The Dispatch Podcast - The Psychology of Mass Violence | Interview: Adam Lankford

Episode Date: September 22, 2025

Kevin Williamson sits down with Adam Lankford, professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Alabama, to delve into the complex factors behind mass violence and ideological killings—from video games and social media to sexual frustrations and extremist ideologies. The Agenda:—Trends in mass shootings—Performative nature of violence—The role of ideology in mass violence—The impact of video games—Incels and femcels—Policy suggestions The Dispatch Podcast is a production of The Dispatch, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—click here. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member by clicking here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Introducing Dispatch Energy. The Dispatch's newest weekly newsletter diving into the politics, policy, and innovation shaping America's energy future, presented by our friends at the Pacific Legal Foundation. Featuring a rotating roster of contributors who are experts in their respective fields. Each edition will feature incisive analysis on everything from oil and gas and permitting regulations to renewables, climate, and the grid. Head to the dispatch.com slash energy to sign up. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. Today, Kevin Williamson talks with Adam Langford, professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Alabama. The two dive into the complex world of mass violence and ideological killings, exploring the forces at play from video games and social media to personal grudges and extremist ideologies. Let's hear from them now. Adam Langford. Thank you for joining the Dispatch podcast. So you are a scholar of mass violence and ideological killings and the influence of things like video games and sexual frustration and all sorts of other hard to talk about, I think, sometimes factors when it comes to these things.

So give us just kind of a broad overview of your work and what it's about and what you've learned. Sure. Well, as you said, they're kind of different ways to categorize this type of violence. So, you know, some people use the phrase targeted violence, kind of referring to premeditated violence that could be mass shootings. It could be mass murder using other weapons. It could be assassinations. It could be terrorism, suicide terrorism. So I've studied, you know, a variety of things, you know, kind of across that landscape, doing a lot on mass shooting specifically, but actually kind of after 9-11, you know, I did focus on suicide terrorism for a long time and looked at terrorism and alone actor terrorism more specifically, you know, just kind of changing depending on the nature of the threats that society faces.

So there's a perception, I think, that this is something that's changed a lot in recent years, at least since Columbine in the last few decades. I'm not sure I entirely believe that, as I often remind people, the worst school massacre in American history was the Bath School disaster, as they called it, which was, what was that, 1920, 1925, something like that. It was 100 years ago, involved no firearms. It was bombing. I guess it was political in the sense that a guy had lost an election, and he was mad about that, and he had some unpayable debts. and he just went a little bonkers. So this sort of mass violence, mass killings have been a part of American history for a long time. It sort of depends on how you define them.

You know, there are things that were pretty clearly political conflicts, little, you know, kind of warlike skirmishes that sometimes get counted in this stuff, you know, with the big Mormon massacre from way back when and that stuff. But it does seem like that since Columbine, there is a particular kind of phenomenon, that putting on my theater critic hat here seems much more performative, I think, much more demonstrative, much more intentionally theatrical than a lot of these these killings have been in the past. Your work suggests that some of it may be driven by in video games, copycat phenomenons,

things like that, and also these other factors we talked about, extremist ideology, sexual frustration, these things. So what, if anything, has changed since the, The Bath School Massacre. As you said, we're kind of talking about different types of crime or violent attacks. And the answer may differ slightly depending on the specifics. But, you know, when it comes to things like mass shootings in particular and these public mass shootings, there are kind of two ways I think about those trends. One is the frequency of attacks and the other is the deadliness of attacks.

And so if you kind of chart those things over time, you know, the 1960 University of Texas tower shooting is one of the points at which a lot of researchers kind of start looking at a change in trends. Essentially, the increase in frequency appears to exist, but it's more subtle, whereas the increase in lethality in incidents killing large number of victims. and being high profile is much more clear. And kind of as you suggested, there's this performative element which perhaps we could associate with various changes in cultural values, self-promotion, fame-seeking, the rise of social media. But for a long time, I think it was kind of accurately assumed that a lot of these attackers had grievances. Now you kind of get to this point where in some of these cases, it almost seems like a grievance is secondary to the desire to do something notorious and capture national

or international attention. I went to the University of Texas, and I lived in an apartment across the street from the tower, and the apartment I lived in allegedly had been inhabited by Charles Whitman some years, some years before that. So I always feel a real strange little connection to that. Although, contrary to popular opinion, that's not why the University of Tower observation deck is closed down. It was open for years after that. They closed the U.T. Tower because people kept jumping out of it, usually around finals week. This had a rash of suicides, and so they closed it down for that reason, which also, I think, is performative.

If you think about it, you know, there's all sorts of ways to kill yourself. Jumping off that tower in the middle of campus is a way of doing it in a very, you know, public and theatrical kind of way. Well, if you don't mind me just adding to that, you're exactly right. And that's one of the kind of things that people overlook that suicide can be performative. Suicide actually, suicide meaning someone only taking their own life and not directly attacking others can't even be done to hurt others. Sometimes people die by their own hand, but they're trying to hurt an ex-girlfriend, an ex-boyfriend, to hurt their family. And in almost like a metaphorical way, you can say that's an attack of sorts, right? It's self-harm, but the desire to harm others as well.

