Mass shootings in the United States
This is an accepted version of this page Mass shootings are incidents involving multiple victims of firearm related violence.
Among the various definitions are those that are: The FBI defines an "active shooter" incident as "one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area", excluding gun-related incidents that were the result of self-defense, gang or drug violence, residential or domestic disputes, crossfire as a byproduct of another ongoing criminal act, controlled barricade or hostage situations, or actions that appeared not to have put other people in peril.
Some commentators argue in favor of a narrow definition of mass shootings that excludes the victims of street crime.
Mark Follman of Mother Jones, which compiles an open-source database of mass shootings, contends that "While all the victims are important, conflating those many other crimes with indiscriminate slaughter in public venues obscures our understanding of this complicated and growing problem.
"[31] Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox argues against the use of the broad definition of "mass shooting" in the popular press, stating that it misleads readers.
[22][33] For example, Mark Hay argues that although gang, party, and domestic violence "probably warrant different solutions" than random mass public shootings, a narrow definition fails "to capture and convey the full scope of large-scale gun violence in the United States" and its effect on marginalized communities.
[30] In 2014, the FBI conducted a review of 160 active shooter incidents in the U.S. from 2000 to 2013 (averaging approximately 11 cases annually) in 40 states and the District of Columbia.
[52] According to the National Institute of Justice/The Violence project study, the demographics of shooters were 97.7% male, with an average age of 34.1 years, 52.3% white, 20.9% black, 8.1% Latino, 6.4% Asian, 4.2% middle eastern, and 1.8% native American.
[30] According to the Center for Inquiry, mass shootings of family members (the most common) are usually carried out by white, middle-aged males.
Felony-related mass shootings (connected with a previous crime) tend to be committed by young Black or Hispanic males with extensive criminal records, typically against people of the same ethnic group.
[42] Analogously, in December 2013, the Journal of Forensic Sciences published a sociodemographic network characteristics and antecedent behaviors survey of 119 lone-actor terrorists in the United States and Europe that found that 96.6% were male.
"[83] The study specifically found that "A 10% increase in state gun ownership was associated with a significant 35.1% (12.7% to 62.7%, P=0.001) higher rate of mass shootings.
"[92][93] The 2021 National Survey on Drug Use and Health conducted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration estimated that 57.8 million U.S. adults had a mental illness and 14.1 million U.S. adults had an SMI,[94] while the Gun Violence Archive recorded 690 mass shootings in the United States in the same year.
"[95] In 2022, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law published a study by Jillian Peterson, James Densley, and others, assessing the life history variables of 172 mass shooters from 1966 to 2019.
[100] However, like the APA, the researchers emphasized that having a formal mental health disorder diagnosis is more predictive of being a victim of violence rather than a perpetrator.
"[103] A 2021 cross-sectional study published in JAMA Network Open examining 170 perpetrators of mass public shootings from 1996 to 2019, found that 44% of mass shooters had leaked their plans prior to committing the act, and that "Leakage was associated with receiving counseling and suicidality, which suggests it may be best characterized as a cry for help from perpetrators prior to their act.
"[104] In 2015, psychiatrists James L. Knoll and George D. Annas noted that considering that mass shootings committed by perpetrators with SMIs amount to less than 1% of all gun-related homicides (and that most gun deaths in the United States are suicides rather than homicides),[105] the tendency of most media attention following mass shootings on mental health leads to sociocultural factors being comparatively overlooked.
[106] Instead, Knoll and Annas cite research by social psychologists Jean Twenge and W. Keith Campbell on narcissism and social rejection in the personal histories of mass shooters, as well as cognitive scientist Steven Pinker's suggestion in The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) that further reductions in human violence may be dependent upon reducing human narcissism.
[109][93] Psychiatrist Paul S. Appelbaum argued that the data from the New York State Psychiatric Institute and Columbia University Irving Medical Center database of mass shootings show that "legal problems, substance and alcohol use, and difficulty coping with life events seem more useful foci for prevention [of mass shootings] and policy than an emphasis on serious mental illness.
[55] British criminologist Peter Squires argued that mass shooters in Europe and the U.S. "tend to be loners with not much social support who strike out at their communities, schools and families", and noted that countries with high gun-ownership rates but greater social capital (such as Norway, Finland, Switzerland, and Israel) have fewer mass killings.
"[82] The October 2018 PLOS One study found that state-level poverty rates and state-level population sizes did not predict state-level mass shooting rates, but did find that greater online media coverage and online search interest levels correlated with shorter intervals between any two consecutive incidents of mass shootings and the researchers concluded that their findings suggest that online media might correlate with an increasing incidence rate of mass shootings.
"[124] However, the study found that the "most powerful effects" in support or opposition to gun control "are driven by variables related to local culture, with pronounced but expected differences emerging between respondents in rural, conservative, and gun-heavy areas and those residing in urban, liberal areas with few firearm stores.
"[124] A separate 2019 replication study, extending the earlier panel analysis, found no evidence that mass shootings caused a "significant or substantively meaningful main effect" on attitudes toward gun control.
"[125] The study authors concluded, "To the extent that mass shootings may affect public opinion, the result is polarizing rather than consensus building.
"[125] A 2020 study published in the American Political Science Review using data on school shootings from 2006 to 2018 concluded the incidents had "little to no effect on electoral outcomes in the United States,"[126] whereas a 2021 study in the same journal covering a broader time period (1980–2016) found that the vote share of the Democratic Party increased by an average of almost 5 percentage points in counties that had experienced a "rampage-style" school shooting.
"[128] The study authors suggested that this phenomenon could help explain why mass shootings in the U.S. have not led to meaningful policy reform efforts.
[128] A review article first published online in 2015 and then printed in January 2017 in the journal Trauma, Violence, & Abuse concluded that "mass shootings are associated with a variety of adverse psychological outcomes in survivors and members of affected communities".
It says that, while "the psychological effects of mass shootings on indirectly exposed populations" is less well-understood, "there is evidence that such events lead to at least short-term increases in fears and declines in perceived safety.
"[132] Identified risk factors for adverse psychological outcomes have included, among others, demographics, greater proximity to the attack, acquaintance with victims, and less access to psychosocial resources.
This list starts in 1949, the year in which Howard Unruh committed his shooting, which was the first in modern U.S. history to incur ten or more fatalities.
