Yes and no. Overall whites commit mass murders at a rate roughly in line with their demographics, with the only real variation is that whites (and asians) have on average more victims
Yeah, but the nature of these murders is different. I can't recall a school shooting committed by an African-American, for example.
Pulse shooter wasn't white. 49 dead.
Also christopher dorner. Everyone remembers, "cant corner the dorner" memes right?
Thats not what im saying either. There is a black community that will talk about your experiences as a black person and give you support. There is not a white equivalent. If you grow up in a white family that is not supportive and involved, your not getting support. Thats not true of other groups.
"White" isn't a culture or even a shared experience, so the only groups that form around the idea are racist groups. There are culture groups that are from white cultures, but they're about an actual culture instead of whiteness. There are plenty of primarily-white clubs and organizations, but they tend to devolve into classism. However, there should also be groups that are built around the shared experience of poverty. The YMCA is probably a good place for finding one.
In any event, this isn't why people kill. The killers have been people with plenty of social opportunities rather often in recent years.
Yes and no. Overall whites commit mass murders at a rate roughly in line with their demographics, with the only real variation is that whites (and asians) have on average more victims
This article refutes the OP pretty thoroughly. The question can't be answered because the assumption that we need one is based on false data.
Yeah, that does seem to be the end of it. The premise is wrong, whites seem to commit more mass murders because they have committed more of the ones which reach the public consciousness of everyone more strongly.
In addition, gaining access to many weapons, especially large capacity high calibre rifles, is an expensive business. Not expensive enough, but expensive enough that a poor black kid might not do it. In addition, the hunting and sports stores which sell these guns are overwhelmingly white places. Even more so the ranges where you can learn to shoot them. If you're a white teenager, or adult, then the owner is likely to just wave away the background check.
Effectively, racism keeps black men from getting the rifles and learning how to use them.
Hmm, interesting if true.
It's not true though. It's backfilling a false idea with speculation. I'm certainly the first person to say that gun control is racist, but again, there doesn't seem to be any actual evidence that white men commit mass shootings out of proportion with their demographics. The Slate article that Pyphor linked says that they might commit nearly 20% fewer than you'd expect!
Having read your article, I would say that it actually is true, but its only true for mass killings which fit the features which call them into attention on the national stage.
As the article clearly states, if a mass killing is defined as one in which more than three people are killed, then the data clearly shows that about the expected number of white people commit those murders.
Conversely, you can use the article to show the contrary fact. If we consider mass killings which are still 'shocking' to us, the ones which reach the media narrative, then white people do commit them more.
So, we should actually ask ourselves, why are those mass killings committed by white people more shocking to us, and more likely to get attention on the national stage. Why are we paying them attention in such great numbers. The answer there is that white people are far more likely to kill other white people, that the people who are killed are likely to be wealthier, that the number of casulties is likely to be slightly elevated (as richer white people can afford more and better weapons, and spend more time practicing with them.
So the answer here to why this post exist is to a great extent the opposite of the posed question. These white people don't have a specific issue, perhaps other than access to very high powered firearms, range training, and the ability to wander into places we believe are 'safe' with fewer questions being asked. But we do have a tendancy to over report the 'fraction of fatalities' that they cause. Why is 'that' the case.
And clearly the answer is, that we report things which are unexpected and 'weird'. We expect poor kids in urban neighborhoods to get shot in drug wars. Or poor schools to get shot up by disgruntled people. We don't expect white people to be massacred at a concert in Las Vegas. We don't expect rich suburban kids to get gunned down. These killers may often come from racist backgrounds, as racism and othering of people is a key part of being able to kill strangers easily, but we are racist ourselves in our reporting of them.
Although, remove the 'white' from the title of this article and you can make a point which statistics do back up on any level. Why do 'males' commit most mass shootings is a topic where you can have a lot of the philosophical discussions about violence, frustration, exclusion, emotional isolation, and the shame of failure that the OP inclines us towards.
There just isn't any community among whites. If you grow up a troubled white boy your going to be told you are experiencing life on "easy mode" so if your failing thats on you, it's because fundamentally there is something wrong with you as an individual. You get told you are the cause of societies problems both for being white and being male. You don't get to be very old before you start getting lectures about what a potential rapist you are. We put a heavy burden on young white boys, and then we don't have a community for them.
We pretend that whites are some homogeneous group when they are not. They tend to be highly individualistic, and our current economy forces everyone to move for work and spend most of their time at work, there really isn't any time to have a community for working people. Young white poor males experience an isolation like no one else in our society. No one will accept that you are disadvantaged in any meaningful way, you will get blamed for things that have nothing to do with you or your life choices, and you will be looked down on. You will experience this without the benefit of a community that advocates for your interests or tries to put things into a context that you can accept, because "white people are already doing so well," a statement that is often made and completely discounts the fact that there are still lots of poor white people out there growing up in horrible environments. No one will accept that you have any meaningful problems. If anyone from any other group has a problem we are willing to listen to it, but if it's a poor white boy everyone wants him to shut up. The way I view it we are emotionally abusing these kids, don't be surprised if some of them end up having problems.