But then, you know, kind of the sad state of affairs here is with many of these cases of mass violence or targeted violence, we see individuals who had some background of suicidal thinking. and they really make the calculation that if they die kind of alone in their own apartment or something, you know, no one will really, apart from those closest to them, notice. But if they die on the national stage and take others with them, you know, the whole event of their leaving life will just garner so much more attention, almost like it's leaving a legacy. Yeah, and I think that's an important way to think about this, because, you know, these mass killings and acts of terrorism and such, many of them are not, they're not political actions in the sense that, you know, John Brown and Harper's Ferry was an explicitly political action. It was meant to accomplish a thing in the world, a thing with a political agenda. He had a particular ideology. And there's a picture of him right back there, by the way, in case you're wondering over my shoulder. But these killings are more like the elaborate suicides. they are and maybe it makes sense and correct me if I'm wrong here to think of the suicide as

as the point and the and the mass killing is something that is an accoutrement of the suicide rather than the suicide being a necessary outcome of the mass killing yeah and I think that absolutely is the case some of the time and and really almost like on a incident by incident offender by offender basis you know sometimes we can even chronologically see that they they expressed interest in suicide before they expressed interest in killing others. Other time, you know, sometimes I use this phrase life indifference where they don't care whether they live or die. You know, they kind of have that recklessness that, you know, they have nothing to lose.

And so that can be emboldening to engage in many types of violence, including, again, terrorism, mass shootings, assassinations, and other things like that. Yeah, spend a fair amount of time driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, so I'm familiar with indifference to life. It's a widespread phenomenon, although maybe not often is motivated. Perhaps not something to joke about, but maybe lighten the conversation up a little bit, because the next part of the conversation is going to get, I suspect, kind of ghoulish, which is, I'd like to know you do a tremendous amount of empirical analysis. How do you do that? How do you go about doing this stuff?

For instance, you were just mentioning, you know, in some of these cases, for a fact that they had talked about suicide before they talked about doing a mass shooting. I assume this is from personal communications, social media posts, text they sent to friends and things like that. So walk me through the process, which I'm sure is a little bit horrifying, of how you go about gathering that data and putting it into some sort of analyzable empirical form. And I'm also curious at what point in your life did you say, that's going to be my life's work. I'm going to be that guy. I'm going to be the guy who is the scholar of this stuff. There's a lot of things you can study in life. And I'm not asking that facetiously.

I mean, it is obviously an ugly field, but so is cancer and someone's got to study it. Sure. Well, you know, just to kind of start your last question and work through it, you know, I was actually an English major as an undergraduate. I did read things like crime and punishment by Dostoevsky. I read Incold Blood by Truman Capote. And so I guess even at that point in my life, I was kind of interested in criminal psychology and why people do such bad things. And so that was kind of just a natural thing to follow in terms of my career. You know, personally, I actually find it easier to analyze the perpetrators than I do to look closely at the lives of the victims.

To me, when you look at the victims, that really brings it home. harder to detach emotionally from that. Whereas, you know, to me, there's a puzzle when it comes to the attackers that doesn't tug on my heartstrings in the same way. I'm just a little curious to me. I'm interrupting real quick. And again, this sounds like I'm being funny. I'm really not, but were people a little concerned about you when you first started getting interested in this? Because one of the things that school shooters almost all have in common is they go through a period of being obsessed with other school shooters. And the people who came before, them, they're sort of antecedents in that field. And, you know, it's not like, you know, torturing

animals in the alley behind your house when you're 13 years old or something. But often when people develop an interest in something that is, you know, these sort of outlandish forms of violence, that people around them take that as an unhealthy instinct in their lives, if there's something wrong with you. Yeah, you know, it's kind of interesting to think about, of course, in the current state of things, we have a ton of people who love true crime, right? So, Having an interest in criminal behavior is almost not a distinguishing characteristic anymore. But, but, you know, so and then of course, you know, I'm a professor in criminology and criminal justice department. So, of course, you know, we have sometimes just, you know, the occasional joke that it's like if you looked at my search history, you know, it's going to look ridiculous because, you know, I'm looking up these manifestos and all these other things.

But, you know, one of the key differentiators between people who like true crime or people who study crime from people who are obsessed with these things in an unhealthy way is, I love life, I have a lot to lose, I have plenty of incentive to keep things on a healthy and legal track. Whereas, you know, sometimes people are obsessing about previous attackers to fill a deep void, a lack of meaning. And actually, there's kind of research related to the concept of celebrity worship. It's like, you know, if you are worshiping Kim Kardashian, for example, the research suggests that, like, at a certain point, celebrity research tells us not just about, who you're interested in, but it tells us about you and kind of your, your, um, unhealthy attachment to, to these kind of things. One other question on that. I'm just curious about.

Do you keep a separate computer for your work stuff versus your, your personal use? Because I imagine your search history being what it is, you get some crazy YouTube algorithms and the ad serve must be bananas. Right. Uh, well, I just do most of that work from the office, you know, and, uh, um, if I, if I, if I spend too much time at home where I'm looking up these kind of things, probably I get some raised eyebrows from my wife. But, you know, like the funny balance there, of course, is I'll get home from a day of studying

these kind of things and she'll want to watch a true crime show. So how do you gather the data and put it into an analyzable empirical form? I'm curious about that. Sure. Well, essentially, we're looking for any and all information we can find about these perpetrators. So in some of the most high-profile cases, you have official investigation reports. You know, for example, the Parkland shooting, the Las Vegas shooting, Virginia Tech, Columbine, sometimes, you know, even when it came to suicide terrorists, they're declassified CIA reports that I looked at. So, you know, I'm open to all information from reliable sources.

