The New Yorker Radio Hour - What Makes a Mass Shooter?

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

In America, unthinkable violence has become routine.  In the wake of the Buffalo and Uvalde mass shootings, David Remnick speaks with the researchers Jillian Peterson and James Densley, whose book ��The Violence Project” is the most in-depth study of mass shooters. Pro-gun politicians may continue to block any measures to reduce violence, but we can understand better a different side of the equation: what motivates these crimes. David Remnick speaks with two criminal-justice researchers who have studied mass killers, James Densley, of Metropolitan State University, and Jillian Peterson, of Hamline University. They point out that mass shootings have risen alongside deaths of despair, including overdoses and suicide.  “The perpetrator goes in with no escape plan,” Peterson points out.  “What we can learn from suicide prevention can teach us how to prevent some of these mass shootings.  We haven’t connected these two things.”  Remnick is also joined by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who wrote about the Buffalo attack for The New Yorker; and we hear from a 70-year-old resident of Uvalde, Texas, about the aftermath of the killings in a tight-knit community. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm Willie Edwards, pretty much a lifetime resident of Evaldi, Texas. I've lived here ever since I was one, and I'm proud to say I'm 70 now. I was actually at a restaurant 20 miles from town with a friend and his wife, who my friend had back surgery today. He's doing well. And as we were leaving the restaurant, a friend of mine, former teacher, said that she just got a text that there was an active shooter at Rob that maybe a teacher had been killed.

And my wife and I, you know, just drove towards Rob Elementary and it became obvious that it was something really bad was going on, lots of ambulances. And then the tolls started coming in. 14 children dead, 18 children dead, 19 children dead, 2 adults, 3 adults. We're just learning what all is involved, who all's involved. You know, I just found out, you know, my wife has a former student whose daughter was one of the ones killed. And the last picture they took.

of her was holding her certificate for being in the all A, B, on a row. They had an awards program yesterday at Rob Elementary. And to see that beaming face with all that possibility and hope and joy and to know it's not here anymore is pretty damn painful, and it's going to be painful for a while. You know, I had a cousin that texted me and it was yesterday and it was like, do you know anybody that's been affected? And I love my cousin, but that was one of the stupider things I've ever had to ask me because we're all affected. But when I heard Kim, somebody that I know personally and that I've seen and know

is such a joyful person to know that her daughter, that I know she loved as much as anybody's ever loved a daughter was dead. Yeah, I'll never get over that moment. And our best friend is the editor of the paper, and they go in and hug her and shake in each other's arms and cry. There's nothing that can be said. Nothing. You just show up.

You know, the greatest thing about Evaldi is the people. You know, this community is, has meant so much to me. It's, you know, my parents died when I was young, and this community held me up. And I can tell you that today is the saddest day that Evalians hopefully will ever feel. That's all I got.

I'm so sorry. No, I know you are. And I appreciate you know. That's Willie Edwards, and he spoke with our contributor, Rachel Monroe, who's reported. for the New Yorker from Uvaldi, Texas. Now, on Tuesday of last week, I called up two researchers

who wrote a study of people who commit mass killings. The book is called The Violence Project, and they run a research institute on the subject. I wanted to talk with them about the shooting in Buffalo, because it seemed to me that after a week, a stunning horror was already being forgotten. One more mass killing on a long historical list. That was the middle of the morning,

Tuesday the 24th. We recorded our conversation, and before my producer had even edited the interview, a teenager walked into an elementary school in Texas carrying an assault rifle. Without a doubt, politicians need to act to reduce gun violence, but we also need all of us to understand better what's going on. Why the number of mass killings in America has increased like this? And what motivates someone to target children or grocery store customers at the cost of their own life or their life outside of prison. So I got back on the phone later in the week with the scholars who run the violence project, James Densley of Metropolitan State University and Jillian Peterson of Hamline University. Jillian and James, I really don't know what to say. Two days ago we were talking

about the horrible shooting in a grocery store in Buffalo. And now here we are again in the aftermath of another horrific shooting, this time in Texas. It's beyond reckoning. You've studied mass shooters stretching back to the University of Texas, so-called the tower shooting in 1966. When you look at the events of the past two weeks, what are you seeing that we don't? I think I see the same story playing out over and over and over and over again. It follows the same trajectories, the sort of slow build over time, the hate, the online radicalization, the leaking plans and telling people they're going to do it, the easy access to firearms, the young 18-year-old kid. It just is the same story over and over again. It feels like we really should be able to take action.