This is some philosophical trap card shit. The way you've set up this (false) situation, presenting facts about how other groups legitimately have a harder time is aggression. But sorry, being told, correctly, that the white man does not have a uniquely bad place in the world isn't an attack. It's reality.
Im not saying other groups dont have a hard time. Im saying its problematic that a young poor white boy can complain about problems only to be laughed at cause of his status as a white male oppressor, and be told that if hes having a problem its his personal problem, and he should feel bad that hes so stupid he cant even succeed at life on easy mode.
Told by who? Therapists? Their family? Their friends?
The person you are talking about has no support structure and is surrounded by nothing but naysayers.
Thats not what im saying either. There is a black community that will talk about your experiences as a black person and give you support. There is not a white equivalent. If you grow up in a white family that is not supportive and involved, your not getting support. Thats not true of other groups.
I appreciate the double-down here but your claim is false.
You can absolutely get support if you feel that way. It's just, the people giving you the support may be a lot more radical and a lot more fringe than we all would like.
Ultimately, there's always groups and ideologies that have room for troubled young men who feel lack proper support structures. At a certain point I think it behooves us to stop asking whether they *deserve* it or not and just provide it ourselves so that people whose ideologies we despise do not do it themselves.
Yes and no. Overall whites commit mass murders at a rate roughly in line with their demographics, with the only real variation is that whites (and asians) have on average more victims
Yeah, but the nature of these murders is different. I can't recall a school shooting committed by an African-American, for example.
Pulse shooter wasn't white. 49 dead.
Also christopher dorner. Everyone remembers, "cant corner the dorner" memes right?
That was a series of shootings, but not a mass shooting.
Yes and no. Overall whites commit mass murders at a rate roughly in line with their demographics, with the only real variation is that whites (and asians) have on average more victims
Yeah, but the nature of these murders is different. I can't recall a school shooting committed by an African-American, for example.
Pulse shooter wasn't white. 49 dead.
Also christopher dorner. Everyone remembers, "cant corner the dorner" memes right?
That was a series of shootings, but not a mass shooting.
Im having trouble parsing the difference, can you help me out with that?
Yes and no. Overall whites commit mass murders at a rate roughly in line with their demographics, with the only real variation is that whites (and asians) have on average more victims
Yeah, but the nature of these murders is different. I can't recall a school shooting committed by an African-American, for example.
Yes and no. Overall whites commit mass murders at a rate roughly in line with their demographics, with the only real variation is that whites (and asians) have on average more victims
Yeah, but the nature of these murders is different. I can't recall a school shooting committed by an African-American, for example.
Pulse shooter wasn't white. 49 dead.
DC sniper also wasn't white.
That was a weird one. WTF even was the deal with that, in the end?
Yes and no. Overall whites commit mass murders at a rate roughly in line with their demographics, with the only real variation is that whites (and asians) have on average more victims
Yeah, but the nature of these murders is different. I can't recall a school shooting committed by an African-American, for example.
Pulse shooter wasn't white. 49 dead.
Also christopher dorner. Everyone remembers, "cant corner the dorner" memes right?
That was a series of shootings, but not a mass shooting.
Im having trouble parsing the difference, can you help me out with that?
Mass shootings happen all at once. River vs. lake, basically.
Yes and no. Overall whites commit mass murders at a rate roughly in line with their demographics, with the only real variation is that whites (and asians) have on average more victims
Yeah, but the nature of these murders is different. I can't recall a school shooting committed by an African-American, for example.
Yes and no. Overall whites commit mass murders at a rate roughly in line with their demographics, with the only real variation is that whites (and asians) have on average more victims
Yeah, but the nature of these murders is different. I can't recall a school shooting committed by an African-American, for example.
Pulse shooter wasn't white. 49 dead.
Also christopher dorner. Everyone remembers, "cant corner the dorner" memes right?
That was a series of shootings, but not a mass shooting.
Im having trouble parsing the difference, can you help me out with that?
No individual shooting incident would qualify as a mass shooting probably
I think the increase in victim numbers in "white" shootings is pretty clearly the ability to access weaponry that allows someone to quickly and accurately (or accurately enough) target people and as someone else mentioned the ability to go anywhere without scrutiny.
"Hello fellow white person, can I help you up to your room with 20 guns and a few hundred pounds of ammunition?"
"Of course, nothing weird going on here. I'm a white person and therefore not dangerous"
Yes and no. Overall whites commit mass murders at a rate roughly in line with their demographics, with the only real variation is that whites (and asians) have on average more victims
Yeah, but the nature of these murders is different. I can't recall a school shooting committed by an African-American, for example.
Pulse shooter wasn't white. 49 dead.
DC sniper also wasn't white.
Interesting though that the Pulse Shooting is overwhelmingly described as a terrorist attack. San Bernardino too (also a Muslim couple).
So white and Asian people commit mass shootings.
