Category: Las Vegas Shooting News Review

This week’s massacre at a country music festival in downtown Las Vegas, which left at least 59 people dead and more than 500 injured, reminds us that the locations and circumstances of mass shootings in America are unpredictable. But according to one researcher, these tragedies are much less random and inexplicable than media reports and solemn speeches by public officials typically suggest.

The shooters often share three converging characteristics, according to Eric Madfis of the University of Washington, Tacoma, one of the world’s leading experts on mass murderers in the US.

In a 2014 paper published in the journal Men and Masculinities, Madfis determined that mass killers tend to share elements of white entitlement, middle-class instability and downward economic mobility, and heterosexual masculinity.

“This is about entitlement because white people are socialized into believing that they are the dominant group in society,” Madfis told Seeker, “and so they have the highest expectations for their own success, and are less able to cope with loss when they fail to achieve that success.”

“The American middle class has shrunk, the economy has been de-industrialized, and wages have not increased in decades,” he continued. As a result, “many more Americans are experiencing downward mobility.”

While alleged Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock’s finances remain unclear, and convicted Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof, to take another recent example, may seem too young to have had major financial concerns, Madfis argues that financial anxiety can be “particularly threatening for many men who, as the traditional breadwinners, feel a great sense of shame when they aren’t able to provide the sort of life for their families that they anticipated.”

RELATED: Study of Convicted Terrorists Reveals Deviant Moral Judgment

Prior research cited by Madfis has found that whites commit mass murder at a slightly higher rate relative to their share of the population, with 69.9 percent of American mass killers being non-Hispanic whites. A more recent dataset from Mother Jones covering 1982 to 2017 shows that 54 percent of mass shootings involving three or more deaths were committed by white men. Black people ranked second, but made up only 16 percent of the total.

Madfis’s analysis suggests that this white disproportionality is exclusive to this type of killer. Whether or not Paddock fully fits Madfis’s profile remains an open question.

“It is hard to tell based on the available information, but certainly he was a straight white male,” he said. “He had no prior history of criminal behavior, which is actually quite typical of mass killers. He was also divorced twice, and that is the type of life stressor which mass killers often experience many times.”

Paddock’s father was a serial bank robber who was arrested by the FBI when Paddock was seven years old. He later escaped from prison and landed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. It’s uncertain what effect this might have had on Paddock, the eldest of four sons.

Early news reports suggest Paddock owned several homes and could potentially be quite wealthy, which Madfis acknowledged is atypical of the general mass shooter profile.

“But he was also a prolific gambler, so it would not surprise me at all to learn that he recently suffered a significant financial loss,” he noted. “That said, mass killers do not just ‘snap.’”

Paddock had reportedly been involved in some high-stakes bets in the weeks ahead of the shooting, according to NBC News, wagering anywhere between $10,000 to $30,000 a day on several occasions. Investigators have not yet determined whether he was winning or losing money.

Madfis’s analysis of mass murderers goes back to 1999, his junior year of high school. Following the Columbine High School massacre that year, he noted copycat shootings. At his own school, someone wrote in the boys’ bathroom, “Columbine Could Happen Here,” along with a particular date. Many people skipped school that day, but Madfis attended as usual.

At the end of the day, after nothing had happened, a friend turned to him at their lockers and said sarcastically, “Boy, today sure was disappointing.” The vice-principal of the school overheard the statement, interpreted it as a threat, and suspended his friend.

This sparked Madfis’s interest in the responses to shootings.

“I wanted to know more, not only about what causes these types of events, but also about evidence-based solutions to actually prevent them,” he said.

RELATED: Loneliness and Self-Centeredness Amplify Each Other in a Vicious Feedback Loop

Studies repeatedly show that upwards of 90 percent of mass killers are male, with the vast majority identifying as straight.

“Violence often operates as a signifier of masculinity, and so someone who has failed to achieve a manly, macho identity in other realms — such as in work, love, or sports — can be seen as powerful and masculine simply by engaging in violence,” Madfis said.

