Nearly all U.S. mass attackers were male and faced major life stressor | Hacker News Reader

Nearly all U.S. mass attackers were male and faced major life stressor

npr.org

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Recently someone gave me this book called "Difficult Men" by Brett Martin. Nope wasnt about mass shootings. It was about the protagonists created in the most popular TV shows in the US and the minds of the writers behind them. So Sopranos, Mad Men, Dexter, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Deadwood, Six Feet Under etc etc. Its a super impressive and ever expanding list of writing. But the common thread is dysfunction. They are all coping badly with whatever situation they are thrown into or run into. And the costs and consequences keep building up and nothing ends too happily.

While reading it I was feeling, this too is a sort of mass attack on the minds of people. Cause its a hope and faith killer. The message is always - here is some entertaining and mesmerizing hypocrisy your small chimp brain hasn't imagined and guess what? Whatever move you make you loose. After reading that book, I see that same message in stand up comedy, in the news media, in tech and business news etc. Probably exacerbated since social media finds and amplifies such things. But I feel the messaging and signaling underneath really needs to be different.

The Sopranos ends with Tony enjoying a nice meal with his family.

Or does it ...

yeah, about that... (https://screenrant.com/sopranos-finale-tony-death-confirmed-...)

The news is negative and there’s too much violence on TV.

This goes back to the philosophical question of whether art imitates life, or life imitates art.

Based on the linked report it is clear that these disturbed individuals see commiting mass killings as a way of getting society in general, their families or objects of obsession to listen to their grievances. (Desire for fame, parting messages/videos for families and others).

If we reported on these incidents with a similar approach to suicides (minimal focus on the individual, no discussion of motivations, offering of therapy and support services) there would be a general decline in these tragedies. The tabloid sensationalism and Internet arm chair detectives are giving these sad people the platform they're looking for with disastrous results.

Doubt. Individuals feel assaulted by society independent of reporting.

True but what has allowed it to become "an option" for these people? It's pronounced in the US, but mass violence (not just shootings, but bombings, knivings, mass vehicular assaults, etc) has increased beyond population growth, I think?

There have always been individuals who feel assaulted by society; what has changed to make these attacks more frequent?

(If they are becoming more frequent; I definitely hear about them more frequently but it may be an illusion, someone tell me if I'm wrong.)

If they just wanted to do as much damage on the way out as possible they wouldn't be spending so much effort on manifestos, video messages, letters and so on. They wouldn't care about becoming famous. Read the report - there is a huge focus on planning. These individuals see this as a way of being heard and sending a message.

The way we talk about these incidents play right into the delusional fantasies of future perpetrators.

I know some news outlets flat out refuse to print the names. That's a start.

Yeah but then people would cry about censorship.

It's not censorship, you can still run a story. I think the issue is the overall fixation, or how much the airwaves are dominated by these stories at the expense of all the other significant things occurring in our world. Consider how much ink is spilled over a mass shooter who isn't a gang member compared to one who is, for example. Gang violence is something that I see pretty much solely relegated to local news, maybe an article or two, and that's that. This shows the media, especially the national media, is incentivized to fixate on certain stories for some reason versus others. Maybe they attract more viewership and therefore ad dollars to the network. Maybe their posts see more engagement online when they are about a school shooting in a nice neighborhood over what people imagine to be routine in bad neighborhoods. It's all a bit perverse and sickening when you spend any time considering all of this.

I can't stop linking this very relevant topic in HN comments it seems:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

We need to stop national reporting on this things. Treat them as local news.

It's kind of sickening how mass shootings in particular are so popular among the media these days. For example, the odds are that gun of yours will be used against yourself by yourself versus in self defense. For women in abusive relationships, they are 5x more likely to be murdered if their partner has access to a gun. Gun owners who carry their weapon are also 3x more likely to have that weapon stolen from them. There are plenty of ways to highlight the risks of gun violence in much more realistic and statistically likely terms for most people, than covering comparatively far rarer mass shootings in ways that invite copycat killers to try and have a platform.

> There are plenty of ways to highlight the risks of gun violence in much more realistic and statistically likely terms for most people,

You seem to imply the objective of reporting about mass attacks should be to inform us about the risks of gun ownership…? My takeaway from reports about details of mass shootings is gun control ideations promote an illusion of safety at the expense of actual safety.

Would you argue on the basis of the risk multipliers you glibly assert that it is beneficial to society for victims to be defenseless in the face of an actual attack rather than experiencing your cited risks in the course of everyday life?