Islamic people commit terrorist acts
Black people commit gang murders and involved in 'gang wars'
All are 'mass killings' but we report them differently. Motivations do tend to be different, although there is a strong overlap. The killer tends to be someone who ostracizes others for any number of reasons. religion, nationalism, 'gang identity'. But there doesn't seem to be a real underlying 'whiteness'. The killers are people who view those unlike them as inhuman, or desires vengeance after an assumed betrayal. This seems to be an emotional state to which all men are vulnerable regardless of race. White people just tend to do the 'unexpected' more.
I would suspect that men are vulnerable to this due to the fact that their are 'expected' to succeed and never taught how to deal with failure and loss. That men can be shown to be enormously isolated from each other in our society, and to be very poorly 'trained' at expressing positive affection and seeking help.
There just isn't any community among whites. If you grow up a troubled white boy your going to be told you are experiencing life on "easy mode" so if your failing thats on you, it's because fundamentally there is something wrong with you as an individual. You get told you are the cause of societies problems both for being white and being male. You don't get to be very old before you start getting lectures about what a potential rapist you are.
I know you've got a lot of responses flying your way Cantelope, but I want to address this, because I do see it a lot.
I don't think there's an epidemic of young white boys being told their lives are easy, or they're potential rapists, or whatever. I think occasionally, someone does say it, even though it's unhelpful. Or someone says something that sounds like it, and it gets interpreted that way. Or someone says it as part of a snarky tweet, or hyperbole.
And what happens in each of these cases is that a brigade of defensive white men will take that statement and amplify it. One dumb comment, or a handful of misinterpreted comments becomes "society says this". Suddenly, you have a bunch of guys pissed of at feminism because when they were 12 they got the idea that feminism means female supremacy, instead of being able to say "yeah some dumb, unhelpful things get said in feminist circles, just as dumb, unhelpful things get said by my circles".
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Thats not what im saying either. There is a black community that will talk about your experiences as a black person and give you support. There is not a white equivalent. If you grow up in a white family that is not supportive and involved, your not getting support. Thats not true of other groups.
See, these "communities" you are describing came about due to white America shutting them out. White people have groups, and communities, and everything else available to them as much as anyone else does.
It's like the argument that there's no "white history month" when, in fact, it's every other month that isn't February.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
Thats not what im saying either. There is a black community that will talk about your experiences as a black person and give you support. There is not a white equivalent. If you grow up in a white family that is not supportive and involved, your not getting support. Thats not true of other groups.
This is one of those perfect places for the BenderOhWaitYoureSerious.jpg file.
Do... do you think that minorities just have intrinsic clubs waiting to talk about your experiences and give you support? Like 'whelp, time to go down the street to Minority Club for therapy session' sort of thing? This is bonkers. What community exists does do because of exclusion from other community opportunities universally controlled by the white majority. I hate to break it to you, but if you are Black in the US and have no family support you are most certainly not in a better place than a while guy in the same situation, and to think such is to be ignorant of decades of history.
Young white kids have their better funded school counselors (which minorities face gate keeping on by discriminatory funding and districting), have therapists (gate keeping by financial cost), have the vast majority of well funded churches and faith institutions (gate keeping by preventing minority facilities, especially non-christian ones, from being able to open in convenient locations). White kids have the passive benefits of not being assumed to be a threat simply by shopping at the store after sundown or wearing a baggy sweatshirt. The passive cultural bias is substantial.
Yes and no. Overall whites commit mass murders at a rate roughly in line with their demographics, with the only real variation is that whites (and asians) have on average more victims
Yeah, but the nature of these murders is different. I can't recall a school shooting committed by an African-American, for example.
Pulse shooter wasn't white. 49 dead.
DC sniper also wasn't white.
Also the Ft. Hood shooting. Also the Dallas shooter who ambushed that police rally.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Yes and no. Overall whites commit mass murders at a rate roughly in line with their demographics, with the only real variation is that whites (and asians) have on average more victims
Yeah, but the nature of these murders is different. I can't recall a school shooting committed by an African-American, for example.
Pulse shooter wasn't white. 49 dead.
DC sniper also wasn't white.
Also the Ft. Hood shooting. Also the Dallas shooter who ambushed that police rally.
We're up to 5.
Out of... I dunno a couple hundred at this point it's difficult to keep up
BTW, just because I'm skeptical of the supposed racial disparity, I'm not skeptical of the gender disparity. Mass shootings are definitely a male problem. For that matter, most perpetrators (and victims) of murder are men.
Why Do White Males Commit Most Mass Shootings?
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Yes and no. Overall whites commit mass murders at a rate roughly in line with their demographics, with the only real variation is that whites (and asians) have on average more victims
Yeah, but the nature of these murders is different. I can't recall a school shooting committed by an African-American, for example.
Pulse shooter wasn't white. 49 dead.
DC sniper also wasn't white.
Also the Ft. Hood shooting. Also the Dallas shooter who ambushed that police rally.
We're up to 5.
Out of... I dunno a couple hundred at this point it's difficult to keep up
No, we are not. Don't get snarky about it, we've already disproven the broad statistic - white men do not per capita disproportionately commit mass shootings unless you truncate the definition dramatically enough that there aren't enough mass shootings left to make any general comment about the race of the perpetrators. When you use the federal definition, they commit around 20% fewer mass shootings per capita than other races.
