#61: Why Would Anyone massacre children?
This is not a hot take
Your hearts (and newsfeeds) may be heavy with fury, fear and grief for the children killed in Uvalde, Texas. I hope you’ll sit this post out if you need to, or that it will be worth a few minutes of your time if you read on.
This newsletter is all about pondering why people do certain things. Only this time, the motives don’t matter that much.
Last month, I wrote briefly about the motivations of mass shooters, citing information from a comprehensive, 54-year U.S. database. I made a graph of the known motives as compiled by the Violence Project’s researchers, sociologist James Densley and psychologist Jillian Peterson:
But I missed an important piece: one of the most common motives in the database is “unknown”, say the two academics in this Washington Post article, published before the Uvalde massacre.
The hunt for motive is ultimately fruitless.
Densley and Peterson argue that hunting for motive is “ultimately fruitless”, because we use motives as labels to “explain away” mass shootings. (“Mental illness, for example, is not a motive.”)
It may be easier to other a killer as a racist monster, a worthless homophobic, or a sick, sick teenager—than to think of him1 as an unhappy human being, living among us. A very angry, lonely person who feels like he’s not getting what he’s owed and has become fixated on a scapegoat: a group of people; their school; their workplace. And who has access to guns.
Our dozens of interviews with perpetrators and the people who knew them do reveal [… ] that shooters often have the same motivation: to cause as much death and destruction as possible so that a world that had otherwise ignored them would be forced to notice them and feel their anguish.
The researchers add:
All we can say with some degree of certainty is that no one living a fulfilled life perpetrates a mass shooting. These shootings are designed to be the perpetrator’s final act, and this is perhaps the most important point when it comes to preventing them. Most mass shooters are actively suicidal. […]
This is also why traditional deterrence measures, such as armed security or harsh criminal sanctions, do little to avert them.
Densley and Peterson write in their book The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic that the United States spent tons of taxpayer money “hunting monsters” ever since a high school mass shooting in Littleton, Colorado in 1999. To no avail: the number of mass shooters and their victims is on the rise.
It has failed because the monsters are not them. They are us—boys and men we know. […] They are insiders.
Many security measures are meant to fend off outsiders, explains Peterson in the online talk below. But often, mass shooters had actually run through the drills and security procedures along with the people they later killed.
That also means potential perpetrators could be spotted, she says:
In a way, that makes prevention harder, but in a way that makes it so much more possible. Because these are kids, or colleagues, or students that we are seeing every single day, that we can notice when things are changing.
Maybe looking at data feels hard and wrong right now. Maybe humanising killers feels hard and wrong always.
I live far away, and I don’t pretend to truly get it. I’m sure we also have very angry, lonely people fixated on scapegoats around here. But they don’t have the same access to guns, and that seems like the freaking obvious place to start.
Here are other things we can do2.
We can care for ourselves, and for the people around us, today.
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Yes, the vast majority of mass shooters are male.
This summary comes from the Off-Ramp project, which suggests possible actions at different stages of the mass shooters’ trajectories, as studied in the Violence Project. Peterson says:
I don’t think you can blame anyone along that trajectory. It’s no one’s fault, but are there opportunities to be pulled off? And how do we see those? One of my goals is to convince people that violence prevention is a way that we lead our lives every day. […] Preventing violence is really just about human connection and we’re all very capable of being part of it.