at this point. Let's take our time with this. Take us through what typically leads someone to do something like this, whether it's in a grocery store or a school or wherever. Yeah, so we started this project building a database just to sort of track the numbers of these mass shootings. But then we started to dive deeper into the life histories of the shooters themselves. Everything from their childhood, their mental health history, how they got access to firearms, their motivations. We have interviewed perpetrators. We've interviewed families who've lost loved ones. We've gone back and spoke to survivors of these shootings, people who were there, eyewitnesses, first responders. So we see this trajectory toward violence. It's very common among these mass shooters. It often starts with some sort of early

childhood trauma. These are individuals who have experienced. something in their lives that has never really been resolved. And related to that, at some point, they reach this identifiable crisis point that this feeling overwhelms their usual coping mechanisms. And they get to a point in life where they no longer care if they live or die. And so it's often a suicidal crisis, but it's also an angry crisis. There's somebody there to blame, they're trying to make sense of their lives. And in doing so, they then look for models of behavior. They start to research other mass shooters, other people who felt just like them. And they start to identify with those individuals and realize, well, maybe it's not me that's the problem. Maybe it's

them that's the problem. Maybe societies to blame. Maybe it's black people to blame. Maybe it's my school teachers to blame, whoever it is that I can focus on. And often during that point, by the way. People are posting on social media, posting online. They're talking about doing this. The warning signs are all there. Why does this happen in the United States with real frequency? And when it happens abroad, it is a freak, an outlier. What distinguishes, to use that word, the United States? I think there's a couple answers to that question. The first one just being how easily we can access. firearms and the sheer number of firearms is really different. I was talking to, I believe it was the BBC

yesterday and sort of an international reporter, and they could not fathom the fact that we run our children through drills in case this happens. That was such a foreign concept to them. Their minds were blown that that's the extent that which we've normalized this in America. For me, it was really this moment of like, my God, what are we doing? Right. We've just accepted this. And so I think there's also this social contagion piece where one happens, somebody gets a lot of fame and notoriety for it. We do nothing. We make no policy changes. And then another person comes right behind them. They do tend to cluster like this, which is why we weren't particularly surprised to see another horrific mass shooting right on the

tails of Buffalo. What's also interesting about the rise of mass shootings is it maps onto a rise in what we also call deaths of despair. Deaths of despair, these are deaths, suicides, drug and alcohol overdoses. These are at record highs right now in the United States, as are mass shootings? And we ask ourselves, are mass shootings a form of death of despair? It's something we write about in the second chapter of our book

where we're trying to explore what is it that makes America different. And yes, it's prevalence of fire. arms, but there's something deeper. There's something deeper in American culture and American society, our lack of a social safety net, the way in which we are sort of organized as individuals in this society as opposed to a collective. And these deaths of despair and these mass shootings, they seem to be related. Yeah, that was one thing that struck me early on is I hadn't thought of these mass shootings as a form of suicide. Of course, it's a horrific homicide. But the perpetrator goes in with no escape plan. It's never like that I'm going to leave and race for the

border. It's I'm going to either be killed, kill myself, or spend the rest of my life in prison. And that's the goal. That's the plan. And so what we can learn from suicide prevention, I think, can teach us about how to prevent some of these mass shootings. We haven't connected those two things. But when we think of these as suicides, in addition to being homicides, as a form of a death of despair, it actually opens up a lot of new prevention release forward. Now, the Buffalo shooter was completely up to his hips in white supremacy material online, a believer in replacement theory, which is the idea that a kind of genocide, a political demographic genocide is being perpetrated on white people.

Now, you say that ideology is not at the root of mass shootings. How can that possibly be true in the case of something like what happened in Buffalo? I think what we try to think about here is what is it that makes somebody susceptible to that type of a conspiracy theory and to that type of propaganda in the first place? Because nobody who's living a fulfilled life finds this material compelling, so much so that it would motivate them to want to commit murder. Now, that material maybe gave that person some sort of meaning, and it perhaps facilitated the crime that followed. It gave them a pathway to move forward.

