Why are mass shootings becoming more common?
Changes in gun laws and interpretations of the Second Amendment create an environment that may be breeding mass shooters.
This Substack employs complicated ideas drawn from multiple social science disciplines. These ideas are laid out in my book America in Crisis. I cover some of the material from the book here plus new insights as they occur to me. For easier comprehension it may help to read past posts that are linked in the current piece in order to gain a better grasp on the tools being employed.
Mass shootings were once a rarity in America, but now are commonplace. Figure 1 shows trends in deaths from mass shootings and riots over the past half century. There has been a shift in the kinds of social instability that happen in America. Before 2000 deaths from riots were about the same or higher than those from shootings. In the new century riot deaths have fallen to very low levels, notwithstanding the George Floyd riots, while deaths from mass shootings have soared.
Figure 1. Trends in riot and mass-shooting fatalities (centered 9 year moving average)
Mass shootings data from Mother Jones.
I consulted Peter Turchin’s USPV database to compare the relative frequency of riots and mass shootings of the 20th century. Turchin does not separate out mass shootings from other kinds of violence. Mass shootings fall into the category of rampage murders which includes other kinds of mass murders. Based on the overlapping portions of the Mother Jones and USPV databases I estimated that 40% of events categorized as rampages are mass shootings. With this adjustment I found that riots were responsible for 65% of all deaths from social unrest while mass shootings made up only 5%. Riots account for only 3% of deaths and mass shootings 80% since 2000. Leaving out the Civil War, riots were the most common form of social unrest in the 19th century as well, while rampages do not even appear in the database before 1900.
People still protest and riot. There have been a lot of protests and riots since 2010, particularly in the wake of the George Floyd murder, but the vast majority of these were nonviolent in the sense that nobody died. The USPV database only counts events resulting in fatalities, so these peaceful protests aren’t included. This is done to avoid recency bias in the database. Events resulting in deaths are more shocking, more newsworthy, and so more likely to have been recorded into the historical records surveyed for the USPV database.
Mass shootings are now the most common form of violent protest. If Peter Turchin’s cycle theories are valid, the high sociopolitical stress of today, if unaddressed, will eventually spill over into violence and we can expect many hundreds of these events every year with causalities in the thousands, with which policymakers ought to be concerned.
Many of the analyzes of mass shootings I have seen in the media focus either on the guns used, or the psychology of the shooters. I don’t think either of these things are key. The trends shown in Figure 1 provide an important clue. It’s not just that mass shootings have become more common, but that violent rioting has become less so. The 20th century data show that deadly riots averaged slightly more deaths than shootings, 6.3 vs. 5.4, respectively, as well as being far more common. In the 21st century, mass shootings have become much more deadly than riots (7.7 vs. 1.2 deaths). Apparently, social forces have been acting to suppress violent rioting, but not mass shootings, and may even be encouraging them. Mass shooting has become the preferred mode of expression by young men angry at the world (95% of shooters are men, median age 30). A likely candidate for the decline of rioting as a mode of violent expression is a massive police presence at riots and active efforts made at crowd control such as kettling. In contrast, police are usually not present at mass shootings, and even when they are, serious efforts at reducing the violence are not always made.
It has is easier to become a mass shooter. To illustrate this, consider two events, one in 2019 and one in 2020 which a lone male teenager armed with a semiautomatic rifle walked into a crowd of people and killed people. In the 2019 example, the gunman walked into a crowd of people at the Gilroy Garlic Festival and commenced firing. According to National Rifle Association CEO Wayne Lapierre, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun.” Fortunately, police quickly stopped the gunman, but not before he had killed 3 people and injured 17 more. In the 2020 case, the gunman came to a BLM protest in Kenosha initially to defend property, but then decided to walk into the crowd of protesters carrying a loaded semiautomatic rifle. One of the protesters threw a bag of clothes at the gunman. tried to wrestle control of the gun, and was shot dead. After this a hue and cry began with calls for violence to be done to the gunman. A second man struck the gunman with a skateboard and wrestled for control of the gun and in the struggle, was killed. A third man, Wayne Lapiere’s good guy with a gun, advanced on the gunman with his own handgun and was shot, but not killed. The gunman then left the scene, walking right in front of police, who let him go, as they had been too far away to see what had happened.
Figure 2. Gilroy (left) and Kenosha gunmen
These two situations, which I presented in parallel, were different. The Gilroy Festival shooter had posted extremist political material and when queried as to why he was doing this, he retorted he was really angry. Clearly, he was there to kill people. The second gunman was a high school dropout and wannabe public safety officer. He was not a mass shooter. Though he killed two people, he was acquitted of all charges on the grounds of self-defense. There was no way for the people in the scene to know the backstory or intent of the gunman before the shooting began. Both young men fit the stereotype of a mass shooter--a lone heavily armed male teenager (see Figure 2) walking into a place where there were many potential victims.
The immediate question is, what is the gunman doing here? In Gilroy, it was immediately clear, he was there to kill people. In Kenosha, it was less clear. The gunman had come from protest opponents, had left his post, and was coming to them. Protestors had reason to believe that the gunman did not wish them well. When protesters attempted to use non-deadly force in response to the perceived threat, they were killed for it. Had Gilroy festival goers attempted to stop the gunmen and were killed, that gunman might also have been acquitted as was the Kenosha gunman. The law apparently says a mass shooter cannot legally be stopped from committing mass murder by a civilian using force (i.e., a good guy with a gun) until he has already started shooting. Forty years ago, a young man showing up heavily armed at a festival would have been arrested on the spot by police, but today is he free to proceed.
