Half of all mass shootings are associated with no red flags—no diagnosed mental illness, no substance use, no history of criminality, nothing. They’re generally committed by middle-aged men who are responding to a severe and acute stressor, so they’re not planned, which makes them very difficult to prevent.
So they are not necessarily in a good emotional state, but they do not have a mental illness.
That seems silly to me. Just because someone that has chickenpox hasn’t been formally diagnosed as having chickenpox, that doesn’t mean they don’t actually have chickenpox.
Maybe none of these folks are truly suffering from mental illness, but what would that mean? That they’re untreatable? That can’t be right. So then what are they afflicted with?
It seems like they’re trying to draw a line between clinical “serious” mental illness like schizophrenia and what’s happening with mass shooters … but I don’t think folks that are saying “mass shooters are mentally ill” mean things like schizophrenia.
Thanks, I definitely skimmed the article, so missing that is on me.
It’s interesting that the profile they mention doesn’t really fit what I have in my mind for mass shooters, which would be younger men, not middle-aged. I guess the ones that really stick out to me, like the Columbine, Christchurch, and Uvalde shooters all fit this stereotype that I have, but apparently that doesn’t map to reality.
There are several different subtypes of mass shootings, and school shooters and planned hate-crime shootings each have their own distinct characteristics. They get the most media coverage, for sure, and tend to trend younger than other types, but they’re the least common type of mass shooting.
The mass shootings the article is talking about, which are the most common, are often workplace or family shootings, and are usually by middle aged men.
The definition of mass shooting used most commonly now is any shooting with 4 or more casualties, which includes a lot of shootings that most people wouldn’t really think of as mass shootings, which are generally thought of as being like the ones like you named.
Right, and I was already aware of several lists of mass shooting using that or similar criteria to determine what fits. It’s just a little strange to me to group so many disparate types of events into a list, and then do a study to say “most of these things don’t involve mental illness” when most of those events are wildly different from each other.
Definitely agree with you there. The FBI had traditionally treated different types of shootings as each being unrelated. It was US media that pushed the term mass shooting in its current definition (so they could run big-number stories), and the consolidation of very different profiles under one label has done more harm than good, imo.
If you actually break them apart into distinct groups, there is a much stronger correlation with mental illness among especially e.g. school shooters.
Yeah, I addressed that briefly in my first comment. This definition of “mass shooting” is much, much broader and very different from what most people are thinking of when people talk about mass shootings. Like, I’m fully aware of how serious the gun violence problem in the US is, but I’m not thinking of a domestic violence situation where multiple people got injured, or a gang related shooting at a club where some bystanders are killed when I hear the term “mass shooting”. Don’t get me wrong, those situations are tragic, and the availability of guns in the US makes them so much worse, but I understand the psychology of them pretty well, I think. It’s not a mystery to me why they are happening. But the kind of situation where a person goes to a place and just starts indiscriminately shooting people is what I don’t understand, and it’s what I tend to think of when people talk about “mass shootings”. Maybe this is just me being wrong, or maybe it’s a problem of imprecise terminology.
They call it out a little further down.
So they are not necessarily in a good emotional state, but they do not have a mental illness.
That seems silly to me. Just because someone that has chickenpox hasn’t been formally diagnosed as having chickenpox, that doesn’t mean they don’t actually have chickenpox.
Maybe none of these folks are truly suffering from mental illness, but what would that mean? That they’re untreatable? That can’t be right. So then what are they afflicted with?
It seems like they’re trying to draw a line between clinical “serious” mental illness like schizophrenia and what’s happening with mass shooters … but I don’t think folks that are saying “mass shooters are mentally ill” mean things like schizophrenia.
Thanks, I definitely skimmed the article, so missing that is on me.
It’s interesting that the profile they mention doesn’t really fit what I have in my mind for mass shooters, which would be younger men, not middle-aged. I guess the ones that really stick out to me, like the Columbine, Christchurch, and Uvalde shooters all fit this stereotype that I have, but apparently that doesn’t map to reality.
There are several different subtypes of mass shootings, and school shooters and planned hate-crime shootings each have their own distinct characteristics. They get the most media coverage, for sure, and tend to trend younger than other types, but they’re the least common type of mass shooting.
The mass shootings the article is talking about, which are the most common, are often workplace or family shootings, and are usually by middle aged men.
The definition of mass shooting used most commonly now is any shooting with 4 or more casualties, which includes a lot of shootings that most people wouldn’t really think of as mass shootings, which are generally thought of as being like the ones like you named.
Right, and I was already aware of several lists of mass shooting using that or similar criteria to determine what fits. It’s just a little strange to me to group so many disparate types of events into a list, and then do a study to say “most of these things don’t involve mental illness” when most of those events are wildly different from each other.
Definitely agree with you there. The FBI had traditionally treated different types of shootings as each being unrelated. It was US media that pushed the term mass shooting in its current definition (so they could run big-number stories), and the consolidation of very different profiles under one label has done more harm than good, imo.
If you actually break them apart into distinct groups, there is a much stronger correlation with mental illness among especially e.g. school shooters.
I think people don’t realize how many mass shootings happen in the US. Mostly because they don’t typically make the news outside the place they occur.
CW: List of mass shootings in the US for 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2024
TL;DR: There have been 372 this year alone. That is 372 in 218 days, so more than one a day on average
Yeah, I addressed that briefly in my first comment. This definition of “mass shooting” is much, much broader and very different from what most people are thinking of when people talk about mass shootings. Like, I’m fully aware of how serious the gun violence problem in the US is, but I’m not thinking of a domestic violence situation where multiple people got injured, or a gang related shooting at a club where some bystanders are killed when I hear the term “mass shooting”. Don’t get me wrong, those situations are tragic, and the availability of guns in the US makes them so much worse, but I understand the psychology of them pretty well, I think. It’s not a mystery to me why they are happening. But the kind of situation where a person goes to a place and just starts indiscriminately shooting people is what I don’t understand, and it’s what I tend to think of when people talk about “mass shootings”. Maybe this is just me being wrong, or maybe it’s a problem of imprecise terminology.
Oh totally. The definition is strictly numbers based. I don’t think that is useful when you are trying to dig deep into the cause.