Last summer, as a way to escape the scorching temperatures, my husband and I got into the habit of walking around area malls to get some exercise while hopefully avoiding heatstroke.
(Yes, we’re those people.)
Toward the end of September, Halloween decorations started going up. In the display windows of one store, in a mall I won’t name, we walked by oversized posters depicting kids in the usual trick-or-treat attire: skeleton, ninja turtle, Wednesday Addams.
One poster showed an adorable little girl dressed as a court jester, her gaze wide-eyed and sort of crazed. In one uplifted arm, she brandished a huge, homicidal-looking silver knife.
It stopped us in our tracks. What the hell?
Then we guffawed at the sheer, horror-movie incongruity of the image. My husband took a photo, which he jokingly posted on Facebook with a caption: Funny? Disturbing? Disturbingly funny?
The reaction he got wasn’t funny at all.
“Not cool.”
“Extremely disturbing, unfortunately it’s how society is … sad.”
“Normalizing violence is never a good idea.”
“Halloween is supposed to be dark but … no.”
It went on from there, with the general consensus being such images have no place in our increasingly violent society, one marred by distressingly regular mass shootings. Elsewhere, it’s been argued that such violent images may even serve as catalysts for malefactors who would turn our public spaces into shooting galleries.
It got me thinking: Could a picture of a little girl dressed as a clown and holding a knife really have that much power?
And if not (because I had my doubts), what, exactly, are the underlying causes of the epidemic of mass shootings in the United States, arguably the most dramatic and horrifying manifestation of homegrown violence?
The recent mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, once again lends this question a new and urgent relevance.
Turns out, experts know a lot about this very issue, and it’s not what you might think.
In the good old days — that is, the 1980s — politicians and pundits often blamed the nation’s growing crime and social degeneracy, especially among the young, on an animated cartoon that was taking the nation by storm, particularly in the yellowed person of one Bart Simpson.
It was a simpler time.
Nowadays, whenever a mass shooting occurs, politicians and others are quick to trot out a host of reasons why the United States disproportionately experiences this particular scourge of public mayhem.
Some have tried to blame single-parent homes or violent video games and rap music, although the link is tenuous at best; others try to pin the blame on abortion, backpacks, too many school doors, family breakdown and not enough “good guys with guns.”
Of course, the biggest hobby horse folks point to as a causative force is mental illness. It’s easy to understand why: Common sense suggests that anyone who would walk into a mall or theater or school or workplace or bowling alley and open fire on innocent bystanders simply must be insane.
But studies show that a vanishingly small number of those who perpetrate mass shootings — around 5% — turn out to have a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia or psychosis. They may have some mental health-related woes in their backgrounds, but the vast majority lack a diagnosable disorder that would label them as severely mentally ill.
This makes a kind of sense, when you think of the painstaking planning and preparation that goes into committing mass murder — something arguably difficult to do if you’re hearing voices or seeing hallucinations.
(The alleged Maine shooter, who reportedly was hearing voices last summer during a stint with his Army Reserve unit and sent away to a two-week inpatient psychiatric evaluation, may be an exception to this rule.)
Studies show people with serious mental illness are much more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators of it.
So, what really are the contributing factors that underlie so much of the mass shootings that happen in the U.S.? Obviously, the prevalence of guns in our country is a factor that can’t be understated — but that’s a whole different column, one I’ve written about before and certainly will again.
Two experts in criminology did a deep dive into every mass shooter who killed four or more people in a public place since 1966, and they examined every shooting incident at schools, workplaces or places of worship since 1999. They published their findings in 2021 in a book titled The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic.
What the experts found were striking similarities among the men – and 98% of mass shooters are men, the majority of them (60%) white — who take up arms in public places.
Commonalities shared by mass shooters include having endured some kind of childhood trauma — being physically or sexually abused, witnessing domestic violence, having a parent commit suicide or suffering extreme bullying in school.
As they get older, these males — and mass shooters are increasingly young males — become isolated and angry, full of hopelessness and self-hatred. Many shooters are suicidal and even attempt suicide before turning their rage outward, onto innocent bystanders. Many will commit suicide after, as the Maine shooter apparently did.
“Death by cop” is a main motivation for many mass shooters, the experts said.
Jillian Peterson, an associate professor of criminology at Hamline University and one of the book’s authors, said in an American Psychological Association podcast that mass shooters often take out their rage in spaces where they feel they’ve been wronged, be it schools, workplaces or other venues.
They tend to target those who they feel have caused their disenfranchisement from society, be it minorities or immigrants or women or the LGBTQ+ community. They’re often racists or bigots, homophobes or misogynists whose fury gets stoked in the dark corners of social media, where they vent their spleen and find common cause with other maladapted men.
They share a sense of damaged masculinity and humiliation, rejection and marginalization.
Many mass shooters, Peterson said, often have made a study of mass killers whose destruction has gained them notoriety and fame; they’re drawn to that kind of deformed recognition.
Practically every mass shooter she studied had reached some sort of “crisis point” in the days, weeks or months leading up to their act, and often they communicated their desperation to others some way, via threats of violence or suicide (as the Maine shooting suspect reportedly did).
About 80% of school shooters tell someone of their plans, Peterson’s research showed.
A different study showed more than two-thirds of mass shootings are perpetrated by someone with a history of domestic violence.
Of course, one of the biggest factors behind mass shootings is that fact these individuals have easy access to firearms, especially assault weapons.
After all, other rich, developed countries in the world have violent video games and mental illness and fatherless children, but none experience the ghastly levels of mass shootings that we do.
Peterson and other experts say if we want to reduce mass homicide, we must fully embrace wholesale gun control measures — states with tighter gun control laws have fewer mass shootings. This includes safe gun storage laws, a higher minimum age for gun purchases, universal backgrounds checks, bans on assault weapons, longer wait periods and red-flag laws.
But the road to becoming a mass shooter is complex and multifaceted, Peterson found, and — aside from the gun issue — we must better address the root causes that can turn a troubled person into an enraged gunman spewing hatred and causing death.
That means intervening earlier in the lives of at-risk children, which would entail pouring mental health resources into communities and schools where none now exist, or exist only in a paltry way, or, as in Texas, exist in the form of religious chaplains who lack the kind of training required.
It would mean that, in lieu of the absurd idea of arming teachers or turning schools into prisons, we undertake a mass societal education campaign, not just in the schools but in workplaces and the public domain, to educate people on the signs of someone going down the path toward possible mass killing.
Peterson and others say society as a whole — teachers and parents and co-workers and bosses and family members — need to learn ways to speak up and safely intervene when they see or hear something troubling. This could require an approach that is less punitive and more compassionate — with an understanding that these are broken boys and men who need help, and need it quickly.
We need to address mass shootings by way of a public health suicide prevention approach, to identify and forestall the plans of those who are so desperate to leave the world in a flare of violence that they would take others down with them.
We must address the social isolation that is a common thread among mass shooters; we should encourage the formation of crisis-intervention teams in schools and other places that can undertake a behavioral threat assessment on someone who is putting out worrisome signals.
The media plays a role in all this, in how it too often provides many killers with the attention they crave, causing copycat behavior and social contagion. Media campaigns like No Notoriety are helping to undercut this phenomenon; holding gun manufacturers liable in mass shootings and taking technology companies to task for their part in facilitating mass violence play a part as well.
Yes, it’s far easier to view mass shooters simply as crazed killers or homicidal maniacs, case closed. I want to state strongly for the record that I’m not suggesting we should view these men as victims.
The people they kill are the victims.
But we’ve got to look deeper at why mass homicide is happening with such ferocity here, because what we’re doing now clearly isn’t working.
