There’s still a lot we don’t know about the gunman who killed one person and wounded two others in an apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump on Saturday.
We know that he was 20 years old, and male.
Those two incidents — and his role in Saturday’s tragic crime — put him in a small but frightening group: He’s now among a handful of American men who, driven by emotional pain, hate or something else, are powerful guns who commit highly public violence.
He joins a list of young men who are two high school seniors who killed 13 people at Columbine High School in 1999; the 24-year-old who killed 12 people at a Colorado movie theater in 2012; the 19-year-old who killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida in 2018; the 18-year-old who killed 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket the same year; And, unfortunately, many more.
“Across the board, young people are responsible for gun violence in this country,” said Jillian Peterson, professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University and executive director of the Violence Prevention Project Research Center. This is especially true for public mass shooters. Out of which 98 percent are men And a growing number are in their late teens or early 20s.
The reasons young people turn to public violence are many and complex, but experts say common factors include access to guns that have become easier in recent years and a sense of social isolation deepened by the pandemic. That isolation can lead youth to seek community in dangerous places, including a growing number of online communities that glorify violence.
Troublingly, each new shooting reinforces a kind of cultural script, Peterson and others say: For troubled youth, killing people in public has seemed an increasingly viable option. Before the Columbine massacre, school shootings were unimaginable. Now, although they remain rare in absolute numbers, they can feel devastatingly common. Robbery of children and families feeling safe in their neighborhood schools. For a small group of troubled people, the dark example of youths gone before has made mass murder “a realistic thing you can plan for,” Peterson said.
Much remains unknown about the life and motives of the Trump rally shooter, including the details of what led him to plan and carry out his crime on Saturday. But that crime was nonetheless part of a larger pattern in America, and understanding that pattern could be the first step to changing it.
Young male shooters often have histories of trauma and isolation
The public mass shooters Peterson has studied are “typically men who have gone through trauma backgrounds, who are isolated, who are disconnected,” he said. They often experience self-loathing or suicidal thoughts and eventually find a blame, someone or something they blame for their feelings.
A young man, for example, Experienced Bullying And years of mental health issues and ultimately anger at what he saw as his rejection by women. In 2014, the 22-year-old killed six people and injured 14 before killing himself in Isla Vista, California.
Another young man, who at the age of 21 killed nine congregants at Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Describes depression and friendlessness Leading up to the shooting, he was diagnosed with multiple mental disorders, including social anxiety. he White became dominantBrutally targeting a predominantly black congregation and filling a journal with racist rants.
While no amount of loneliness can ever excuse the type of crime these youths and others have committed, understanding the history and psychological profile of killers can help clinicians and others identify problematic behaviors before they turn into violence. People of all genders can experience bullying and isolation, but boys in particular often start isolating themselves during adolescence, experts say.
Before that time, “boys are very similar to girls in their social networks,” Adam Staneland, a researcher at New York University who studies how young people think about gender, told Vox in an email. But as they approach puberty, “boys begin to deny themselves distance and intimate emotional connection as a way to prove their growing masculinity.”
Young men also sometimes react to loneliness in dangerous ways, experts say. In general, women are more likely to internalize negative feelings, with higher rates of anxiety, depression and self-harm, Peterson said. Men are more likely to act out these feelings through violence or substance abuse. And overall people under 25 are more emotional and less able to consider consequences than their elders, Experts say.
Most men would never commit violence, let alone a mass shooting, which happens Generally defined Murder of four or more people (Saturday’s attempted murder would not qualify, but in its very public nature, has many characteristics with this murder). But such crimes often represent an extreme example of a more common phenomenon.
Lonely youth are especially “vulnerable to some false community appeal,” says political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone: The Decline and Revival of American Community, said The New York Times Earlier this month. “In the 1930s those interested in the Nazi Party were lonely young German men, and it is no accident that today those attracted to white nationalist parties are lonely young white men.”
The Isla Vista shooter, for his part, served time Pick-up-artists forum, talking to other men who identify as “incels” — a derision for those who describe themselves as involuntarily celibate — about revenge for women’s perceived insignificance. A 25-year-old who killed 10 people with a van in Toronto in 2018 also described himself as an incel.
Isolation has been a particularly prominent factor in homicides since the pandemic began, Peterson said. In recent years, a growing portion of mass shooters have been young people who have graduated from high school but aren’t in college or working — “no one really looked at them or noticed,” Peterson said.
Online, Peterson said, these young people can find “communities where violence is really celebrated.”
Easy access to guns gives young people a cool opportunity
For some young people, public gun violence has become a cultural trope they can all too easily emulate, Peterson said. It started with the Columbine massacre and accelerated with the rise of social media. Public mass shooters often study manifestos or videos left by previous shooters, he added. “They want to be a part of this team.”
Which brings us to another big factor that drives some of America’s youth to mass violence: the sheer ease of having a powerful gun. about men Twice as likely As women own a gun, and male high school students are more likely to report it than their female classmates. carries a weapon.
Gun ads Often makes an obvious connection between firearms and masculinity, Stanaland said. “Carrying a gun is seen as a way to enhance masculinity in certain men,” he explained. “If they feel unsafe and want to prove their masculinity, they can do so by carrying a gun (or worse, firing that gun in a way that harms others).”
Gun policy, meanwhile, has done little or nothing to interrupt the destructive cycle of violence. Supreme Court judgment in 2022 New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, for example, has made gun control laws incredibly difficult for states to pass and maintain. The Increased gun production From 2020 onwards concealed carry Laws have made firearms a ubiquitous and unavoidable part of public life.
It’s awfully hard to keep those firearms out of the hands of unruly people. Jonathan Metzl, a professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University who studies gun violence, told Vox in an email, “There are surprisingly few ways to stop people who are circling before they commit acts of violence.”
In 2018, for example, a 29-year-old man killed four people with an AR-15-style rifle at a Nashville Waffle House. He came to the attention of police at least five times before the shooting, said Metzl, whose forthcoming book, what have we become, deals with episodes. “But because of permissive gun laws, there was literally nothing the authorities could do to disarm him until he killed people.”
Many experts have floated the idea of an age limit for the most powerful weapon. “We need to pay attention to the scientific evidence that suggests these young minds may not be capable of the serious responsibility of owning an assault rifle,” said Kami Chavis, director of the Criminal Justice Program at Wake Forest University School of Law. told the Washington Post In 2022.
Such bans have gained little traction in a political climate that remains highly deferential to gun rights. Months before the attempt on Trump’s life, Republicans in the Pennsylvania state legislature blocked a bill to ban the type of assault rifle, Liver reported.
Experts say no plan to stop future mass shootings is complete without gun control legislation. The Violence Prevention Project Research Center, for example, calls for universal background checks and assault weapons bans, as well as measures to limit access to guns for people in crisis.
However, there are also ways that individuals and communities can help prevent youth from turning to violence. Limiting social isolation is important for young children, especially boys, Peterson said. So adults are trained in crisis intervention and suicide prevention, since mass shootings in public are often a form of suicidal behavior.
While young people’s turn to gun violence may seem inexplicable or, in our current environment, inevitable, experts say, there are many opportunities to prevent such crimes. In interviews with people who have done mass shootings, “I always ask them, is there someone or something that could have stopped you,” Peterson said. “They will always say yes.”
