Everything We Think We Know About Mass Shooters Is Wrong [View all]

[phantom power]

...Trunk does, however, think often of the person who is out there right now feeling the way he used to feel. The person with a grievance. The person with a plan. The person with a gun—hell, an arsenal. The person we feel powerless against, because we don’t know who he is. All we know is what he—or she—is going to do.

Can he or she—they—be stopped before they become what we in America call “mass shooters”? We are so convinced they can’t be that we don’t even know if anyone is trying to stop them. Can they be understood? We are so convinced the evil they represent is inexplicable that we don’t try to explicate it. Mass shootings have become by now American rituals—blood sacrifices, propitiations to our angry American gods, made all the more terrible by our apparent acceptance of them. They have become a feature of American life, and we know very well what follows each one: the shock, the horror, the demonization of the guilty, the prayers for the innocent, the calls for action, the finger-pointing, the paralysis, and finally the forgetting. We know that they change everything only so that everything may remain unchanged.

But we are wrong about that. Mass shootings are not unstoppable, and there are people trying to stop them. They are not even inexplicable, because every time Trunk hears of one he understands why it happened and who did it. We have come to believe that mass shooters can’t be stopped because we never know who they are until they make themselves known. But Trunk was almost one of them once. He was a heartbeat away. And what he understands is that shooters want to be known, not through the infamy of a massacre, but before they have to go through with it. They want to be known as much as he, years later, wants to remain unknown, walking to the bus stop in the rain…

..

… We tend to think of perpetrators of targeted violence as either psychopaths—cold, isolated, highly motivated, and conscienceless—or troubled individuals who one day “just snap.” According to the tenets of threat assessment, they are neither. Indeed, according to the tenets of threat assessment, nobody just snaps; everybody follows an explicable course, even those intent on accomplishing the inexplicable. “The people who carry out these attacks typically do them out of a sense of desperation,” says Marisa Randazzo, a former Secret Service psychologist who collaborated with Fein and Vossekuil on several papers and is now a partner at Sigma Threat Management Associates. “They typically have been of concern to people who know them for long periods of time. And when we did interviews with school shooters, they expressed a level of ambivalence that surprised me. Part of them felt they had to go through with it; part of them felt they didn’t want to at all. Part of them looked for encouragement; part of them looked for someone to stop them. The national mind-set is that they’re determined to go through with it no matter what. That is absolutely not the case.”…

http://www.esquire.com/features/mass-shooters-1014