Now I'm just poking at the "I can't even think of one" comment from earlier. It's easy to think of them.
Yes and no. Overall whites commit mass murders at a rate roughly in line with their demographics, with the only real variation is that whites (and asians) have on average more victims
Yeah, but the nature of these murders is different. I can't recall a school shooting committed by an African-American, for example.
Pulse shooter wasn't white. 49 dead.
DC sniper also wasn't white.
That was a weird one. WTF even was the deal with that, in the end?
He was going to assassinate his ex wife I think, and was using the other killings as a way to disguise it as a serial killer instead to make it seem random. The judge didn't let them try to use that in the trial though.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
We have a really hard time accurately studying gun violence in the US because epidemiologists cannot receive federal funding and study gun violence on the whole. America as an institution is largely unwilling to look into this problem as it exists. That means mass shootings, random shootings, shootings during robbery, any of it. There are also no central repositories and crime reporting is not nationalized, meaning that individual police agencies may or may not record all acts of violence.
However, the FBI did perform a study on what is referred to as Active Shooters.
Active Shooters are defined as
The agreed-upon definition of an active shooter by U.S. government agencies—including
the White House, U.S. Department of Justice/FBI, U.S. Department of Education, and
U.S. Department of Homeland Security/Federal Emergency Management Agency—is
“an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and
populated area.”
Implicit in this definition is that the subject’s criminal actions involve the
use of firearms.
This study looked at all active shooter incidents between the years of 2000 and 2013. This was 160 cases. The study did not per se study mass shootings or mass killings in public places but you can see from all the cases that they were indeed mass shootings.
This study was published in 2013 after an Obama administration commission to study this specific topic.
I think this is a good data set because it allows us to look before our current year (where we can bias ourselves due to ongoing issues occurring around us). We can use it as a case study so to speak.
The first observation this study made is that the number of active shooter incidents per year is on the rise.
The number of incidents doubled over the span of 7 years.
Additionally, 40% of these active shooter incidents qualify as "mass shootings" under the new FBI regulations for what constitutes a mass shooting, which is three or more killings in a single incident.
The second observation is that casualties also increased over the span of 7 years.
56% of these active shooter incidents were ended by the shooter either through suicide, stopping shooting, or fleeing the scene.
Almost all of the 160 events studied were committed by a male. Additionally, almost all of the events were committed by a lone male.
Only 1.3% had multiple shooters and only 3.8% had a female shooter.
This is this first conclusion we can make about active shooters. They are nearly exclusively committed by men and there is typically only one male shooter per active shooting.
The next thing the study looks at is where the shootings take place.
The type of locations active shooters become active in is broken down.
45% of active shootings occurred in places of business: open, closed, or malls.
The next biggest location was in educational environments at 24%.
This is the second conclusion we can make about active shootings. They occur mostly in businesses and schools.
Now we get into the murky part that everyone wants to talk about: motivation, age, ethnicity.
The study found no correlation between age and active shooter. I demonstrated this myself by graphing all the ages of the active shooters. There is a slightly higher peak at 18-30 and again at 40-80. But it is a very weak bimodal distribution. In reality, anyone at any age can become an active shooter but there were slightly less active shooters from the age of 30-40.
There is however an interesting correlation regarding motivations.
For example, in businesses generally closed to pedestrian traffic, 22 of the 23 shooters were
employees or former employees of the involved company. In other instances, the location
category appeared less significant than the victims targeted. For example, in 15 (9.3%)
of the 160 incidents, the shooter targeted family members. And in 15 (9.3%) of the 160
incidents, the shooter targeted his current, estranged, or former spouse or his current or
former girlfriend.
Active shootings at closed businesses were employees or former employees. Indicating that one reason to become an active shooter is a work-related dispute.
A subset of active shooters choose to target family members and another subset choose to target spouse or girlfriend. This means that active shooting is in and of itself an act of domestic violence in some cases.
When you jump into the case studies there are many keywords that demonstrate this qualitatively. Active shooters shoot after being fired, or being reprimanded at work. Active shooters shoot after getting divorced, exiting a relationship, and after estrangement.
All in all, the data from this study demonstrate that there really aren't good correlates for who will become an active shooter.
In this study, the FBI identified 160 active shooter incidents, noting they occurred in small
and large towns, in urban and rural areas, and in 40 of 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Though incidents occurred primarily in commerce and educational environments (70.0%),
they also occurred on city streets, on military and other government properties, and in private
residences, health care facilities, and houses of worship. The shooters victimized young and
old, male and female, family members, and people of all races, cultures, and religions.
I do think the study is really important though because it challenges some of our biases regarding active shooters in the news. We have a knee-jerk bias to think of active shooters as angry teenagers, but in reality, any male at any age can become an active shooter. We also focus heavily on school shootings, and understandably so because it is heartbreaking, but we tend to focus less on workplace active shootings. I am interested in opinions as to why we tend to cover factory or job-related active shootings less.
