Another Mass Shooting in the Good Ol' USA

[whell]

Originally Posted by finnbow

You still have not offered your view on what is/are the primary factor(s) responsible for the more than daily occurrence of mass shootings in the USA (and firearm deaths being the leading cause of child death) if it is not the unhindered access to firearms.

If we continue to focus on only guns and not on the shooter(s), we'll never find a solution. Here's why:

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.

POLITICO: Can you take us through the profile of mass shooters that emerged from your research?

Peterson: There’s this really consistent pathway. Early childhood trauma seems to be the foundation, whether violence in the home, sexual assault, parental suicides, extreme bullying. Then you see the build toward hopelessness, despair, isolation, self-loathing, and oftentimes rejection from peers. That turns into a really identifiable crisis point where they’re acting differently. Sometimes they have previous suicide attempts.

What’s different from traditional suicide is that the self-hate turns against a group. They start asking themselves, “Whose fault is this?” Is it a racial group or women or a religious group, or is it my classmates? The hate turns outward. There’s also this quest for fame and notoriety.

What focusing on guns will get you is a myopic focus on only part of the solution. One of the points that the professors make is that a mass shooting will beget a mass shooting because those who fit the psych profile of a shooter will relate to and want to imitate another shooter.

Also, the shooter isn't only about committing an act of violence against (in the case of school shootings) the kids. These acts are DRIVEN by the shooter's desire to kill themselves:

Peterson: I don’t think most people realize that these are suicides, in addition to homicides. Mass shooters design these to be their final acts. When you realize this, it completely flips the idea that someone with a gun on the scene is going to deter this. If anything, that’s an incentive for these individuals. They are going in to be killed.

It’s hard to focus on the suicide because these are horrific homicides. But it’s a critical piece because we know so much from the suicide prevention world that can translate here.

This is the reason that you really can't view mass shootings through the lens of "typical" murder crimes. They're different. The motivations are different.

Finally, given the shooter's motivation to commit a final act of "payback" before their suicide, focusing on the type of weapon is useful only to the extent that the earliest shootings created the template for what came later. If the earliest "shooters" decided to use the Oklahoma City bombing as the template, I suspect we'd be talking about how to restrict access to fertilizer.