Mass shootings per year in America are increasing, and some recent research from the Violence Project aims to help us understand why this is.
For students of A-level Sociology this is a useful case study relevant to both research methods and crime and deviance.
The project has interviewed hundreds of people convicted of mass shootings and their family members to better understand their life histories (nice link to secondary qualitative data here!) and then fed this information into a database in oder to quantify it and to see what the main characteristics of mass shooters are.
Interestingly the data shows that there is a broad difference between people who do mass shootings in restaurants, bars and retail establishments compared to people who shoot up workplaces, religious institutions or schools and colleges. In the former, the victims tended to be strangers to the shooters, in the later type the shooters were much more likely to have known their victims.
The main characteristics of mass shooters in America….
- Out of 172 cases only four were women, two of these acted with a man.
- 50% are white, 50% from other ethnic backgrounds
- 65% of shooters had a criminal record, 63% had a history of violence
- The most common ‘motivation’ was a history of psychosis (30% of shooters) where the shooter was loosing their grip on reality.
- Half the shooters acquired their guns legally.
You can explore the database for yourself at the link below.
These seem to be a very ‘postmodern’ set of findings…
The researchers note that the data reveals that there is ‘no one type of shooter’ – mass shooters in America come from a diverse array of backgrounds and have diverse motives for what they are doing.
Although personally i can see one clear trend from the data which is the huge bias towards to males – as is the case with many other crimes!
And another is the recent shift to grocery store shootings – the first of these wasn’t until 2018, and since then there have been ‘copycat’ cases following it – Shooters tend to take lessons from other shooters who have done the same before!
Controlling Gun Crime…
The project suggests two main solutions to bring down the number of mass shootings…..
- Monitoring people with high risk characteristics and restricting gun sales to these people (nice link to Actuarialism here within crime and deviance).
- Stopping giving attention to mass shooters – which should help stop the copycat spreading of such hideous acts!
Sources
- The Violence Project
- Article in The Conversation discussing the rise of mass shootings in Grocery Stores.