I myself was surprised to see there was no age bias. I was quite certain that there would be a large spike in active shootings by teenagers but that really doesn't show up in this study. That being said, this is only a single study. The study also excludes gang violence, which really I think should be included in mass shooting studies. That is part of the problem. We don't really seem to have a good base metric for defining the criteria so that we can measure changes.
Some people make the argument that mass shootings aren't on the rise but that news coverage is. I don't think this study supports that hypothesis.
There are also some really good newspaper articles on this topic and that is how I found this study and went through it. This study did not cover race and it didn't test any hypotheses regarding a social theory of entitlement.
I think the social theory of entitlement is interesting and partially explanatory but honestly from the data it looks to me like a person can snap at any time and there are certain times that these people snap: divorce, estrangement, firing, et cetera. You could argue that entitlement breeds a person who is unable to withstand or be resilient to failure outside of their control but I think that really needs to be established first.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
edited March 2018
Some of you may be aware, but my Uncle committed a mass shooting about 30 years ago (depending on criteria). He killed one person, and injured a good number more (one of which near fatally). He also attempted to kill a number of other people during the same day. He was white. Being white did not make him more likely to commit mass murder, his mental illness did. He was a diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teen and over time became increasingly disillusioned with society.
When he snapped, he was able to walk out of the mental institution he was at, steal cash to take a bus to where my family lived, buy a gun with said stolen cash without either background check nor waiting period, killed and injured a number of people in my family while hunting for the rest of us, and then returned the gun the next day because "it pulled to the right" and used the refund to then try and flee the country on yet another bus.
He wasn't bullied. He wasn't a victim. He was a sick man who decided that, in his mind, the best thing he could do to make his life better was to kill everyone he was blood related to. He later hung himself in a higher security place.
A guy I grew up with also did a mass shooting, killing one of my friends, a girl they were sheltering, and injuring several others. He was a white male, who had his girlfriend leave him and, in a fit of jealous rage, crashed his car into the house she was staying at and shot 6 people, two of which were killed. There were many, many threats of physical violence beforehand, and the police had no ability to do anything about it due to where laws on digital threats were at the time.
He also wasn't bullied. He wasn't a victim. He was an asshole who hit his girlfriend one time he got angry, in public, and lost her. Leading to him building up resentment and hate until he could somehow get to the point where murder was fine.
Both of these are white males committing mass murder.
But being white and male isn't the important thing here. In Orlando alone there are hundreds of murders each year, not counting bizarre high-volume deaths like the Pulse shooting. Women and men alike kill people. People of all ethnicities.
Hell, sometimes you all post the news articles for the more bizarre ones as part of the running 'Florida Man' joke.
Access to a firearm while angry, or mentally unfit, is the important thing here. Anyone can be driven to the point of rage by enough stress. Some people are more likely to get there by mental disposition, but I would really hesitate to say it has anything to do with race. We have mass shootings because our gun laws are dumb and loose. Fix that, and the opportunities for the angry and mentally unstable will be reduced somewhat in the short term and greatly in the long term.
I would say that since we know mass violence effects of any kind are 'infectious' white men commit mass shootings in the specific way which fits our media narrative because previous white men have. If you can identify with a previous killer, you are more likely to copy them with your own actions.
In addition, gaining access to many weapons, especially large capacity high calibre rifles, is an expensive business. Not expensive enough, but expensive enough that a poor black kid might not do it. In addition, the hunting and sports stores which sell these guns are overwhelmingly white places. Even more so the ranges where you can learn to shoot them. If you're a white teenager, or adult, then the owner is likely to just wave away the background check.
Effectively, racism keeps black men from getting the rifles and learning how to use them.
You're going to need to provide some kind of proof for this claim RE that an FFL is "likely" to risk their business and their freedom to not perform the federally required NICS check for a purchase.
There just isn't any community among whites. If you grow up a troubled white boy your going to be told you are experiencing life on "easy mode" so if your failing thats on you, it's because fundamentally there is something wrong with you as an individual. You get told you are the cause of societies problems both for being white and being male. You don't get to be very old before you start getting lectures about what a potential rapist you are.
I know you've got a lot of responses flying your way Cantelope, but I want to address this, because I do see it a lot.
I don't think there's an epidemic of young white boys being told their lives are easy, or they're potential rapists, or whatever. I think occasionally, someone does say it, even though it's unhelpful. Or someone says something that sounds like it, and it gets interpreted that way. Or someone says it as part of a snarky tweet, or hyperbole.
And what happens in each of these cases is that a brigade of defensive white men will take that statement and amplify it. One dumb comment, or a handful of misinterpreted comments becomes "society says this". Suddenly, you have a bunch of guys pissed of at feminism because when they were 12 they got the idea that feminism means female supremacy, instead of being able to say "yeah some dumb, unhelpful things get said in feminist circles, just as dumb, unhelpful things get said by my circles".
I would say that I disagree with this. White people are told that their lives are easier, and that they are getting a leg up, by many groups very regularly. And, for the overwhelming majority of white people it's completely true their lives are factually easier and better because they are white.