Of course, then there's also the primary source documents, which is our kind of fancy way of saying manifestos, the words of the perpetrators themselves, online. posts, things like that. So getting all this kind of information and then also getting the biographical information, so not just what people said or thought, but also, you know, demographics, life characteristics, stressors in their lives, various types of experiences. So, you know, essentially all this information goes into data sets and then we can conduct various types of studies, some are comparing perpetrators with each other to say, oh, are those perpetrators who have an interest in extreme ideologies different from the other perpetrators? It helps us understand the role of ideology and their behavior. But then also sometimes looking at changes

over time, trying to essentially learn from the sequence of behaviors in their lives. And then sometimes doing comparisons with the general population. I've done comparisons with other homicide offenders, you know, to say like, oh, are these mass shooters different from your typical murderer? So, you know, really trying to be creative in analyzing these things both quantitatively when the data are large enough and or qualitatively, all that can be useful. So what is the role of ideology in this phenomenon? How many, you know, as a share of these these kind of theatrical killers are ideological, how many are partly ideological and partly something else, how many are mainly ideological, which ideologies tend to be prominent

in these phenomena? Speak to us about that. Sure, it's a good question. And actually, the former FBI director in 2021 testified before, I think, both the House Intelligence Committee and a Senate committee basically saying, wow, this is a complicated phenomenon that the FBI was struggling to deal with because you have attackers who express ideological interests, but also seem to have sometimes personal issues, personal grievances. Sometimes their ideologies are not entirely coherent. So basically saying when you're throwing all these factors into a pot and the outcome is an attack, how do you understand what the role of the different factors is? And then just as kind of a historical point that I found compelling is, you know, back when I was looking at things like suicide bombers more closely, you know, in this declassified CIA report, they said that looking specifically at the 9-11 hijackers, that some of the hijackers did not appear to be religious zealots. And actually more than religious devotion, it was personal or family considerations that led some of them on the path that ultimately led to the September 11th attacks. So just as an example, like September 11th, pretty easy to understand the politics there.

It's like we have Islamic extremists. They attacked for pretty clear of reasons. you know, they all were part of the same organization. They went and trained together, so on and so forth. And yet, there was still more complexity there. So when I'm looking at these other attackers, I think almost always it's a combination of ideological or political or religious and personal. Now, one of the ways I say that with so much confidence is that if you just, you just

just look at only the ideological, the evidence is very clear that many people have extreme ideological interests. You know, there are many people, if you do a survey and say, for example, if you ask Muslims and say, you know, this varies depending on the country. But if you say, should suicide attacks against civilians be justified to protect our religion, you know, if you extrapolate the results, it would be millions of Muslims worldwide who would support that, at least as a survey response. But the number of people who commit suicide bombings is less than a thousand a year. So, but that could apply to any ideology, a right-wing white supremacist ideology, a neo-Nazi ideology, a left-wing ideology. There are always going to be more people with that ideology than the very few people who, as we said, have nothing. lose, feel they have nothing to lose and are willing to commit these attacks.

So given kind of my confidence in that, I'm always looking at both the ideological factors and the personal factors. And kind of invariably, especially when we're talking about individuals who are lone actors, you're going to have some pretty profound personal issues there. Often they're choosing to kill for a cause that in many cases they haven't tried really working for yet. You know, if someone was purely ideologically motivated, you would think maybe violence would come after 30 years of trying to fight through the system, of contributing to charities, of volunteering for the cause in pro-social ways. And typically we don't see that.

We see someone who's only interested in fighting for the cause in a violent manner and often a violent manner that will essentially ruin their future life. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance fast and easy

to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. Ethos keeps it simple. It's 100% online, no medical exam, just a few health questions. You can get a quote in as little as 10 minutes, same-day coverage, and policies starting at about two bucks a day, build monthly, with options up to $3 million in coverage. With a 4.8 out of five-star rating on trust pilot and thousands of families already applying through Ethos, it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ETHO-S. dot com slash dispatch application times may vary rates may vary introducing dispatch energy the dispatch's newest weekly newsletter diving into the politics policy and innovation shaping america's energy future presented by our friends at the pacific legal foundation featuring a rotating roster of contributors who are experts in their

respective fields each edition will feature incisive analysis on everything from oil and gas and permitting regulations to renewables climate and the grid head to the dispatch dot com slash energy to sign up. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, you're writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one. Use one of their award-winning templates or try the new Blueprint AI, which tailors a site for you based on your goals and style.

It's quick intuitive and requires zero coding experience. You can also tap into built-in analytics and see who's engaging with your site and email campaigns to stay connected with subscribers or clients. And Squarespace goes beyond design. You can offer services, book appointments, and receive payments directly through your site. It's a single hub for managing your work and reaching your audience without having to piece together a bunch of different tools. All seamlessly integrated. Go to Squarespace.com slash dispatch for a free trial. trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code dispatch to save 10% off your first purchase

of a website or domain. Yeah, it often seems that the desire to do this spectacular thing comes first. And the other, the ideological, the religious conspiracy stuff gets built on top of it. You know, sometimes you're dealing with just obviously disordered minds. Like, I think about the case of John Salvey, who was an abortion clinic killer. And, you know, a guy who kills people in an abortion clinic. You look at it and you think, well, obviously there's, you know, that's the agenda, right? You don't choose an abortion clinic just randomly. Just like you don't choose Charlie Kirk randomly. You know, you're choosing that target for a reason. But then you dig into John Salby's actual beliefs. And there's sort of like Da Vinci Code meets, you know, Ron Paul. It's about the Catholic