Violence, he added, seems to be a solution for certain men not only because of the association of violence with masculinity, but also because of cultural cues that establish aggression as an appropriate masculine reaction to shame.

“Some men respond to perceived emasculation in the socially approved manner for men — with violence,” he said.

Madfis emphasizes that his argument is based on the performance of masculinity and gender, “rather than one about biological sex differences.” A transgender male should therefore be vulnerable to such behaviors, but Madfis said that since “trans people are forced to face myriad challenges throughout their lives” they “do not have the same privileges or lack of coping mechanisms as cisgender males.”

Mass murders are very different from homicide because the latter typically involves single-victim events. According to FBI crime statistics, interracial homicides in the US do not seem to exhibit the crisis in white identity that Madfis sees among many mass murderers in America. Last year, for example, it was reported that about 8.6 percent of black victims were killed by whites, while 15.8 percent of white victims were killed by blacks.

“The vast majority of homicide is intraracial, with blacks killing blacks, and whites killing whites,” Madfis said.

RELATED: Brothers Who Are Terrorists: Why It’s Common

Robert Hanlon of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine pointed out that in addition to cultural and societal influences, neurobiology and personality facets should be considered when attempting to analyze killers.

Certain genetic mutations mostly affecting males have been shown to increase a person’s risk for violent behavior 13-fold.

“All of our behavior has both a genetic and environmental component — they cannot be separated,” neuroscientist Jeremy Richman of the Avielle Foundation — named after Avielle Rose Richman, who was killed during the 2012 mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut — told Seeker.

Madfis rejects a strong genetic connection between violence committed by non-human male primates and violence committed by men.

“If that were the case,” he said, “one would see more stable and constant rates of mass murder all across the world and throughout history. However, we are seeing more instances of mass murder now in the United States for a reason.”

A 2016 cross-national study that looked at 171 countries confirmed that there are more public mass shootings in the US than in any other country in the world.

Madfis argues that political and cultural responses are necessary for diminishing gun violence in America.

“We need to work against our problematic culture, which associates violence with masculinity and glorifies gun culture and violence as a way to attain a sense of masculine power and lasting fame,” he said. “We also could do a lot more to prevent these attacks with a far more robust mental health system, and especially with mental health care that focuses on addressing toxic forms of masculinity.”

WATCH: Why the Government Stops Gun Violence Research

“Everyone has three lives,” Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez once posited. “A public life, a private life and a secret life.”

It remains unclear whether a secret life led Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old wealthy, retired accountant with a penchant for gambling, to open fire on a Las Vegas music festival crowd and kill 58 people and injure 500 others before turning the gun on himself.

Police are continuing to search for clues on what would trigger him to commit the deadliest US shooting in recent history.

“My hunch is there is a secret life here that will eventually be uncovered,” said J Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist at the University of California at San Diego who researches mass shootings.

Though the suspect appeared to show no red flags about his intentions, Paddock had been quietly stockpiling 33 high-powered weapons – which included assault rifles and explosives – over the past 13 months. He spent decades acquiring guns and ammunition, police said.

Paddock’s family and friends appeared puzzled by the attack, with his girlfriend, Marilou Danley, describing him as “a kind, caring, quiet man”, while his brother, Eric Paddock, told reporters that he was stunned.

But Mr Meloy said there are several warning behaviours that signal whether an individual might be capable of committing such a crime.

Eric Paddock says he is in total shock after police named his brother, Stephen, as the shooter

No one would argue over whether the horrific massacre at a Las Vegas concert on Sunday, which claimed the lives of 58 people and injured over 500 more, fits the definition of a mass shooting. Nor does anyone quibble over that classification for the Orlando nightclub shooting that killed 49 and injured 53, or Sandy Hook, or Virginia Tech, or any of the other outbursts of gun violence that have claimed hundreds of lives in past decade alone.

