Two Professors Found What Creates a Mass Shooter. Will Politicians Pay Attention?

Mass shooters overwhelmingly fit a certain profile, say Jillian Peterson and James Densley, which means it’s possible to ID and treat them before they commit violence.

Each time a high-profile mass shooting happens in America, a grieving and incredulous nation scrambles for answers. Who was this criminal and how could he (usually) have committed such a horrendous and inhumane act? A few details emerge about the individual’s troubled life and then everyone moves on.

Three years ago, Jillian Peterson, an associate professor of criminology at Hamline University, and James Densley, a professor of criminal justice at Metro State University, decided to take a different approach. In their view, the failure to gain a more meaningful and evidence-based understanding of why mass shooters do what they do seemed a lost opportunity to stop the next one from happening. Funded by the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice, their research constructed a database of every mass shooter since 1966 who shot and killed four or more people in a public place, and every shooting incident at schools, workplaces and places of worship since 1999.

Peterson and Densley also compiled detailed life histories on 180 shooters, speaking to their spouses, parents, siblings, childhood friends, work colleagues and teachers. As for the gunmen themselves, most don’t survive their carnage, but five who did talked to Peterson and Densely from prison, where they were serving life sentences. The researchers also found several people who planned a mass shooting but changed their mind.

Their findings, also published in the 2021 book, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic, reveal striking commonalities among the perpetrators of mass shootings and suggest a data-backed, mental health-based approach could identify and address the next mass shooter before he pulls the trigger — if only politicians are willing to actually engage in finding and funding targeted solutions.

But, it triggers more people to talk about guns than actually resolving problems so,....

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cherokeepatti · 61-69, F

they’ve also found out that constantly replaying a news story of a shooting will create more. Not just a shooting but other types of stories like a bombing or whatever. So the media is encouraging more of it and I believe they know they are doing it.

Heartlander · 80-89, M

@cherokeepatti

I agree. Revenge is one way to even the score if you think the world is picking on you. Since so many disenfranchised young adults want to get their revenge by attacking random school children, there's good reason to ask what schools may be doing or not doing that turns some kids into murderers.

I've long thought that our desegregation process did a lot more than simply mix us together racially. They also took kids out of their neighborhoods and in doing so destroyed so many of our old neighborhoods. Meanwhile, schools became bigger and bigger, and that made it easy for kids to fall through the cracks. Add in special treatment for honor students and star students, and teachers banding together in national unions, and ... it's may have gotten us to where we are now.

Through the 70s we lived but a couple of blocks from a big city high school. Most of our neighbors connected with that school, some of whom had gone to school there years earlier. The school was integrated, but it was mostly a white neighborhood; so the federal courts forced the school board to start bussing kids in and out of the neighborhood to achieve a racial balance, not of the neighborhood but in the mind of the federal courts. Smart Black and White parents responded by sending their kids to private or parochial schools. Smart teachers likewise found more stability in private schools or public schools beyond the reach of the court.

Within a few years that school turned into a blackboard jungle and the neighborhood started to turn. There were reports of both the police and the fire department being called every day. In one of the media interviews with a fireman the firemen commented about being harassed once they responded to the fire alarm. When the reporter asked for more details about how the students had harassed the responding firemen the fireman corrected the reporter. It was the teachers who were harassing the firemen. The school was later closed. The idea was that building a new school building elsewhere would fix things. It didn't.

cherokeepatti · 61-69, F

@Heartlander I think it’s something else besides revenge. It very well could draw out these people who have been subjected to MKULTRA training and triggers them to act out.