Church and the mafia and some conspiracy involving fiat currency and this, you know, this crazy stuff. it's not just, well, I don't like abortions, and I'd like to see them stopped. And so I'm going to kill these people who operate this abortion clinic. My kind of archetypes I talk about in these cases are, you know, you have Booths and you have Booths and you have a political agenda. And Hinklies just tend to be crazy people who latch on to a famous person for some reason or another. They may have some political overtones, but it's not primarily and seriously a political enterprise. It's not really primarily a political act. And I suppose there's sort of a Booth Hinkley spectrum, you might say. Yeah, I think that's a good way of thinking about it. And also, you know, Hinkley, he was obsessed with Jody Foster, right, among other things, right? So it's kind of a curious thing about talking about latching on to something bigger than himself. But I guess more generally, when I think about causation, I think about the shape or performance of the. attack, the target, things like that, and then I think about kind of underlying causes that led

someone to decide that they're eager to kill. And those can be really different things. So kind of as you're pointing out, there's no doubt that in a lot of cases, the ideology is shaping who they decide to kill. But one of the things in the research I've done that stands out is there are also plenty of cases of people who have a clear ideology and then the violence that they commit doesn't even seem to fit with their own ideology in terms of the victims they kill, in terms of the location they target, in terms of other inconsistencies in their behavior, like claiming

to be motivated by a cause, but then not leaving behind any manifesto or document that clarifies what your cause is. Like, you know, if you're trying to send a message, you would think you'd make that loud and clear, and yet they're often inconsistencies kind of in the behavior and psychology of these attackers, which I think undermines the idea that they're purely just doing it for the cause. Is that just an incoherent personality, a person who's not very well integrated? Sure, sure.

Incoherent or, I mean, apart from the purely the mental illness part of it, it could just be, you know, some degree of anger and lashing out and laziness, frankly, you know, especially for people who aren't really thinking about their future. I think, you know, we've seen cases like the United Healthcare CEO killer who wrote this very short manifesto, I think it was about 300 words. And even in it, he basically admitted, he's like, you know, I'm not the best one to speak on these subjects of what's wrong with the health care system. And yet he decided he was the one that it was going to carry out the violence, right? There's an El Paso shooter at a Walmart in Texas who said something like, you know, better at a man or crappy manifesto than no manifesto at all.

You know, you would think, well, it's like, well, gee, if you've decided to throw away your life for for an act of mass violence and you care about a cause, at least you do your homework. And yet, you know, sometimes that's not always seen. They've given a lot of young people writing assignments over the years. They don't enjoy them very much. This is a phenomenon almost exclusively of men. You don't see a lot of women carrying out these sorts of attacks. One of the things that seems to me is obvious, though maybe underappreciated, is that men have a desire for power and for the public exercise of power. I noticed something the other day that really caught my attention.

We mentioned we were talking about Hinkley earlier, and Hinkley, of course, was obsessed with the movie Taxi Driver. And the character in taxi driver played by Robert De Niro is this guy named Travis Bickle who ends up being a political assassin. And Bickle has become sort of an icon in some ways, someone that people look up to to emulate in some ways. And I noticed there's a particular fashion label I won't name right now that sells a replica of the taxi driver army jacket with the patches and stuff. in the same way so you can sort of cosplay this mass killer character or this political assassin in this case. And it seems to me that's something interesting about our society, that this is something that people look to and say, well, maybe I don't want to be a guy who goes out and assassinate's a political candidate or just something like that. But I want to dress like that guy.

You know, I want to take on some of the trappings of being that sort of person and show that I can stand up to social pressures and assert myself in particular kinds of ways. And to me, I suspect, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on this, that that maybe does some of the work of linking together some of these disparate things of ideology, sexual frustration, video games, social alienation, this overall sense of helplessness and powerlessness and not being in charge of one's life, it seems that it is a way to assert oneself. I'll be it a nihilistic and destructive and ultimately pointless way of asserting oneself, but it is an assertion. And I suspect that is, in some way, the point of a lot of this.

So hold forth. Yeah, you know, you raise so many good points there. It's almost kind of hard to respond to them all. I've got 30 minutes. Go. I will say, right, right. Well, so in terms of the powerlessness, yes. Definitely, you know, you can think, you know, I'm not trying to get Freudian when I say like impotence, but lack of power.

These people are gaining power and in some sense gaining power that they lacked, you know, their entire lives and are finally seizing in some ways, even though it's kind of fleeting and pointless. And, you know, status seeking in particular, you know, I think like evolutionary. psychologists and others would say that status seeking, even if you look at chimpanzees, is more of a priority for males than it is for females. You see other things like if you just look at homicide in the United States, when men commit homicide, they are much more likely to kill strangers than women are. Women are much more likely to kill intimate partners or family members or close acquaintances. You know, so. You know, in some sense, I guess, you know, these acts can be seen as attempted compensation for failure. And, you know, historically, you know, for a long time in our society, wealth was prioritized as the number one form of power. And this is one of those areas where I think society has changed. And so that, you know, even wealthy people now court attention, fame, followers as kind of the ultimate currency. Now, you can also think of that in terms of respect, right?

Something that, you know, everything from like, you know, 13-year-old boys and middle school to CEOs and politicians want. But, you know, and then in terms of, I guess, the broader culture with people who, who don't commit violence themselves, but may, you know, in some ways contribute to the overall problem, you have, you have things like explicit members of extremist forums who themselves are not carrying out attacks, but I think these attackers think that they're getting applause from the other members on their forum, right? that they will be celebrated and that's a big deal to them in many cases. You have things like the Parkland shooter, you know, when he was arrested, he was getting love letters in jail. So it's like he wasn't popular in high school, but he was popular after he killed, I think it was 17 people, you know, at his school in Florida.

You know, so you have kind of all these ways that people contribute to the sense that this is a high profile and important type of behavior. You have the media, of course, giving the attention to these individuals, in some cases, almost treating them like celebrities, according to the research I've done that actually quantified. I did once say to quantify and found that mass shooters were often getting more attention than Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, you know, Kim Kardashian, Jennifer Amistin, people like that. So, you know, these are kind of all parts of the broader social. and societal challenge here.

