In one of his letters, Perpetrator A told us that his weapon of choice was simply convenient:

  The shotgun I used was one that I was given on my 15th birthday and used it to hunt deer and various small game animals. I had it and the ammo there at my fiancée’s house.

  Fifteen-year-old Gracie Anne Muehlberger and fourteen-year-old Dominic Blackwell were killed in November 2019 at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, California. A fellow student with a pistol opened fire in the outside courtyard, or quad, shooting five students in total, two fatally, before turning the gun on himself. Gracie’s father, Bryan, walked us through the heart-wrenching story of that day, including how he was forced to use his Find My iPhone app to cut through the chaos of the scene to locate his daughter’s body in the hospital. Bryan, a technologist, is a big proponent of “root cause analysis,” a method of problem-solving used for identifying the source of faults. He was still trying to comprehend how the shooter, who was too young to pass a background check or purchase a gun legally in California, was able to source off the internet a do-it-yourself kit of interchangeable parts and build the .45-caliber “ghost gun” that killed his little girl.

  A ghost gun is any sort of firearm built at home without a manufacturer’s serial number, which makes it practically impossible to trace. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives doesn’t consider the do-it-yourself kits to be firearms, so buyers don’t have to undergo the usual background checks, although President Joe Biden has proposed new restrictions on ghost guns, and California attorney general Xavier Becerra, backed by Bryan Muehlberger, is suing the ATF to change its policy.19 In the Santa Clarita shooting, it is unclear whether the gun was assembled by the shooter or his father, an avid hunter who died in 2017 and left guns in his wake. What is clear is that whoever assembled the weapon bypassed both many existing regulations regarding the definition and registration of firearms and the associated background checks for possession and transfer.

  Bryan himself proved this fact by buying his own ghost gun online—in his deceased daughter’s name, he told us. And assembly isn’t difficult: An unfinished firearm receiver comes about 80 percent complete, and there are instructional videos online that walk you through the finishing process. The parts and playbook, both found online, created the opportunity for violence to occur. Without them, Bryan’s daughter might still be alive.

  Firearms used in mass shootings

  How mass shooters got their guns

  If the prevalent weapon in a community is a knife, then stabbings are higher. If it is a gun, then more people are shot. In our database, 172 mass shooters used a total of 377 firearms to commit 169 mass shootings. Is this just the price America has to pay for protecting everyone’s Second Amendment right to bear arms? We don’t think so. There is nothing in the Second Amendment prohibiting sensible firearm regulations that curb opportunities for shootings to arise. As Justice Antonin Scalia, champion of constitutional originalism, wrote in his 2008 opinion for District of Columbia v. Heller, the landmark Supreme Court decision that expanded the scope of the Second Amendment to the possession of firearms for the purpose of personal self-defense, not simply the common defense. “Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

  The United States has regulated firearms for years, albeit loosely. The 1934 National Firearms Act, the first major federal gun law, and the 1938 Federal Firearms Act together created a licensing system for dealers and imposed tax and registration requirements on the “gangster guns” favored by Prohibition-era organized crime and on display during the 1929 Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. The 1968 Gun Control Act, passed after the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., restricted the importation of military-surplus firearms, banned mail-order gun sales—President John F. Kennedy was killed with a mail-order gun—and prohibited gun dealers from selling to “dangerous” categories of persons, such as people with felony convictions or those with prior psychiatric hospitalization.

  Efforts at the federal level to regulate firearms have gone nowhere in recent years, however, owing in large part to the power of the National Rifle Association. There was a time when the NRA, founded in 1871, focused principally on hunting, marksmanship, and conservation, and was willing to compromise on gun legislation. The NRA in fact endorsed the laws of the 1930s and 1960s. But in the late 1970s, its moderate leadership fell to a cadre of absolutists opposed to any hint of regulation.20 In the 1980s, the attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan and the shooting of his press secretary, James Brady, led to a call for gun control. The NRA was vehemently opposed, and gun laws largely got weaker, not stronger, in the years since.

  In 1986, for example, the Firearms Owners Protection Act repealed parts of the 1968 Gun Control Act by invoking “the rights of citizens . . . to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.” Individual states responded by widely adopting “concealed carry” and “stand your ground” laws, the latter of which exonerated from prosecution citizens who used deadly force when confronted by an assailant, even if they could have retreated safely. In 2005, President George W. Bush signed a law protecting firearms manufacturers, importers, and dealers from lawsuits by victims of crimes involving guns. Three years later, in District of Columbia v. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a Washington, DC, ban on handguns in the home
for self-defense. States have the right to pass their own gun control measures; they just can’t deny firearms outright, the Court said.