However, Perceived awfulness of life is like the sum of two error functions vs actual shittiness. White privilege modifies actual shittiness, whereas the only thing that matters to people is perceived shittiness. This is completely impossible to change, and absolutely fundamental to the way humans work. So perhaps white privilege gave that white family an extra $100 in their pockets every month. Unless it pushed them over one of the humps to the next happiness level, they really didn't notice it.
In the above graph, X is your 'percentile position vs other humans' and Y is how happy you actually feel about that. Clearly, this isn't a super scientific graph, just for clarifying my point! But, most articles about peoples perceived security and happiness bear this out. For most white people, privilege just shunts them about on one of the plateaus. It's only 'in total' that white privilege really makes white peoples lives 'feel easier' on average because it only pushes a small number of people over one of those big "I feel better about my life" humps.
Yes and no. Overall whites commit mass murders at a rate roughly in line with their demographics, with the only real variation is that whites (and asians) have on average more victims
Yeah, but the nature of these murders is different. I can't recall a school shooting committed by an African-American, for example.
Pulse shooter wasn't white. 49 dead.
DC sniper also wasn't white.
Also the Ft. Hood shooting. Also the Dallas shooter who ambushed that police rally.
We're up to 5.
Out of... I dunno a couple hundred at this point it's difficult to keep up
No, we are not. Don't get snarky about it, we've already disproven the broad statistic - white men do not per capita disproportionately commit mass shootings unless you truncate the definition dramatically enough that there aren't enough mass shootings left to make any general comment about the race of the perpetrators. When you use the federal definition, they commit around 20% fewer mass shootings per capita than other races.
Now I'm just poking at the "I can't even think of one" comment from earlier. It's easy to think of them.
The one that ruminates on school shootings?
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
I would say that since we know mass violence effects of any kind are 'infectious' white men commit mass shootings in the specific way which fits our media narrative because previous white men have. If you can identify with a previous killer, you are more likely to copy them with your own actions.
In addition, gaining access to many weapons, especially large capacity high calibre rifles, is an expensive business. Not expensive enough, but expensive enough that a poor black kid might not do it. In addition, the hunting and sports stores which sell these guns are overwhelmingly white places. Even more so the ranges where you can learn to shoot them. If you're a white teenager, or adult, then the owner is likely to just wave away the background check.
Effectively, racism keeps black men from getting the rifles and learning how to use them.
You're going to need to provide some kind of proof for this claim RE that an FFL is "likely" to risk their business and their freedom to not perform the federally required NICS check for a purchase.
Done at a gun show?
No risk to business when it's not legally required.
I would say that since we know mass violence effects of any kind are 'infectious' white men commit mass shootings in the specific way which fits our media narrative because previous white men have. If you can identify with a previous killer, you are more likely to copy them with your own actions.
In addition, gaining access to many weapons, especially large capacity high calibre rifles, is an expensive business. Not expensive enough, but expensive enough that a poor black kid might not do it. In addition, the hunting and sports stores which sell these guns are overwhelmingly white places. Even more so the ranges where you can learn to shoot them. If you're a white teenager, or adult, then the owner is likely to just wave away the background check.
Effectively, racism keeps black men from getting the rifles and learning how to use them.
You're going to need to provide some kind of proof for this claim RE that an FFL is "likely" to risk their business and their freedom to not perform the federally required NICS check for a purchase.
Done at a gun show?
No risk to business when it's not legally required.
If you have the FFL all your sales count as regulated sales and need the background check im pretty sure. Like i don't think you can make unregulated "private" sales as an FFL. I'm willing to accept i might be wrong about that.
I would say that since we know mass violence effects of any kind are 'infectious' white men commit mass shootings in the specific way which fits our media narrative because previous white men have. If you can identify with a previous killer, you are more likely to copy them with your own actions.
In addition, gaining access to many weapons, especially large capacity high calibre rifles, is an expensive business. Not expensive enough, but expensive enough that a poor black kid might not do it. In addition, the hunting and sports stores which sell these guns are overwhelmingly white places. Even more so the ranges where you can learn to shoot them. If you're a white teenager, or adult, then the owner is likely to just wave away the background check.
Effectively, racism keeps black men from getting the rifles and learning how to use them.
You're going to need to provide some kind of proof for this claim RE that an FFL is "likely" to risk their business and their freedom to not perform the federally required NICS check for a purchase.
Done at a gun show?
No risk to business when it's not legally required.
If you have the FFL all your sales count as regulated sales and need the background check im pretty sure. Like i don't think you can make unregulated "private" sales as an FFL. I'm willing to accept i might be wrong about that.
I would say that since we know mass violence effects of any kind are 'infectious' white men commit mass shootings in the specific way which fits our media narrative because previous white men have. If you can identify with a previous killer, you are more likely to copy them with your own actions.
In addition, gaining access to many weapons, especially large capacity high calibre rifles, is an expensive business. Not expensive enough, but expensive enough that a poor black kid might not do it. In addition, the hunting and sports stores which sell these guns are overwhelmingly white places. Even more so the ranges where you can learn to shoot them. If you're a white teenager, or adult, then the owner is likely to just wave away the background check.