But, of course, like, ultimately, you know, the responsibility lies with the murderers, most of all. Tell me about the role of video games. Yeah, you know, this is kind of interesting because for a long time, there was a fear of video games causing violence. And I think essentially the mechanism by which people were worried about it was fear of desensitization. And I think this was kind of based on the idea that, well, like the military. and police sometimes use simulators as training. And so if we have people, but especially young men, who are essentially being desensitized by playing especially first-shooter,

first-person shooter games, that that will make it easier for them to engage in violence. I'm not so sure that that really holds up. At least the evidence is more complicated than people initially thought. And I guess as an analogy, I just think there are a lot of things that young people do online that they'd be very uncomfortable doing face to face. So you have as one example that's kind of a little uncomfortable, it's like you have kids going online watching terrible forms of pornography and yet they're too nervous to kiss a girl or ask a girl out in the real world. So that's my analogy to say that there's a big difference between, you know, shooting someone in a video game and shooting them in real life. So, so, but the research I've done suggests that, well, but maybe we shouldn't dismiss the role of video games altogether. And in particular, you know, the way video games are played today, often you have young men who are playing video games who are listening, you know, so they have their headsets in.

and they're talking to people who may be strangers all around the country or around the world. And, you know, I think boys being boys, but, you know, even when you look at like stand-up comedy, it's like sometimes jokes and laughter come from an outrageousness. And my sense is that these video game players, these young men are often kind of trying to push the limits on outrageousness a little bit. And sometimes the way to push the limits is by citing kind of, you know, Hitler or extremism or saying things that are outside the bounds. They're unexpected and therefore they're exciting. And so the research I've done essentially finds that the video games for some of these individuals seem to be a stepping stone or a gateway to more interest in extremism, which then they,

are become versed in more greatly by looking at online forums, you know, 4chan, 8chan, you know, some of this, like we saw this, Charlie Kirk shooter was part of a video game group talking to other people through Discord and other attackers have used Discord before as well. And then, you know, I guess one of, I'll mention two things because, you know, I have kids who play video games. And so as I was doing this research, I was thinking, well, what makes them different? And one of the things that stood out is that a lot of these attackers are so socially marginalized in the physical world, in the real world, that their entire lives are playing video games and being online. And so that's an unhealthy place to be. And then the other thing is that really kind of was an epiphany for us was I went into this research thing.

that video games and online extremism forums were the problem. And in some sense, there's some truth to that. But I came out of it realizing that these attackers get bored of online extremism. They are not content or satiated by being mean to people online, by joking about or spreading extremist ideologies, by harassing, by being keyboard warriors. And so it's actually that boredom that means they take their violence to the real world instead. So, you know, you can kind of interpret this in a variety of ways, but, you know, kind of one counterintuitive way of thinking about it would be if they found the online extremism and video games more satisfying, if it gave them more meaning, then maybe they wouldn't attack in the real world. So just to restate here, you're saying that the role of video games is less about getting people used to, the idea of shooting people than providing them with the means of connecting with extremist ideology

and communities that are involved in that. Absolutely. And, you know, there's a way of, you know, you can think about the social element of this. You know, actually there was a surgeon general report on the epidemic of loneliness in the United States. Relatively recently, you know, this report came out. And in many ways, you know, I'm sure the audience realizes that, You know, social media, you know, not just COVID, but the way our life has changed, you know, remote work, things like that, that people are disconnected in a lot of ways that maybe weren't applicable in the past. And so, but the surgeon general said social connection is a need, like period. You know, it's not food and water, but it's real close. And so when we think about these attackers, they're definitely.

for the need. They aren't having that need of meaningful social connection, often filled or filled enough in their real lives. And so, you know, it's kind of like if they're choosing between having no friends and having friends who believe in extremist ideologies, the latter, the belief in extremist ideologies with friends is actually more appealing to them. Yeah, I've heard people say and write that one of the things that's really hard about getting people out of extremist movements or getting them out of cults or things like that is that they have to abandon all their friends. You know, you have to sort of start your social life again from the beginning, and that is a very, very difficult thing to do. Yeah, it seems

like we are in a place that's sort of far worse than even like bowling alone, and that stuff really imagined. We're sort of doing everything alone now, at least some people are. And speaking of being alone, you have, you've made the subject of sexual frustration, a kind of explicit and direct part of your research. And I'm interested in what you found out there. And I'm also interested in the, in the less discussed, but real phenomenon that you mention of feminist, or female in cells, women who are experiencing the same sort of lack of sexual contact that we associate with the people who call themselves in cells. I think femcells was the term that was being used. But you don't see a lot of them shooting up

schools as far as I know. So walk me through the sexual issues here. Sure. So, you know, I think this was something I was kind of looking at a little bit here and there for a number of years. And then we had a mass shooting in Atlanta by an individual who was tremendously ashamed because he felt he had a sexual addiction. He was going to massage parlors and essentially using services of sex workers. And so he felt, you know, not that he wasn't having any sexual conduct, but rather the sexual frustration he was feeling was such a torturous part of his life that he had to kill these people and kind of remove the temptation. So I started looking at more closely there. And then as you said, there's this kind of phenomenon online, but more broadly in the real world, of course, of the physical world of people. people who claim to be in cells to be involuntarily celibate.

You know, there are kind of a variety of things I've looked at here. I've looked at like a tremendous amount of literature across different disciplines, you know, psychology, but also biology, you know, thinking about like really kind of perhaps silly things, you know, it's just you might think because they're disconnected from violence in a direct way. but like, oh, how do rams and deers in chimpanzees and elephants and dragonflies and all sorts of things? How do they deal with sexual competition? How often does it lead to violent clashes, especially among males and things like that? In any case, so among the other studies, we did a study of sexually frustrated mass shooters.

And one of the things that I guess surprised us is, you know, this is a study we published in, 2022, you know, that's more than 20 years after Columbine, you know, and if you had told me, there's nothing really left to learn about Columbine 20 years after I would have said, yeah, you're probably right. But we were just shocked by how many perpetrators when we look closely at their lives and their statements identified sexual frustration as a significant problem in their lives. So one, the Columbine killers basically said, you know, hey, maybe I need to get laid. maybe that would change some things.