My thesis is that these stories are gripping for people. They truly are, I saw people reposting the monterey park vigil on their social media around the country. This of course makes for good TV, and fills the room at the expense of covering other perhaps more directly relevant concerns that people should be up in arms about (such as corruption and abuse of office, climate change, and our inability to seriously address either due to how these things are connected). And of course when you have one side of the aisle wanting one thing and the other wanting the direct opposite, people will be emboldened to argue various ways in person and online about these issues, and perpetuate even more interest into looking at related media.

But I can't leave the other half of your point hanging either. The guy who stopped the monterey park shooter was unarmed. Honestly though, the whole 'good guy with a gun' narrative is rooted in fantasy. Over the past 20 years of mass shootings in this country, a good guy with a gun has stopped a bad guy with a gun 3% of times. It's also happened before where in the chaos and confusion, that good guy ends up shot by police.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/06/22/us/shootings-...

But in either case, the odds of one of being a victim in a mass shooting with a shooter you don't personally know are so low. In terms of gun deaths, you are far more likely to die via suicide or from someone you intimately know (1). Of the deaths via murder, both in terms of mass shootings where 4 people are killed at once (making up 1% of gun deaths a year), and in general, a little over half of all homicides are from intimate partner violence (2,3). So if you think "well a good guy with a gun only stopped a bad guy with a gun so few times because not every good guy has a gun," think again and consider how many more deaths from both suicide or intimate partner violence there would be with more access to guns among the population, along with the police shooting the good guy. Even with the current amount of guns there are in circulation, its estimated that 380,000 are stolen a year (4), and with more ownership that number is sure to increase. That same source also suggests you are 3x more likely to have a gun stolen while carrying.

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-da...

2. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6628a1.htm

3. https://injepijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40...

4. https://injepijournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40...

a lot of what you’re citing seems disingenuous at best. I wasn’t going to respond because the platoon downvoting discourages further discussion, but some brave souls upvoted so I feel encouraged. You also didn’t directly address my actual points, but what you came up with is rather ludicrous and I’ll just point out a few more obvious absurdities.

For example the "3x more likely to have a gun stolen while carrying” actually isn’t a result from the source, in fact the source clearly states "we know almost nothing about the actual event” with respect to the actual theft. Perhaps you’re trying to assert “must possess firearm for it to be stolen?"

How can you legitimately assert that “good guy with a gun” is a fantasy when your own numbers show it’s a reality? 3% is non-zero! Even the police occasionally use firearms to stop bad guys, yet I’m sure a majority of police never use their firearms in the line of duty.

Do you also discount lives saved? Can you even quantify them? None of your sources seem to give a damn about it! Just last year an ordinary guy out at the mall stopped a spree killer ambush in a crowded food court. Your analysis would conclude not allowing concealed carry because of the risk of suicide is greater than the risk of spree-killing per person-mall-visit (probably true) despite the fact they are not equivalent for comparison. Thusly spree-killers should be (absurdly) unimpeded, because they are uncommon. Similarly we shouldn’t bother wearing seatbelts, because it is mostly unnecessary...?

My opinion is your apparent gun control ideation is mostly founded in nutty false equivalencies and I consider these hazardous to public and personal safety as a basis for law.

> 57% were white and 34% were Black.

> Nearly all the attackers experienced "at least one significant stressor" within five years of the attack, most of which were issues with family and romantic relationships. 20% of the attackers experienced some kind of childhood trauma

These numbers aren’t very helpful without knowing the stats for non mass attackers.

Eg, almost everyone I know has suffered a significant stressor in the last five years, and that’s just the people who have been willing to talk about it.

Violent crime in general is dominated by men who have faced "major life stressors"; it's just a fact of life that is unlikely to ever change. Men are much more likely to react to heavy stress violently, and struggle to both find and accept help.

Finding men who may be going down a dark path is a good first step, but genuinely helping such individuals (beyond trite therapy) is challenging. I suspect the problem is only going to get worse as society becomes more and more isolating.

The stressors are mostly things faced by a great number of people.

A few decades back there was the trope of postal workers being the protagonists of attacks but that seems to have been addressed. (either screening better or the work isn’t driving them up a wall any more).