But what about the Plano, Texas man who fatally shot his estranged wife and seven other people at a private party just last week? Or the 25-year-old man who opened fire during a church service in Antioch, Tenn. just a few days earlier, killing one parishioner and wounding seven, many of whom remained hospitalized days later?

Under the current federal definition, authorized by President Obama in January 2013, a “mass killing” must involve at least three deaths and occur in a “place of public use,” disqualifying both the Antioch and Plano incidents. A Congressional Research Service Report published two months later acknowledged a lack of consensus on the issue and used its own definition, which required four or more deaths, not including the shooter, occurring in a public place and a gunman “who select victims somewhat indiscriminately.”

As others have already noted, there is a widespread disagreement on what constitutes a mass shooting. The Washington Post‘s Christopher Ingraham identified three broad categories, from the one used by Mother Jones magazine (and TIME), which also limits incidents to public places and three deaths not including the shooter, to the broad categorization used by the non-profit Gun Violence Archive, which includes any incident in which four people were killed or injured, leading to much higher incident counts.

To wit: A Vox article on Monday reports that “[t]here have been more than 1,500 mass shootings since Sandy Hook,” using Gun Violence Archive Data, while Mother Jones‘ database contains only 29 mass shootings in that time. Neither are incorrect. But the discrepancy can easily lead to confusion when different outlets report vastly different numbers using the same term.

“It’s a tricky issue here,” says Avery Gardiner, the co-president of the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence. The Brady Campaign defines mass shootings as incidents with four or more deaths, not including the shooter — but doesn’t limit the definition to public places or anonymous rampages.

“Some define a public mass shooting as one where the people were chosen indiscriminately. That doesn’t seem right to me,” Gardiner says. She adds that she would “absolutely” include the Plano, Texas incident. “I’d be very uncomfortable with any definition that minimized the role of domestic violence,” she says.

While the definition of a mass shooting may seem like a fairly technical or semantic debate, it has the power to drive the media narrative and the public perception of the scope of gun violence in the U.S. A universally accepted definition is unlikely, but greater transparency in how outlets report the numbers is important when the figures vary so drastically.

1. Listen Hamline professor building database on mass shooters

The gunman at last Sunday night’s shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas is entry number 134 in a database of mass shooters that two Twin Cities professors are building.

Jillian Peterson, a Hamline University assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice, and James Densley, an associate professor of criminal justice at Metropolitan State University, hope to better understand why mass shootings happen and identify ways to prevent them.

They’re focused on shootings that happen in a public place with four or more victims and aren’t family or gang-related. Peterson and Densley code mass shooters according to 50 different variables. Peterson said they go deep into shooters’ histories and look at past trauma, their parents, mental illness, their relationships with other people and their social media profiles.

From what Peterson has read about Stephen Paddock, the alleged shooter in Las Vegas, she said she’s curious to see how he fits in.

“This shooter is a little different, compared to the data we have,” said Peterson, a forensic psychologist. “He’s significantly older than average, the average age is mid-30s. Social media presence is also something we usually see, some sort of radicalization on social media or wanting to go viral on social media. In this case the shooter was not active on social media, didn’t seem to have any social media accounts.”

They’re still in the process of building data, so Peterson said they don’t have definitive statistics. But she has seen two things surface repeatedly– hopelessness and a need for notoriety in life or in death.

But trying to predict future shootings and who is most at risk can be difficult, said Peterson. “The problem is that finding a mass shooter is like finding a needle in a haystack. So, for every person that fits the profile and does a shooting there’s probably a million people that fit the profile and don’t do a shooting.”

She and Densley would like to make their database open to the public, once they finish building it. But she’s cautious about how such data could be used. “People can be labeled and be seen as risky and they’re not, and I think we don’t want to start picking up people because they seem risky.” She said information is powerful and important, but so is recognizing its limits.

On Monday, Oct. 16, Peterson and Densley will host a free public discussion on their data at Hamline University.