Women Don't Do Mass Shootings, It's Mostly Young White Men

All of these young men had access to weapons, and of them were angry.

What is it about guns that attracts young men?  I’ve defended many gun possession cases, but never any with women, and never any mass shootings (random shootings of three or more people) involving black men. (I’ve done plenty of shooting cases involving gangs, but these were not random or mass killings.)

The nation is once again awash in concern about what’s prompting mostly young white men to commit such crimes.  The newest random killings involved 23-year-old Mark Conditt in Austin, Texas.  Conditt left home-made bombs made to look like Amazon deliveries on people’s doorsteps. The bombs killed two black men, Anthony Stephan House and Draylen Mason, and seriously injured several others.  Conditt killed himself last week as police closed in.  Although Conditt used bombs instead of a gun, like many of killers in the mass shooting, Conditt was a young white male.

Based on FBI data and media sources, 156 mass shootings took place in the United States from 2009 through 2016.  These numbers do not include Devin Kelley’s 2017 murders of 26 people in a rural Texas church, Stephen Paddock’s rampage in Los Vegas that killed 58, or last month’s murder of 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, by Nikolas Cruz.  According to Statistica, more than half of all these shootings were done by white men under 40.

A report by Everytownresearch.org puts the number of people killed in mass shootings at 848.  And that’s only for the seven years from 2009 through 2016.  Adding, at a minimum, the new numbers from Kelley, Paddock, and Cruz’s killings in 2017 and 2018, and the total climbs to 951.

As a country, we’ve got to do better.

Studies show many of the perpetrators were disaffected young men, introverts with few friends. Yet there were few other commonalities.  Some were homeschooled, some went to public schools and attacked the schools they’d attended.  Many had been bullied. Some were religious, some atheist.  Some specifically targeted a particular group like gay men or blacks, others just shot randomly. Most were politically conservative — anti-government, pro gun. Some had histories of mental illness, some didn’t.  Many had prior incidents of being domestic abusers, track records of having hurt their children, spouses, even pets

All had access to weapons.  All were angry.

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Why did they kill?  According to the study, for different reasons.  Some sought fame, some had an ax to grind — like punishing the girl who ignored him, or retaliating for being fired.  For some, no reason was ever uncovered. Most were killed in efforts to capture them or killed themselves.

According to the report, red flags appeared before the killings in 49% of the cases.  The biggest indicator was a past history of domestic violence.  Fifty-four percent of the mass shootings from 2009 to 2016 involved the murder of a family member and prior threats or acts of violence against loved ones.

Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people at an Orlando nightclub in 2016, beat his wife.  According to Mateen’s former colleague, “He was an angry person… I saw it coming.  He said he was going to kill a whole bunch of people.”

Devin Kelley, the man who killed 26 in a church in Texas, cracked his stepson’s skull and beat his wife.  He pleaded guilty to both crimes five years before the church shootings.

Based on this data, it seems that keeping guns out of the hands of people convicted of violent crimes, especially domestic violence, is crucial.  That means background checks across the board.  But there’s more the U.S. can do to prevent these shootings.

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Kudos to the following:

1) The “March for Our Lives” participants and the students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, spearheading efforts of young people around the country to walk out of school and battle for reasonable gun control.

2) The Walmart employee in Ithaca, New York, who noticed that 20-year-old Maximilien Reynolds, a former Cornell University student, was buying a lot of ammunition, knives, and suspicious items that could be used to make bombs. He called police.  When law enforcement raided Reynolds’s studio apartment, they found a stunning array of weapons — an AR-15-style rifle, a shrapnel bomb, more than 300 rounds of ammo for various guns, a homemade silencer, metal pipes, a gas mask, and food rations.  Nobody knows what Reynolds was up to, but by alerting the police, the astute Walmart employee may have saved lives.

3) Citigroup is setting restrictions on the businesses they finance that sell firearms.  According to the New York Times, the bank will withhold credit cards, the borrowing of money, use of banking services, and raising capital through Citibank unless the businesses which sell weapons institute a background check of people under 21 seeking to buy firearms.  It will do the same to businesses that sell bump stocks (which enhance the firing speed of non-automatic weapons) and high-capacity magazines.

4)  All the grass-roots organizations (and individuals) throughout the country advocating for sensible gun control by writing their representatives, taking part in rallies and contributing money.

5)  Those families struggling with children (particularly young men) who live isolated, anti-social, non-communicative lives.  Kids who spend more time interacting with violent video games than with human beings.  It’s tough for these parents to know what to do, or how to compel the child to see specialists, take medication, or find healthy outlets for their anger and loneliness. These are the people fighting this battle one day at a time.


Toni Messina has tried over 100 cases and has been practicing criminal law and immigration since 1990. You can follow her on Twitter: @tonitamess.