But we don't think of it necessarily as quite as causal as sometimes is referenced in the sort of popular media. Because we often search for motive, and then when we find that motive, we are able to put these mass shooters in a little box. we're able to say, well, that was a terrorist, or that was a hate crime, or it was a gang member, or whatever brand we can give it, we make it sound like these are these scary monsters that aren't actually our children, our community members, people that we know, our neighbors. That prevents us from looking out when the warning signs are abundantly clear. When somebody's there on social media posting this stuff, somebody needs to pay attention. And if we absolve ourselves of that responsibility, this is going to keep happening again and again and again.

Who's that somebody? It's everyone, I would say. It's everyone from family members, friends, teachers, police, coworkers. What we see time and time again is that these perpetrators tell people they're going to do this. They post about it. School shooters in particular, it's over 80% of them tell other people. We call it leakage. the most common people they tell is their classmates.

You know, we've studied school shootings where 50, 60 kids knew what was going to happen and nobody told any adults in the building. And then even when adults do get told, we're not sure what to do with that information, right? The police check it out. They say, oh, maybe he doesn't have guns right at this moment, so there's nothing we can do. And then we move on, rather than having systems in place at the school to say, this is a kid who's not okay. This is a kid who has to be connected with,

long-term services with continual follow-up. I want to ask specifically about the shooting in Texas, the targeting of kids, of children. It's incomprehensible, and yet it's not unique to the Evalde shooting. What could possibly motivate a person? Even a person who's experienced trauma, who was suicidal, who had been radicalized, indoctrinated, what would drive a person to kill kids in grade school? It's unreal. I'm a parent of three kids. My oldest is in fourth grade. So this has just been so gutting. What's kind of different actually about this shooting is that when we look at school mass shootings, over 90% of them typically target their own school. Either their current school or a former school, they typically are angry at their classmates and at their teachers and at their peers. So targeting an elementary school, of course it happened in Sandy Hook, but it is very It's possible that something happened to him in elementary school, that he still carries anger from.

I think that will emerge. But what we do know is, sadly, when you target elementary school kids, it makes huge headlines, right? You make the history books. And so it could be that sort of fame and notoriety seeking. That's the point, the fame and notoriety of killing children. We see that. It's the wanting to be known for something in doing something like this in a way that you were never going to be known in life. It is. It's wanting to make the headlines and have your face everywhere.

Now, this may be outside the scope of your scholarly research. And I must say it stuns me that you're really the first ones to come along and do research of this kind and at this depth, considering the problem involved here. But when I listen to Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas, when I listened to Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas talking about this, rushing to the force saying we should not come to any untoward political conclusions. And yet again, you know, the same cycle of rhetoric. What conclusion do you draw about our politics? Well, one thing we've tried really hard to do in our work is come at it. in this nonpartisan, really data-driven ways. So when we come up with solutions, when we say universal background checks,

when we say red flag laws, when we say permit to purchase or rage to the age limit, those aren't political statements. Those are data-driven. That is what the data tells us. Those things will save lives. There's nothing political about that. It's simply the science.

And many countries have shown us the way. We have the evidence. So the idea that that is political, That to me is the bothersome piece of this. We try to organize solutions to mass shootings in our book on three levels, one at the individual level, which is what could I do tomorrow as a regular citizen to try and prevent a mass shooting? And that might just be something as simple as, if I have a gun in the home, lock it up,

safe storage. What can we do as institutions, you know, at schools, workplaces to prevent a mass shooting? Can we do more to be attuned to the behavioral warning signs that somebody is on the path way to violence? Can we intervene earlier? Can we get them connected to the help that they need? And then there is the societal piece. And I think that's what we're talking about here. And that's where a lot of the effort has often been placed is talking around how do we get politicians to act. The challenge is we don't want that to hold us up to start to make small steps that can actually make a big difference. And that's what our research is telling us.

We can't grow numb to this. But I swear to God, it seems that we have, after Charles there was an outpouring of emotion, and it went on for days, and there were story after story after story after Buffalo, after two days it was gone. Now, maybe with the killing of children, it'll last a few days longer, and then it'll be gone. What changes the damn equation? I mean, I'll be honest, I wish I knew. I think we've done this research, we've written the book, we know the pathway forward, it is there. We know what we need to do, to stop. I mean, I'll be honest. I wish I knew. I stop this and we choose not to do it. We've been doing it wrong for a long time, right? For a long time, we thought, okay, let's harden our schools and let's arm our teachers and let's run our kids

through drills. That all failed. That was the wrong approach. We now know we need to soften our schools. We need to make them welcoming and open and we need to get guns out of there. And now we just need people to do it. I don't know how we keep ourselves from getting numb and how we stay this sad and this angry to push this through. James Densley teaches criminal justice at Metropolitan State University in Minnesota. And Gillian Peterson teaches forensic psychology at Hamline University in St. Paul. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour and we'll continue on this in a moment. Kiyanga Yamada Taylor wrote about the attack in Buffalo, New York, just a couple of weeks ago. when a white gunman killed 10 people at a grocery store in a predominantly black neighborhood in that city.