  Federal law is the floor, not the ceiling, on gun control, which is why America is a “confusing patchwork” of gun legislation.21 It’s why a teenager who can’t buy a gun in California can go buy one in neighboring Nevada, drive back to California, visit a popular garlic festival, kill three people, wound seventeen others, and then take his own life. It’s why most of the guns used to perpetrate the worst mass shooting in Canadian history, the 2020 Nova Scotia attacks that killed 22 people, came from the United States. Still, according to the federal government and the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1994, named for the staffer disabled in the Reagan assassination attempt, it is illegal to sell guns to juveniles, convicted felons, fugitives, undocumented Americans, drug users, former mental patients, and dishonorably discharged veterans. People convicted of domestic violence or living under a particular type of restraining order also are prohibited. Under the common-law concept of “negligent entrustment,” a gun also cannot be sold to a person if the seller knows, or reasonably should know, that the buyer poses an unusually high risk of misusing it.

  NRA enthusiasts argue that we don’t need new gun laws; we just need to enforce the existing ones. It is illegal for a gun retailer to sell a firearm to anyone we’ve just listed. These dealers need a federal license and must run background checks to see if the buyer meets any of the criteria just given. However, a privately owned gun can be transferred legally in ways that bypass gun dealers, and our data show that a combination of strange state-versus-federal loopholes and poor enforcement of existing gun laws keep contributing to mass shootings.

  For example, the 1990 General Motors Acceptance Corporation office shooter, who killed eleven people over a twenty-four-hour shooting spree, had killed someone years before, but because the judge withheld a guilty verdict on the condition that the shooter complete probation, the shooter was not considered a convicted felon under state law and was free to purchase guns.

  The 2007 Trolley Square shooter, who killed five and wounded four in Salt Lake City, purchased a shotgun with a pistol grip from a pawnshop. You have to be eighteen to purchase a rifle or shotgun in Utah, but twenty-one to purchase a handgun. The question is: Is a shotgun with a pistol grip a shotgun or a pistol? Some argue that it’s a handgun because the existence of the pistol grip means it no longer qualifies as a weapon to be fired from the shoulder. Others say it’s a shotgun because the pistol grip is removable. In the end, the clerk who sold the gun was charged with unlawful transfer of a firearm to someone under twenty-one, but the charges were dropped when he pled guilty to a misdemeanor paperwork violation (he forgot to check a box on the form to confirm that he had seen two forms of ID), meaning the shotgun/pistol debate was never adjudicated.

  See how easy it is? The Virginia Tech shooter had been court-ordered to receive mental health treatment, thus shouldn’t have been eligible to buy a gun under federal law. In fact, of the thirty-four perpetrators in our database who had been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons, 88 percent were hospitalized involuntarily, which should have prohibited them from possessing firearms. However, Virginia commonwealth statute was worded in such a way that it did not apply to the shooter’s situation, and in this and other cases he was still able to pass a background check.

  The 2015 Charleston church shooter had a prior arrest during which he confessed to using drugs. When he tried to buy a gun, the dealer asked the FBI for approval, but the FBI declined because they wanted to investigate further. By law, the FBI has three business days to allow or deny a gun purchase, after which the gun dealer is free to sell the gun whether they have heard back from the FBI or not. Three days passed, and even though the FBI had not yet completed their investigation, the dealer sold the young man the gun. A few months before the shooting, the Charleston shooter was also caught by police in possession of a forearm grip for an AR-15, but he was not charged because the tool is lawful in South Carolina.

  The 2017 Sutherland Springs church shooter was court-martialed by the air force for beating his wife and fracturing his toddler stepson’s skull. The shooter was given a “bad conduct” discharge, and the air force was supposed to report his domestic violence conviction, which, on six separate occasions, would have disqualified him from purchasing a gun, but never did. The shooter lied on his background checks and said he had never been convicted of a felony, though he functionally had, because the military does not classify crimes committed by service members as “felonies” or “misdemeanors.”

