The Current Events Room
The study was conducted by a group called The Violence Project, a nonpartisan think tank founded by psychologists at Minnesota's Hamline University, with the goal of reducing violence in society. The study consisted of several components, which included the creation of a a database of the 171 shootings — defined per FBI guidelines as involving the killing of four or more people in a public setting — that have taken place between 1966 and 2019. The database is coded on 99 “life history variables,” including mental health, trauma, and “interest in past shootings.” You can find the database here.
The study also explored larger sociological factors in the areas where the shootings occurred, exploring crime rates, inequality, and prevalence of household guns. Furthermore, the authors of the study conducted interviews with incarcerated shooters to determine what led to their actions.
In looking at the shootings, the authors of the study identified four key traits that tied together the perpetrators. Typically, they concluded, shooters had experienced childhood trauma, had identified a personal grievance, and had developed a “script” based on prior cases. They also, of course, could get their hands on a gun.
https://www.mic.com/p/new-study-on-m...ators-19366339
The Violence Project also identified five profile categories of shooters. This includes K-12 shooters, who are usually white males who plan their actions and steal guns from their family, compared with college shooters, who are more likely to be suicidal, non-white, and to write a manifesto. Other profiled groups include shooters at places of worship, commercial locations, and workplaces. https://www.mic.com/p/new-study-on-m...ators-19366339
Another factor that the study noted is that of contagion i.e. school shootings and other shootings with four or more deaths spread like a contagion — each shooting tends to spark more shootings. https://www.keranews.org/post/mass-s...research-shows
"Peterson [Jillian Peterson, assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University] hopes the database will be useful for researchers and scholars who are studying the phenomenon of mass shootings. She also is toying with the idea of eventually making the database public, with some hesitancy."
“It’s risky because people can use data to say different things,” Peterson said. “For every school shooter who has a certain profile, there are a million people who have that exact same profile who don’t commit a mass shooting. Also, ... I’m very concerned about increasing the stigma of connecting mental illness to criminal behavior."
https://www.hamline.edu/HUNewsDetail.aspx?id=4295037437
“The vast majority of people go into this with no escape plan. They plan that this is their final act. They’re either going to kill themselves in the act or they’re going to be killed, or they’re going to spend the rest of their lives in prison,” said Dr. Jillian Peterson, one of the Hamline University professors leading the study.
Peterson’s team looked closely at the mental health of the shooters and found that about 80% of them showed signs of a crisis leading up to the event.
She believes that’s where a red flag law, which gives police the authority to temporarily remove weapons, could be beneficial.
https://kstp.com/news/local-research...2019-/5557861/
“What we found is unfortunately there really is no pattern,” Peterson said. “Each person has a really different and unique story. But we did see it was a slow build over time, and then the tipping point seems to be suicidality, that people expressed a desire to die before the shooting.”
The team discussed crisis intervention and suicide prevention, and spoke about the role of social media during these shootings.
https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2018/...ds-no-pattern/
Methodology:
By focusing only on public events, we exclude domestic mass shootings (if 50% or more of victims are non-relatives killed in public then we include them). We also exclude mass shootings attributable to underlying criminal activity, and events where a firearm was not the primary means of death. A broader definition with a threshold of fewer deaths, non-fatal shootings, or any means or motive would certainly yield more cases.
https://www.theviolenceproject.org/methodology/
This database is the first to look closely at the mental health histories of mass shooters. Among the 171 mass shooters, two-thirds had a mental health diagnosis or presented mental health concerns. This is only slightly higher than the fifty percent of people in the general population who will meet criteria for a mental illness in their lifetime. However, a mental health diagnosis does not mean that the actions of mass shooters are directly motivated by their symptoms.
The database shows that sixteen percent of mass shootings are at least partly motivated by psychosis – which is less than the percentage that of shootings motivated by domestic issues, employment changes, interpersonal issues, and hate.
This is also the first database to look closely at how many shooters obtained their guns. The majority of mass shooters use handguns (seventy-seven percent) and twenty-five percent used assault rifles. Of the known data, seventy-seven percent of shooters purchased at least some of their guns legally, thirteen percent made illegal purchases, and nineteen percent stole guns.
https://www.hamline.edu/news/MassShooterDatabase/
The purpose of the study was to examine the psychology of mass-shooters with a goal of prevention in mind. Unlike the "other" thread on this topic, all aspects of the study are up for discussion.
Clearly there are many people who are not faring well in a world that allows social isolation and that social isolation generally leads these people to seek out others who are similarly isolated on social media where they literally feed each other's misery. I doubt that most would meet the test for clinical psychosis. They are not incompetent, but they are persuaded that they have nothing to live for and that certain members of society are to blame. In the case of the younger shooters, I believe that their parents and families failed to pay enough attention. How many people throw their hands up and suggest that their teen deliberately isolating himself or herself in their bedroom or in the basement is just typical teen behavior? It's easier than forcing them to be part of the family.
All manner of teens may happen upon posts on forums by these people that may well be a cry for help, but do nothing either because no one really believes much of what people post or even if they do believe it, they don't know what to do about it. Even if they personally know someone in that kind of crisis, there's a kind of unwritten law that you don't inform on your peers to their parents.
I am also of the view that while other methods of mass murder are possible for people who have reached this point of psychological crisis and suicidal ideation, they are far less convenient and/or efficient than acquiring firearms.
I think that there should be far more monitoring of social media sites where it is clear that these socially maladapted people gather, by people trained to recognize the signs of the kind psychological deterioration that suggests suicidal ideation as well as an inclination to be vengeful so that these people can be identified and intervention made possible. Yes, they should also be red flagged, if in the opinion of a trained psychologist they pose a risk for suicide and/or mass murder.
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Originally Posted by Cletus
