What so many high-profile shootings have in common

We don’t know much yet about the shooter who killed one man and wounded two others in an apparent assassination attempt on Donald Trump on Saturday. 

We do know that he was 20 years old, and male. 

Those two facts — and his role in Saturday’s shocking crimes — put him in a small but frightening group: He’s now among a handful of young American men who, driven by psychological distress, hatred, or something else, commit highly public acts of violence with powerful guns.

He joins a list of young men that includes the two high school seniors who killed 13 people at Columbine High School in 1999; the 24-year-old who killed 12 people at a movie theater in Colorado in 2012; the 19-year-old who killed 17 people at a high school in Parkland, Florida, in 2018; the 18-year-old who killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket the same year; and, unfortunately, many more. 

“Across the board, young men are responsible for the vast majority of gun violence in this country,” said Jillian Peterson, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University and executive director of the Violence Prevention Project Research Center. That’s especially true for public mass shooters, 98 percent of whom are male and a growing number of whom are in their late teens or early 20s.

The reasons young men turn to public violence are many and complicated, but experts say that common factors include access to guns that has grown even easier in recent years and a sense of social isolation deepened by the pandemic. That isolation can lead young men to seek out community in dangerous places, including a growing number of online communities that glorify violence. 

Troublingly, each new shooting reinforces a kind of cultural script, Peterson and others say: For young men in distress, murdering people in public has come to seem like an increasingly viable option. Before the Columbine murders, school shootings were unthinkable. Now, though they remain rare in absolute numbers, they can feel devastatingly commonplace, robbing children and families of a sense of safety in their neighborhood schools. For a small group of troubled people, the dark examples of young men who have gone before have made public killings “a more realistic thing you can plan,” Peterson said.

Much about the life and motives of the Trump rally shooter remains unknown, including the details of what led him to plan and carry out his crime on Saturday. But that crime was nonetheless part of a larger pattern in America, and understanding that pattern may be the first step to changing it.

Young male shooters often have a history of trauma and isolation

The public mass shooters Peterson has studied are “typically men who have been through a trauma background, who are isolated, who are disconnected,” she said. They often experience self-loathing or suicidal thoughts, and eventually come to find a grievance, someone or something they blame for their feelings.

One young man, for example, experienced bullying and mental health issues for years and ultimately became consumed with rage at what he perceived as his rejection by women. In 2014, the 22-year-old killed six people and wounded 14 others in Isla Vista, California, before dying by suicide.

Another young man, who at age 21 killed nine congregants at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, described depression and friendlessness leading up to the shooting and was diagnosed with multiple mental disorders, including social anxiety. He became a white supremacist, ruthlessly targeting a predominantly Black congregation and filling a journal with racist rantings.

While no amount of loneliness can ever be an excuse for the kind of crimes these young men and others committed, understanding the histories and psychological profiles of killers can help clinicians and others spot problematic behaviors before they turn into violence. People of all genders can experience bullying and isolation, but boys in particular often begin to isolate themselves in adolescence, experts say. 

Before that time, “boys are very similar to girls in their social networks,” Adam Stanaland, a researcher at New York University who studies how young people think about gender, told Vox in an email. But as they approach puberty, “boys begin distancing and denying themselves intimate emotional connections as a way to prove their burgeoning manhood.”

Young men also sometimes respond to loneliness in dangerous ways, experts say. In general, women are more likely to internalize negative feelings, with higher rates of anxiety, depression, and self-harm, Peterson said. Men are more likely to externalize these feelings with violence or substance abuse. And people under 25 overall are more impulsive and less able to consider consequences than their elders, experts say.

Most men will never commit violence, let alone a mass shooting, which is typically defined as the killing of four or more people (the assassination attempt on Saturday would not qualify, but in its highly public nature, shares many characteristics with these killings). But such crimes often represent an extreme example of a more common phenomenon. 

Lonely young men are especially “vulnerable to the appeals of some false community,” political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, told the New York Times earlier this month. “Eager recruits to the Nazi Party in the 1930s were lonely young German men, and it’s not an accident that the people who are attracted today to white nationalist groups are lonely young white men.”

The Isla Vista shooter, for his part, spent time on pick-up-artist forums, talking to other men who identified as “incels” — a moniker for those who describe themselves as involuntarily celibate — about retribution for the perceived slights of women. A 25-year-old who killed 10 people with a van in Toronto in 2018 also described himself as an incel. 

Isolation has been an especially prominent factor in public killings since the pandemic began, Peterson said. In recent years, a growing share of mass shooters has been young men who have graduated from high school but are not in college or working — “nobody really had eyes on them or noticed,” Peterson said.

Online, said Peterson, these young men can find “communities where violence is really celebrated.”

Easy access to guns gives young men a chilling opportunity

For some young men, public gun violence has become a cultural trope they can all too easily emulate, Peterson said. It started with the Columbine killings and accelerated with the rise of social media. Public mass shooters often study the manifestos or videos left behind by previous shooters, she added. “They kind of want to be a part of this group.”

Which brings us to another major factor leading some young men in America to commit public violence: the sheer ease of obtaining a powerful gun. Men are about twice as likely as women to own a gun, and male high school students are much more likely than their female classmates to report carrying a weapon.  

Gun ads often make an explicit connection between firearms and masculinity, Stanaland said. “Carrying guns is viewed as a way to shore up masculinity among certain men,” he explained. “If they are feeling insecure and want to prove their masculinity, they may do so by carrying a gun (or, worse, shooting that gun in ways that harm others).”

Gun policy, meanwhile, has done little or nothing to interrupt the devastating cycle of violence. The 2022 Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, for example, has made gun control legislation incredibly difficult for states to pass and maintain. The increase in gun production since 2020 and the rise of concealed-carry laws have made firearms an ever more ubiquitous and inescapable part of public life. 

Keeping those firearms out of the hands of people who are unstable is frighteningly difficult. “There are shockingly few avenues to stop people who are spiraling before they commit acts of violence,” Jonathan Metzl, a professor of sociology and psychiatry at Vanderbilt University who has studied gun violence, told Vox in an email. 

In 2018, for example, a 29-year-old man killed four people with an AR-15-style rifle in a Nashville Waffle House. He had come to the attention of the police at least five times before the shooting, said Metzl, whose forthcoming book, What We’ve Become, deals with the episode. “But because of permissive gun laws, there was literally nothing authorities could do to disarm him until after he had killed people.”

Many experts have floated the idea of age restrictions on the most powerful weapons. “We need to pay attention to the scientific evidence that suggests these young minds may not be capable of having the serious responsibility of owning an assault rifle,” Kami Chavis, director of the criminal justice program at Wake Forest University School of Law, told the Washington Post in 2022.

Such restrictions have gained little traction in a political environment that remains highly deferential to gun rights. Months before the attempt on Trump’s life, Republicans in the Pennsylvania state legislature blocked a bill to ban the type of rifle used in the attack, the Lever reported.

Experts say no plan to stop future mass shootings is complete without gun control legislation. The Violence Prevention Project Research Center, for example, calls for universal background checks and an assault weapons ban, as well as measures to limit access to guns for people who are in crisis. 

However, there are also ways that individuals and communities can help prevent young men from turning to violence. Limiting social isolation for young children, especially boys, is critical, Peterson said. So is training adults in crisis intervention and suicide prevention, since public mass shooting is often a form of suicidal behavior.

While young men turning to gun violence may seem inexplicable or, in our current environment, inevitable, there are often many opportunities to prevent such crimes, experts say. In interviews with men who have committed mass shootings, “I always ask them, is there anyone or anything that could’ve stopped you,” Peterson said. “They will always say yes.”