  The shooter who killed five and injured seven at Henry Pratt Company in Aurora, Illinois, in 2019 had a prior conviction for aggravated assault for beating his girlfriend with a baseball bat. Despite this, he was able to obtain an Illinois Firearm Owner’s Identification Card (FOID), which is a prerequisite for buying a gun in the state, presumably because his felony record was not properly submitted to the federal database. With FOID in hand, the shooter bought a gun and applied for a concealed-carry permit. That was when the state discovered the felony record. It revoked the shooter’s FOID but never confiscated the gun he had bought with it. Why not? Illinois law states that when someone’s FOID is revoked, they are asked to confirm that they no longer possess guns. The problem is no one checks that information.

  Finally, the 2017 Rancho Tehama Reserve shooter, who killed five and injured twelve, was previously arrested for stabbing his neighbor. He was subject to a civil harassment restraining order as well as a criminal protective order and was asked to turn over all his firearms. He turned in a pistol and said he owned no other guns, exploiting the infamous “honor system,” given that officials had no way of knowing how many guns he owned and no responsibility to check because he was not a felon. Little did they know, the shooter had two AR-15s he had built from parts, a handgun, and his wife’s handgun at home. Neighbors even told police that the man had guns at home—they could hear him doing target practice—but because no one ever caught him red-handed, there was nothing law enforcement could do.

  By our calculation, background checks on all gun sales or transfers may have prevented at least sixteen mass shootings (about 9 percent of the total), saving more than one hundred lives,22 while ending the “default proceed” option on federal checks that take longer than three days may have averted the 2015 Charleston church shooting. Leading experts in criminology, public health, and law consider background checks performed by a licensed firearms dealer, law enforcement agency, or other neutral third-party arbiter to be the most effective way to reduce all gun deaths.23 About 80 percent of all Americans support background checks for private sales and at gun shows.24 However, a 2017 survey found that 22 percent of current U.S. gun owners who acquired a firearm within the past two years had done so without one and that the rate was 57 percent for people living in the thirty-one U.S. states without regulations on private firearm sales.25

  More comprehensive than universal background checks, the most effective mass shooting prevention measure would be permit-to-purchase laws,26 which exist in some form in thirteen states and require prospective gun purchasers to apply for a permit in person at a law enforcement office. Anyone granted a permit can then purchase guns for a set period of time without undergoing repeated background checks, as they would have to otherwise. One 2015 study found that Connecticut’s permit-to-purchase law, introduced in 1995, was associated with a 40 percent reduction in the state’s firearm-related homicide rate, while Missouri’s removal of its permit-to-purchase law in 2007 was associated with a 25 percent increase in its firearm homicide rates over the next five years.27

  For those buying a gun impulsively, permit-to-purchase laws create a temporary barrier, a bit like mandatory waiting periods. Mandatory waiting periods of three to ten days are the functional equivalent of counting to ten before doing something impulsive that could ruin your life and career, such as sending an angry email to your boss—only, in this case, it
can stop you from shooting someone. Critics argue that waiting for a gun is inconvenient, especially in an era of online shopping and instant gratification, but you have to ask: Who needs a gun immediately unless they intend to use it right away? Nearly a third of mass shooters purchased a gun within a month of their crimes. The 2021 Atlanta spa shooter bought his gun just hours before the attack—no waiting required. That same day, over a thousand miles away, a twenty-one year old man bought a Ruger AR-556 pistol, a semi-automatic weapon with a capacity of thirty rounds, and six days later he used it to kill ten people in a Boulder supermarket. One Harvard study found that waiting period laws that delay the purchase of firearms by a few days reduced gun homicides by roughly 17 percent.28 That seems worth the wait.

  Of course, it’s not just procedures and policies that fail to stop mass shootings. People do, too. The 2018 Nashville Waffle House shooter had legally bought his guns. They were then taken away by police after the Secret Service arrested him while trying to break into the White House. The guns were given to the shooter’s father for safekeeping, but he just gave them right back to his son.

  Our data show that 80 percent of school shooters get their weapons from family members. There are many examples: A teen in Marysville, Washington, used one of his father’s handguns to kill four classmates and himself in 2014. The shooter at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 used firearms that belonged to his mother to kill twenty-seven people, mostly small children, but also his mother, before killing himself. The gunman who killed ten people in a Santa Fe, Texas, high school in 2018 had taken a shotgun and a pistol that belonged to his father.