You know, there were a variety of other attackers, you know, Virginia Tech, Las Vegas had child pornography. You know, he wasn't sleeping with his partner who was an adult, but he did have child pornography on his computer. You know, so I guess there are a lot of interesting complexities here. And if your readers would like to or your audience would like to see the article, I'd be happy to share it, but one way to boil it down is like, what's going on with these people who are not struggling to survive in any meaningful sense? Like, what are they so angry about?

These are not, typically these mass killers and targeted killers are not, you know, destitute. You know, they live in a great country with a high quality of life. So what are they, what can't they get? And in many cases, you know, one of the answers to that. in addition to things like respect, might be they can't get a girlfriend, they can't get someone who loves them. And then those kind of things interact, right? So if you want to find someone who will be your girlfriend, if you want to find someone who will love you and have sex with you, then it's important to have career success or at least that's kind of the standard expectation. You know, if you have respect, if you're successful in life, like these are all things that can help you romantically.

You know, fame and attention, being a celebrity can help you romantically. So I think all of these things interact and kind of explain why attackers are so upset despite really not necessarily having that much to be upset about in terms of the state of things. And then also why these kind of other stressors in their lives become amplified. I was just going to say on the subject of fem cells, you know, I did with an excellent kind of co-author and graduate student here at the University of Alabama, we did a close study of fem cells, meaning females who said they were in cells. We did find some cases where they did talk about violent revenge, having kind of fantasies of having power over men so they could, you know, kind of set the record straight or change kind of. of the path of history. But, you know, for the most part, I think there was more depression. There was more kind of concern, you know, ultimately, I guess the fem cells, their biggest

issue, if I had to generalize, was how do we navigate a world where we want relationships with high-quality men? And it's a dangerous dating world to navigate because of the, the threats that they perceived. They felt like men will take advantage of us, men won't respect us, things like that. So, you know, they were kind of upset about that, whereas the male in cells seem, I guess, more prone to aggression and violence overall. Yeah. Sometimes seems to me that one of the broader social problems is that we as a species are operating on separate and incompatible timelines. So, you know, when a society gets to its, to a

certain point in its material prosperity, social competition stops being primarily about material resources, becomes primarily about status. And we've been there for a bit. But that's a relatively new thing in human history. You know, for the first 300,000 years of Homo sapiens, we were just trying to scrape together enough grubs not to starve to death. And then this other stuff comes along very, very recently. And the ways in which males, not only in our species, but lots of other species traditionally compete for status, has to do with violence, has to do with asserting yourself physically. And because of those economic changes we've been through, those things are really sort of passe. There's nothing very useful about being able to be a really good fist fighter

in 2025. I mean, in most of the world, in most of the developed world, in most situations. And it's one of the most beside the point things you could probably get, especially in an age in which every nine-year-old can get a gun if you really wants one, I suppose. But that's still, that's still kind of been us from an evolutionary point of view. And so we've created a world for ourselves, which is extraordinarily prosperous and good. And I don't want to, you know, I don't want to seem like I'm a Luddite pissing on modernity. I love my air conditioning and all that stuff. I like the world that we've built for ourselves.

I think it's an extraordinary thing. But we aren't naturally suited to live in it and require some adaptation, acculturation. This used to be what we called education and character development and all. all those things as part of what religion does. And I've often, the only thing I've ever written about Encells was a little piece of advice I wrote for National Review, which was join a church. You know, it doesn't really matter if you believe or not that much. You know, I mean, I'm a Christian. I think if the Holy Spirit wants to work in his life, it's going to happen. But there are lots of girls at church, and they're the kind of girls who want to get married. And you're obviously

not the kind of guy who's like good at going to a bar and picking up chicks. And maybe just go to church. And you'll be around people. You'll have a reason to get out of bed. So that's one adaptation you could maybe send to people, but, you know, people are going to ask us in this conversation, okay, so what? So you've learned all these things about a very small subset of homicides. I should point out that, and this is not to diminish Charlie Kirk's situation or any of these other high-profile killings, but we have 62 homicides a day on average in the United States, and most of them are nobodies, and so they're not on the news. We don't care about them. I mean, their family and their friends care about them, but they're not going to be national

stories because we have just so much of this kind of stuff. So I guess that's a double question, really. Why should we care about your issue that much when these are a very rare and exotic kind of murder, when the much more ordinary kind of murder is two 16-year-olds who have some very, very personal boutique beef between the two of them? And when there isn't any obvious takeaway of, okay, well, here's the policy things we should change to try to mitigate the situation or assuage the effects of it. So what do you think? Is there something we can do policy-wise?

It's something we should be doing policy-wise? Yeah, well, let me touch on both parts. So, of course, in setting the national agenda, we could just say we're going to rank all the causes of death and start at the top and work our way down. And whatever kills the most people is going to be our top priority. you know, I'm not setting that agenda so, you know, people can do what they want, but it's certainly not how we operate. And so, and by the way, if we lived in North Korea, God forbid, you know, some of these things

would never get oxygen by being on state-run media anyway, so they wouldn't have outsized effects on the populace on the national psyche and things like that. But I would make the argument that given the current state of things, given that these things are in the media and that everybody knows about them, their consequences are not just the number of people who are killed. The consequences are also the fear. You know, if you actually look at the fear literature, you can start to look at various kind of health outcomes that are problematic as well. So it's like not just how many people are going to get killed in a church or a movie theater or their school, but how many people while they're going to church or a