Effectively, racism keeps black men from getting the rifles and learning how to use them.
You're going to need to provide some kind of proof for this claim RE that an FFL is "likely" to risk their business and their freedom to not perform the federally required NICS check for a purchase.
I guess my point here was not described in detail enough. 'Waving the background check' was a glib comment which likely is not true. Actual gun stores do usually follow what background check rules exist.
However, it is true that 'hobby shooting', 'hunting' and the ownership of legal firearms for defence is overwhelmingly a white activity. So, when a white guy walks into a gun store and asks to buy an AR-15 and some ammo, he is likely to encounter a sympathetic fellow white person who will be seeing what he expects. A white person, come to the sporting goods store to buy some guns for legitimate purposes. That white person isn't going to face any extra grilling, or be asked, "You aren't planning on using this for some kind of drugs stuff right?" or "Are you planning on doing one of those mass shootings". Instead he is likely to both expect, and encounter a friendly shop owner and the most likely pressure he will encounter is some up sell to buy a second gun and a nice holster.
Conversely a black guy planning to buy a gun, from a sporting goods store where they sell AR-15s and similar, sees and expects a different experience. For one thing, he'll be going into an overwhelmingly white, armed, environment. So he'll be concerned from moment one. His behavior will be more stressed and concerned. The owner will then see something odd. A black guy in his store looking at the rifles. Thats not who usually buys those. What's going on? The owner is concerned. Is the black guy planning on using this for drug stuff? Robbing people? He'd better make sure. Quiz the guy a little bit.
And so black people are marginally more limited in their access to high powered firearms. Hell, simple access to these sporting goods stores which sell these guns is hard for many urban people who don't own the cars to get to the suburbs where they are.
I would say that since we know mass violence effects of any kind are 'infectious' white men commit mass shootings in the specific way which fits our media narrative because previous white men have. If you can identify with a previous killer, you are more likely to copy them with your own actions.
In addition, gaining access to many weapons, especially large capacity high calibre rifles, is an expensive business. Not expensive enough, but expensive enough that a poor black kid might not do it. In addition, the hunting and sports stores which sell these guns are overwhelmingly white places. Even more so the ranges where you can learn to shoot them. If you're a white teenager, or adult, then the owner is likely to just wave away the background check.
Effectively, racism keeps black men from getting the rifles and learning how to use them.
You're going to need to provide some kind of proof for this claim RE that an FFL is "likely" to risk their business and their freedom to not perform the federally required NICS check for a purchase.
Done at a gun show?
No risk to business when it's not legally required.
FFLs are required by federal law to conduct a NICS check for every purchase regardless of venue. State law determines whether a private citizen who does not have an FFL is required to perform a NICS for a private sale, but by federal law one cannot be "in the business of selling arms" without an FFL.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
I would say that since we know mass violence effects of any kind are 'infectious' white men commit mass shootings in the specific way which fits our media narrative because previous white men have. If you can identify with a previous killer, you are more likely to copy them with your own actions.
In addition, gaining access to many weapons, especially large capacity high calibre rifles, is an expensive business. Not expensive enough, but expensive enough that a poor black kid might not do it. In addition, the hunting and sports stores which sell these guns are overwhelmingly white places. Even more so the ranges where you can learn to shoot them. If you're a white teenager, or adult, then the owner is likely to just wave away the background check.
Effectively, racism keeps black men from getting the rifles and learning how to use them.
You're going to need to provide some kind of proof for this claim RE that an FFL is "likely" to risk their business and their freedom to not perform the federally required NICS check for a purchase.
Done at a gun show?
No risk to business when it's not legally required.
FFLs are required by federal law to conduct a NICS check for every purchase regardless of venue. State law determines whether a private citizen who does not have an FFL is required to perform a NICS for a private sale, but by federal law one cannot be "in the business of selling arms" without an FFL.
I do like how you put these in quotation marks because that's exactly the point. Make it a private sale, boom, done. People often purchase out of their own stock and then sell it as a private reseller. Ez pz.
To my understanding the gun show loophole is that not everyone at a gun show need be an FFL and can make all their sales at the gun show as a private sale.
There just isn't any community among whites. If you grow up a troubled white boy your going to be told you are experiencing life on "easy mode" so if your failing thats on you, it's because fundamentally there is something wrong with you as an individual. You get told you are the cause of societies problems both for being white and being male. You don't get to be very old before you start getting lectures about what a potential rapist you are.
I know you've got a lot of responses flying your way Cantelope, but I want to address this, because I do see it a lot.
I don't think there's an epidemic of young white boys being told their lives are easy, or they're potential rapists, or whatever. I think occasionally, someone does say it, even though it's unhelpful. Or someone says something that sounds like it, and it gets interpreted that way. Or someone says it as part of a snarky tweet, or hyperbole.