With the armament gunmen typically carry it means many will need to die before it is permissible for a “good guy” to use force against the gunman. Americans today are vulnerable to would-be mass shooters in way there were not in the past. Before a person can become a mass shooter, they must first become a gunman, that is an individual not on his own property in possession of a firearm intended for use against people. Hunters seeking deet during gun season or ranchers who use a gun to shoot varmints don’t fall in this category as the lawfully-employed firearm is intended for and being used on animals. A person who keeps a gun in their home or business for defense against robbers does possess a weapon intended for use on people, but they are on their own property. A person carrying a weapon who enters your property without permission has traditionally been considered as someone against whom force is justified.
A gunman is someone wielding a weapon intended for killing people in public, that is, what mass shooters do. Back in the 1970’s it was illegal to be a gunman. To carry a weapon, one needed a license that was only issued to people who had a legitimate reason for carrying a gun, such as private security guards. Off duty police officers were often encouraged or even required to carry their weapons, presumably to increase the number of “good guys with guns” on the streets, as the effect of carrying restrictions was to make criminals the only civilians who were armed. But this was the whole point of carry restrictions. Simple possession of a gun (i.e. being a gunman) was a crime (like possession of illegal drugs) and could get your ass sent to jail, so maybe you don’t carry one. Being a gunman was frowned upon, a stupid thing to do, and so it was not something people would consider as a form of violent protest.
Figure 3. Cumulative total of states reducing restrictions on carrying firearms
But the environment began to change in the late 1980’s and 1990’s. Figure 3 presents the number of states adopting more permissive stances towards gunman. After the 2008 Supreme Court Heller decision that declared than an individual right to be a gunman existed under the Second Amendment, which has led to a number of states passing laws permitting open or concealed carry of a firearm without a permit (known as constitutional carry). These political trends create a cultural environment in which a new attitude towards people being a gunman has emerged. Mass shooters have every right to be heavily armed and in a crowd of targets, right up until they pull the trigger. Once they do this, you are free to stop them if you can. This has created a situation in which the expectation is that teachers and schoolchildren need to take responsibility for defending themselves against any gunmen whom they might encounter.
Most readers will think I am exaggerating the situation. I am not saying that gunmen per se are some sort of threat to the public. The vast majority are not, but some are, and the impossibility of knowing the intent of gunmen one encounters makes it difficult to distinguish between a Gilroy gunman and a Kenosha gunman. Situations like these are rare and it would seem I am getting worked up about something that is not a real problem. But I believe this is only beginning. Figure 3 suggests mass-shooting frequency is a lagged response, typical of a cultural evolutionary response to a more permissive attitude towards gunmen. If this is true, the impact of Heller and the Constitutional Carry state laws that followed it may still lie in the future. This is easily tested. The expectation according to Peter Turchins’s social contagion model is that mass shootings as a form of sociopolitical unrest will decline in the coming years as the creedal passion period winds down. If Turchin’s model is invalid, we should expect no change in these events. But if the cultural evolutionary process I am suggesting is happening is actually happening, then the incidence of mass shootings will continue to rise, and if they don’t, we can rule it out.
Already in recent years we have seen armed men at protests. In the new permissive environment, they have every right to be armed. But why are they doing so? Do they fear legislators will try to steal their wallets at gunpoint? Of course not, the arms are not for protection, the gunmen at the protest are trying to signal resolve. At some point those against whom they signal resolve will have to arm up to signal resolve back, creating a dangerous situation.
Advocates of the second amendment apparently do not understand what it is about. The amendment reads:
A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
What does this mean? It does not say anything about self-protection, or does it say anything specifically about guns. Rather it makes clear that since a militia (i.e. an armed populace) is needed to secure a free state (i.e. one free from tyranny by a foreign power or an overweening government) the people have to be able to maintain and use (bear) the arms needed to ensure this. The men who wrote this were Englishmen whose history included numerous examples of times when free citizens confronted a tyrannical government demanding redress of grievances. An early and famous example would be the barons who gathered, bearing arms, at Runnymeade, where King John was forced to sign the Magna Carta. He renounced it shortly afterward and there was civil war. Such armed confrontations happened many times over the subsequent centuries, including a 1775 confrontation between colonial militia and British soldiers at the villages of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts colony, which began the Revolutionary War. Many of the Founding Fathers had fought in the Revolution. They knew that it was a well-regulated militia (existing colonial militia regulated under the authority of General Washington into an army capable of defeating the British Empire) that had won them the victory. It is clear that “Arms” in the amendment refers to the weapons of war used by armies, since colonial militias bearing such arms had gone toe to toe with British regulars and prevailed.
But today the word “Arms” in the amendment has been redefined to refer only to weapons that pose no serious threat to the state or ruling elite. The permitted arms only serve to intimidate ordinary people, the same sort of soft targets favored by mass shooters. Rather than confront the state with the possibility of open war, as the Minutemen at Lexington did and what the Second Amendment was intended to permit, today’s “militia” display their military-styled semiautomatic weapons as a symbolic or fashion statement. In this way they may be acting as prestige cultural models for people who like their style. With the legalization of carrying powerful weaponry in public, such displays have grown more common. It is not surprising that angry young men are increasingly choosing armed forms of expression and mass shootings are on the rise.