movie theater or school are having this thought about, man, I hope I don't get killed or my kids don't get killed today. You know, that, that comes at a cost. I can remember a time when it was a lot easier to get on an airplane. And when I went to churches, it didn't have armed guards. Absolutely. Absolutely. So the broader consequences essentially. And that's, I guess, the argument I would make for why this matters. The other thing is, you know, in terms of politics, and I'm a criminologist, I'm not a politician, but the polarization in society that results from anger about these types of violence is itself a problem, right? So, you know, this is, I guess, a way of saying if we can save Charlie Kirk's life, you know, by dialing back the clock

and, you know, putting that back in place and keep his family from being devastated, that would be great. But, you know, it would also be great if we didn't have the entire country up in arms and fighting about it for the last however many days, right? Because that, that's damaging as well. In terms of kind of what do we do about it, you know, well, there are different things. You know, you can think about like broad social things you can do. Like, can we make progress on this epidemic of loneliness and social isolation? Can we teach our kids to care about things other than getting fame and attention at any cost, you know, can we ask the media to give less attention to these perpetrators and thus cut down on some of the fame-seeking, the copycat

effects, things like that, but then also, you know, on a more specific, I guess, element of this, you know, it's like I went and talked to the FBI at Quantico and, you know, we're talking about threat assessment there. I did a separate workshop with FBI and Boston related to threat assessment. It's like on an individual case-by-case basis, you know, if our science helps us prevent some of these attacks,

you know, that is a big deal. And a big deal not only for those who are saved, but because of the cascading consequences. Without getting into, you know, Minority report style stuff, are we able to profile and sort of get an idea of what sort of person is very likely to become an offender like this and intervene before the crime happens? Is that a real thing? Yes, absolutely, it's a real thing. And, of course, it's not all or nothing, right?

So it doesn't mean necessarily, I'm not saying, like, we can prevent all of these, but there absolutely are tonne that are preventable. And sometimes there's, you know, massive, um, public outcry at the failure to prevent. You'll get these guys who've said 11 times that I'm going to do a school shooting and posted it on Facebook and been arrested twice and been charged with lesser offenses. And it seems like there's some real institutional failures there. Absolutely. And but, but in some cases, also public failure. So, you know, that it wasn't necessarily law enforcement who knew in some cases, but it was the family who knew. or a friend or a teacher who could have said more

but they were kind of just resistance it was like it was uncomfortable to say something and so they said nothing but there absolutely are a ton of cases where in large part because these attackers are not just

you know special commandos right these are not members of the Navy SEAL who all they care about is their mission you know they're human beings in term oil. You know, sometimes they're floating the idea. They're talking about it before they do it as they're building up their courage. They're leaking information in a variety of ways. Sometimes they're making explicit threats. Sometimes they're posting online. There are a ton of opportunities to prevent this type of violence. And so we just want to kind of capitalize it on it the best way we can. And I guess I'll just add, you know, sometimes people think that or I guess, the attacks that are successful get a lot more attention than the attacks that are successfully prevented.

And so, and frankly, the data on the attacks that are successful is better than the data on the attacks that are thwarted or that fail. But, you know, I would say with some degree of confidence that some of these problems have been getting worse in America over time and we've simultaneously been getting better at preventing them. So, it's like, you know, if the number of people with motives to engage in extreme violence has increased tenfold, maybe the number of attacks is only increased twofold or one and a halffold. And that's because we're just doing better on the prevention side against, like, trying to stem the tide. What's the most surprising thing you found in your research on this? I think you really were shocked to discover that challenged your priors the most. You know, I think as a researcher, you kind of always have to keep an open in mind. So, you know, there were a variety of things.

You know, back when I started studying suicide bombers, there was kind of a classic kind of dichotomy. And the question was, are suicide terrorists who essentially engaged in a form of suicide, or are they engaged in self-sacrifice? So kind of I thought the entire conventional wisdom at that time was that this is sacrifice, this is not suicide, this is altruism, it's not about personal motives. And so I guess that was one of my first epiphanies when I started looking at the written statements of these perpetrators and finding out that that was not nearly the case in all cases. but actually, you know, like suicide terrorists who are thought to be rational political actors had a lot more in common with mass shooters, for example, than had traditionally been assumed. So, you know, that was an epiphany, you know, related to firearms.

I kind of had an epiphany where, you know, I published some research that was, you know, widely disseminated. And what I found in that case was that the best explanation at the time, for why the United States had more public mass shooters than other countries was firearm ownership rate, meaning that countries with more firearms and it applied beyond the United States had more public mass shooters. Then kind of an epiphany when we looked more closely at the data and analyzed it in different ways was that it was not firearm ownership per se that mattered as much as firearm access. And so many mass shooters were not lifelong firearm

owners at all. They weren't hunters. They weren't doing riflery as little kids. In many cases, they had the motive for mass murder first and then the access to firearms second. So, you know, that was something we discovered by by looking at the sequence of these individuals' lives over time. Whereas, like, you can't say that the gun caused them to want to kill mass murder, which might have been obvious to commit mass murder. It might have been obvious to some people, but kind of like we demonstrated it empirically that often, you know, they're deciding they want to kill. And then the problem is these people who've exhibited all these warning signs and red flags, despite all of that, we're still able to access firearms in our country where perhaps if they were in Japan or something,

they wouldn't have been able to. So I guess that's just like two of many things. But I think kind of as a researcher, as an investigator, you kind of always have to stay curious and open-minded to learning near. things. As it's kind of a gun nut, I was, I was interested in some of your research. I believe I remember correctly that you found a link between ideology and choice of firearms. In some cases, that certain kinds of killers were more likely to use some automatic weapons, that sort of thing. That's right. And what did you find? Oh, you know, I think essentially that they were more likely, so ideologically extreme mass shooters were more likely to use semi-automatic rifles and powerful

weapons like that. It doesn't matter what kind of ideology? I mean, they're like environmental terrorists out there, you know, who are not doing this. We did not distinguish between ideologies in this particular analysis. So we're looking at any sort of ideological extremism compared to others who might have been committing mass shootings because, you know, they were angry about getting expelled from school or they were just seeking fame without an ideological element or they got fired from work or they were grieved at a romantic partner or a family or something like that.