She's a regular contributor as well as a historian at Princeton University. Keanga, I just spoke with Jillian Peterson and James Densley, who are researchers who have made a big study of mass shootings, and they've concluded that while bigotry and prejudice are motivating factors in many of these shootings, they're not necessarily the root cause. suggest that a person first reaches a kind of personal crisis point, even a suicidal one, and that crisis drives them toward ideology and finding ideologies on the internet or elsewhere in their lives, that in some sense mass shootings are first and foremost about hopelessness and despair,

and that leads to the bigoted ideas. What do you make of that? I mean, in some ways it makes sense. I had the unfortunate task of reading through the manifesto, the Buffalo Shooter, but also the messages that were posted on the Discord platform. And you could see that, yes, this is actually an 18-year-old. But also that this was an anguished person who talked about suicide and seemed to be in trouble and deep despair. And I know that it's, you know, in this country in particular, we're not supposed to talk about that.

This is a hardened killer. We can't talk about him as a teenager or a child. He's an 18-year-old man. But I don't know where that takes us. You're from Buffalo, and you must have taken this especially hard. Your dad is still there, who's a scholar, professor. What was your initial reaction to this? And how does the buffalo nests of this story figure into everything?

So I think my wife and son had gone out for the morning and we'd come back in the afternoon. And we were like sitting around. I looked at my phone like we always do before we do anything or when we finish something. And the banner came across. At that point, it was eight shot in Buffalo grocery store. You know, I thought it was unlikely that my father is not going out shopping anywhere. But for my stepmother, most certainly. And this was one mile from my dad's house.

So there was about five minutes of panic where they got back in touch within five minutes. And then I immediately shifted course to this was a white supremacist. It was the same feeling that I had when I initially heard the Charleston shooting. I immediately thought there is a white person involved with this. And there are many things to say about this. But I do think the fact that he wanted to find, find the greatest concentration of black people that were nearest to him and was able to type that information in and quickly come to this area.

And Buffalo just really tells you a lot about the conditions in the city that lead to a zip code where 78% of the residents are African American. people are angry about the way that this story is being framed, which is to say that there has been a lot of talk about, you know, we won't let this white supremacist divide our city. Buffalo's nickname is the city of good neighbors. And I think that people are disturbed because there's a way in which Buffalo is not a united city. Buffalo is one of the most segregated cities in the United States.

meaning that, you know, Buffalo is not exactly the city of good neighbors. It might be the city of hostile neighbors. Now, Kiyang, there's no way for me to quantify this. It's an impression, and maybe you think I'm wrong. But it seemed to me that when Charleston happened, there was an enormous storm of publicity, journalism, demonstrations of President Obama, of course, went down for the funerals.

I find that the Buffalo story has passed. It's almost as if racialized mass killing has become not so extraordinary. I saw this poll this morning, 60% of Trump supporters think that the quote-unquote great replacement theory is real. The racial dynamics have dramatically changed since Charleston. But the second part of this is I think that we have become, habituated to mass shootings. I remember having this sense after the Vegas shooting in 2017. It was massive, massive carnage and it felt very quickly that we had moved on. Someone said it, and I can't remember who, but that once the United States sort of deemed itself powerless to respond to the

mass murder of first graders in Connecticut, then what would compel a reckoning around gun violence? Kiyanga Yamada Taylor, thank you so much. Thank you. Kiyanga Yamada Taylor is a professor of African American studies at Princeton University, and you can read her on the Buffalo Attack and much more at New Yorker.com. I'm David Remnick, and that's our program. I want to thank you for joining us. See you soon.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Peter Bresnan, Aveykoreo, Avey, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Putabwele. With help from Alison McAdam, David Gable, Harrison Keithline, Alex Barish, Victor Gwan, and Mungfayoran, and Mungfayor. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.