There was another school shooting today. It certainly seems like there have been a lot of mass shootings lately. Off the top of my head, I can think of the Virginia Tech, Tuscon, Colorado Movie Theater, and this one all over the past 2-3 years. I was curious whether mass shootings are increasing in either number or severity over the past 10 years. It sure seems like it from the news, but perhaps it is just our society remembering the more recents ones, and forgetting that others occurred. So I decided to look it up, and by one standard there have been 62 mass killings in the United States since 1982.
This has a pretty good summary with a chart of some interesting factoids about mass shootings. I am not a psychiatrist, social worker, or sociologist, but here are a few of my observations about some common themes of the shootings:
1) most of them occur either at a school or work (current or former)
2) the assailant often commits suicide
3) they do not appear clustered in any particular part of the country
4) family members seem to be more often than not to be victims
I draw two conclusions from this - (1) The shooters are very angry (2) The shooters do not value their own lives.
I tried to see if there was a comprable analysis for similar killings in Europe. Here is one. Not being satisfied with this, I checked out wikipedia and hit the mother lode. This wiki lists all sorts of mass killings from around the world. While, it may be stated that school shootings are something new and horrible in our society and were absent in the days of yore, the worse school shooting in the United States happened in 1927.
Again, I perused the list and it seemed many of the killings were work, school, or family related and the erstwhile assailant again seemed to more often than not commit suicide.
I am dismayed by what I have found (but somewhat suspected) - mass killings follow a relatively basic pattern and are by no means new or limited to any particular area of the world.
Based on my "research" (using quotes because I'm chuckling at the thought of a second career as a sociologist), it appears some extremely small percentage of people when faced with an educational, professional or family crisis proverbially "snap". Instead of committing suicide immediately, for whatever reason they decide to take a bunch of people with them. Therefore, my overall conclusions are -
1. limiting access to firearms will not stop these killings. I believe the assailants use whatever means available to enact their rage.
2. it is impossible to "deter" these killings. the perpetrator does not intend to get away with the crime.
3. it is probably impossible to identify in 99% of the cases who might become an assailant.
which leads to the final and ultimate and perhaps unfortunate conclusions that -
Mass killings have been around for a long time and probably will be around for a long time going forward. It isn't guns, it isn't the lack of God, it isn't bad parenting, it isn't society, it isn't heavy metal, it isn't religious extremism. I wish it was one of those, because then at least we'd have something to look at it to make it stop - what a mass killing really is, is a very, very bad reaction to certain situations that seems universal to human nature. I doubt we can ever stop them. I suppose the only good news is in the grand scheme of the amount of deaths caused each year, it is probably still infinitely safer to be at an elementary school than cross the street in downtown Los Angeles.