So, you know, and that kind of fits with this idea of ideology often shaping the nature of the attack, even if it's not the underlying cause. So the ideological attackers did think about, they were more likely to do various things that you might expect. They're more likely to attack certain locations that would fit with their ideology to use semi-automatic. weapons to sometimes leave behind statements, legacy tokens or manifestos, explaining why they did what they did. Kind of all the things you would expect from ideological attackers, but not all of them fit that mold either.

You know, it's interesting. It probably is a relationship between ideology and tactics, if you think about it. If you think about the example of, if you think about it, what do you do all day, right? I'm sorry. I didn't mean to say that in a way that sounded quite so self-assured and condescending. Professional hazard, I suppose. But I'm thinking about the case of Palestinian violence. You know, in the early days, the PLO, it was essentially a Leninist movement. It wasn't really, didn't have very strong Islamic flavor to it back then. It was more kind of conventionally left wing. Their tactics were a lot like what you would see from the IRA in Northern Ireland and places like that. And over time, as he became a much more religiously influenced way of going about terrorism, the ways they carried out their attacks seem to have changed quite a bit. It no longer looks like Belfast. It looks like, you know, a new kind of thing in the world.

Yeah, you know, and I guess I'm just add to that, that when I've looked at influence, you know, sometimes we talk about this as copycat influence, but also by like role models among attackers, often they're gaining inspiration that seems psychological or emotional, you know, thinking that, oh, these other people did it, I want to do something like them. But there are cases, of course, where they're also learning from each other tactically, and that can certainly include weapons. Anything you like to say in closing? No, I don't know if you wanted to talk any more about the killer of Charlie Kirk specifically. Yes, of course. Please, share. Sure. Well, I guess I was struck by a few things. One is that many ideologically

motivated attackers are defiant and bragging about the violence that they just committed, you know, even when they're caught. You know, in some cases you have people, you know, yelling and screaming in in court as they're being sentenced. And so it struck me as interesting that the killer of Charlie Kurt, what he said to his partner in those text messages was not, I did this for you or I did this for a cause, but I'm sorry um in other words why are you sorry uh now i think there was some indication there that maybe um i'm sorry that uh i brought you into this but but there is kind of about like a

delusion it seems to me um that this guy apparently thought he was going to commit this shooting and then just keep it a secret for the rest of their lives and they were going to live happily ever after that's kind of fascinating um some other things from the text messages that struck me as interesting. There's this phrase that he says, the killer says, I've had enough. That seems to me deeply personal, right? It's putting the focus on himself, right? So almost indicating anger, loss of control or temper or saying, I can't stand this anymore.

This has pushed my buttons too much. So, I guess as a criminologist, I think there probably been plenty of barfights, you know, by somebody who said, I've had enough, right? I can't take what this other person is doing anymore. And it's kind of a deeply personal anger, not just political. But on the political side, you know, I have these various attackers manifestos in my head. And the one that came to mind is those guy Joe Stack who crashed a plane in 2010 into a building within a building within a house. IRS office in in Austin, Texas. And so I did look it up. And in his manifesto, you know, he left behind a five or six page manifesto, which is different from this Charlie Kirk Killer, but he said,

I've had all I can stand. So we have, you know, I've had enough in the Charlie Kirk Killer to I've had all I can stand. It just kind of strikes me as kind of an interesting insight into their own psychology. And then I guess just to add on a few things there, I guess, part of these text messages, the Charlie Kirk killer said he had, he had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk. I think, and that was essentially a direct quote opportunity to take him out. Kind of fascinating because what does that, what does opportunity really mean? You know, as you've kind of indicated, we live in a society where if you want to get a gun and go find some enemy to kill them, that opportunity exists for almost anyone all the time if you don't care of. about the consequences. So what does opportunity mean? Does it mean, oh, this guy came to my state and therefore I had the opportunity if I drive a couple hours? But, you know, if you think about like a classic political assassin, the idea that it's like, well, you know, I'm only going to do it if it's convenient. Sounds absurd, right, to reconcile with a powerful ideological commitment.

But then I guess there's kind of these other ways of reading opportunities and also an opportunity to do something that he thought was important, would make him cool, giving those kind of stupid bullet casing engravings, an opportunity to do something that would make him appealing to his Discord group and to other video game players, an opportunity to ruin his own life, an opportunity to get back at his dad, who he said was kind of die hard politically in a way that was different from him. So I guess to me, you know, I hope we find out more about this individual's psychology, especially based on, you know, kind of forensic investigations into online searches, online activity, you know, not what he says post attack, but what he said pre-attack. But absolutely, I think this fits the mold of someone who clearly was was shaped by politics and political hatred, but also. also was acting for kind of boggling personal reasons as well.

Interesting stuff. Professor Adam Langford, thank you for your time. Those of you who are watching this on YouTube will understand why I say that I'm calling to close this meeting of the hair club for men. And we will move on from here. If you're watching this, I'm the bald guy on one side, and Langford is the bald guy on the other side. And thank you for your time. We'll talk to you again sometime soon. I hope.

You know, Introducing Dispatch Energy, the dispatch's newest weekly newsletter diving into the politics, policy, and innovation shaping America's energy future, presented by our friends at the Pacific Legal Foundation. Featuring a rotating roster of contributors who are experts in their respective fields, each edition will feature incisive analysis on everything from oil and gas and permitting regulations to renewables, climate, and the grid. Head to thedispatch.com slash energy to sign up.