But these new guys. I don’t know. Short of confiscating all arms and other means of violence (knives, pipe bombs, etc.) I think we can drive a different narrative in Hollywood, music, video games, the news, etc. It’s now a culturally learned thing. We’ve always had guns, but the mass shootings seem to be increasing faster than gun ownership (correct me if I’m wrong, not gun sales but ownership -as in one person buying ten isn’t 10 more owners but one, if he’d didn’t previously own one)

I think Chris Rock has the right idea. Smack a MASSIVE tax on ammunition. Make illegal ammunition a BIG crime.

I'm talking ammo should be $50/bullet.

"I've got that bullet on layaway, as soon as I pay it off, you're dead MF'er!"

Ammo isn't hard to make (or smuggle in). If you tax it massively, there will be a black market for it.

We see that with Tobacco and Marijuana --both of which have legal options with medium taxes and illegal but no taxes.

There will always be a black market for it, but making it harder to get means these crimes are overall less likely to occur. Consider the Monterey Park shooting. The killer used a gun they bought legally and was granfathered in, and shot ammo they also bought legally, to commit a crime of passion in the moment. This wasn't some criminal tapped into the underworld who would be able to source black market ammo. This was a pretty boring 73 year old man who bought it from the store. Take out that access to these weapons, and that crime would not have occurred in that manner.

That being said, most gun violence in this country isn't of a mass shooting or a organized crime nature. Most deaths from guns are suicides. Half of all intimate partner homicides are from a gun. Just from having a gun present in the home, a women in an abusive relationship is now 5x more likely to be murdered. These aren't cases where people seek out illegal arms dealers, they happen because the gun is in easy access.

There's a reason why this country faces so much gun violence compared to countries that have more sensible positions on gun ownership, and its because of the ease of legal access.

Go ahead and black market it. I get that.

But guns... don't blow up. Ammo does. It's not reusable. If you ban guns, you can't get the existing ones to go away, but a gun is useless without ammo, and even if they hoard it, it will either be locked away as precious, not used, or if used, the supply goes down.

Responsible owners won't want to use their guns. So they exist for home defense. For hunters, well, is shooting a deer worth $50 per shot? We'll see, but it doesn't preclude the sport entirely. Better be a better shot :-)

And if you black market the ammo, it's yet another legal exposure for criminals and criminal organizations.

So as flippant as the joke is, I think it has potential.

Now for shooting ranges, that's tough. Maybe allow the ammo to only stay at a shooting range, but any ammo carrier outside of the shooting range is the same: very illegal. Maybe there can shooting range ammo that is far less effective (rubber bullets or even less lethal) that will still allow target practice.

> as in one person buying ten isn’t 10 more owners but one, if he’d didn’t previously own one

The culture of gun ownership has changed a lot in my lifetime. IMO the fact that it's now fairly normal to own a small armory is more significant than the total number of people who own more than zero guns.

I think part of that is disposable money. Compared to any time before the 80s people can more easily afford a firearm.

They've become collectible. Some guns are pretty cheap too, a few hundred. If you spend a few hundred a year on new guns, probably the amount most people pay for hobby collections of any sort, you'd have a pretty substantial armory before long. Manufactures cash in too. You can get a bright pink pistol for example, if that fits your style.

Sure, violence will likely always happen, since people can kill with just their two hands too. The thing with a gun is that its a lot different than most other ways of enacting violence, in the sense its a lot easier to be brutally successful with a gun and a lot harder to be stopped. The numbers of dead and wounded from some of these mass shootings are absurd. You'd have to be a decent bomb maker to get similar numbers, and the FBI tries to anticipate people like this by limiting access to precursors for example. We don't see very many bombings in this country anymore, so I guess their efforts work decently well. Likewise with a knife, maybe you'd slash a few people but a lot of people would be able to get away, and if someone comes with a blunt object that puts some distance between them and you, the knife might only hinder you.

The gun though. You can get a Glock with a 19 round magazine and fire it as fast as you can press the trigger. You can even practice with this thing at the gun range all day until you are a crackshot. People can't get close to you to stop you. People can't run away from you as easily either. Even if someone else in the room has a gun, they'd have to somehow beat you on the draw while you already have a gun out cocked and loaded. That's why mass shootings usually only end after the shooter is entirely surrounded by swat in body armor, or they shoot themselves.

This delves into territory of stereotyping and discrimination.

There are no simple answers.

Sky is blue.

As always, it’s still important to document the obvious. Particularly when denying elements of the basic context of an argument seems to be a successful way of shutting down inconvenient conversations.

Don't forget the SSRI's

Not sure why downvoted. Eli Lily must answer for their crimes. The only solution is severe punishment.

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