And what happens in each of these cases is that a brigade of defensive white men will take that statement and amplify it. One dumb comment, or a handful of misinterpreted comments becomes "society says this". Suddenly, you have a bunch of guys pissed of at feminism because when they were 12 they got the idea that feminism means female supremacy, instead of being able to say "yeah some dumb, unhelpful things get said in feminist circles, just as dumb, unhelpful things get said by my circles".
I would say that I disagree with this. White people are told that their lives are easier, and that they are getting a leg up, by many groups very regularly. And, for the overwhelming majority of white people it's completely true their lives are factually easier and better because they are white.
However, Perceived awfulness of life is like the sum of two error functions vs actual shittiness. White privilege modifies actual shittiness, whereas the only thing that matters to people is perceived shittiness. This is completely impossible to change, and absolutely fundamental to the way humans work. So perhaps white privilege gave that white family an extra $100 in their pockets every month. Unless it pushed them over one of the humps to the next happiness level, they really didn't notice it.
In the above graph, X is your 'percentile position vs other humans' and Y is how happy you actually feel about that. Clearly, this isn't a super scientific graph, just for clarifying my point! But, most articles about peoples perceived security and happiness bear this out. For most white people, privilege just shunts them about on one of the plateaus. It's only 'in total' that white privilege really makes white peoples lives 'feel easier' on average because it only pushes a small number of people over one of those big "I feel better about my life" humps.
I can’t for the life of me figure out what the graph is graphing. There are no labels. What are the axes?
Yes and no. Overall whites commit mass murders at a rate roughly in line with their demographics, with the only real variation is that whites (and asians) have on average more victims
Yeah, but the nature of these murders is different. I can't recall a school shooting committed by an African-American, for example.
Pulse shooter wasn't white. 49 dead.
DC sniper also wasn't white.
Also the Ft. Hood shooting. Also the Dallas shooter who ambushed that police rally.
We're up to 5.
Out of... I dunno a couple hundred at this point it's difficult to keep up
No, we are not. Don't get snarky about it, we've already disproven the broad statistic - white men do not per capita disproportionately commit mass shootings unless you truncate the definition dramatically enough that there aren't enough mass shootings left to make any general comment about the race of the perpetrators. When you use the federal definition, they commit around 20% fewer mass shootings per capita than other races.
Now I'm just poking at the "I can't even think of one" comment from earlier. It's easy to think of them.
The one that ruminates on school shootings?
Virginia Tech shooting
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
Lots of second-hand sales and gun show sales simply ignore required sales checks as cash only businesses. In 2015 Harvard did a survey that found as many as 40% of polled gun owners did not go through a background check to acquire one or more of their firearms (instead getting them through unregistered cash sales, unregistered gifts, or swaps). I suspect the latter two were the more common variants contributing to the 40%, but they included all three in the research if memory serves.
I suspect that number is less now, as it was already on a downward trend, but there are still plenty of folks out there who get guns without checks.
I would say that since we know mass violence effects of any kind are 'infectious' white men commit mass shootings in the specific way which fits our media narrative because previous white men have. If you can identify with a previous killer, you are more likely to copy them with your own actions.
In addition, gaining access to many weapons, especially large capacity high calibre rifles, is an expensive business. Not expensive enough, but expensive enough that a poor black kid might not do it. In addition, the hunting and sports stores which sell these guns are overwhelmingly white places. Even more so the ranges where you can learn to shoot them. If you're a white teenager, or adult, then the owner is likely to just wave away the background check.
Effectively, racism keeps black men from getting the rifles and learning how to use them.
You're going to need to provide some kind of proof for this claim RE that an FFL is "likely" to risk their business and their freedom to not perform the federally required NICS check for a purchase.
Done at a gun show?
No risk to business when it's not legally required.
FFLs are required by federal law to conduct a NICS check for every purchase regardless of venue. State law determines whether a private citizen who does not have an FFL is required to perform a NICS for a private sale, but by federal law one cannot be "in the business of selling arms" without an FFL.
I do like how you put these in quotation marks because that's exactly the point. Make it a private sale, boom, done. People often purchase out of their own stock and then sell it as a private reseller. Ez pz.
But this is veering off topic, I fear.
I put it in quotes because I was quoting the language used specifically.
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EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
There just isn't any community among whites. If you grow up a troubled white boy your going to be told you are experiencing life on "easy mode" so if your failing thats on you, it's because fundamentally there is something wrong with you as an individual. You get told you are the cause of societies problems both for being white and being male. You don't get to be very old before you start getting lectures about what a potential rapist you are.
I know you've got a lot of responses flying your way Cantelope, but I want to address this, because I do see it a lot.
I don't think there's an epidemic of young white boys being told their lives are easy, or they're potential rapists, or whatever. I think occasionally, someone does say it, even though it's unhelpful. Or someone says something that sounds like it, and it gets interpreted that way. Or someone says it as part of a snarky tweet, or hyperbole.
And what happens in each of these cases is that a brigade of defensive white men will take that statement and amplify it. One dumb comment, or a handful of misinterpreted comments becomes "society says this". Suddenly, you have a bunch of guys pissed of at feminism because when they were 12 they got the idea that feminism means female supremacy, instead of being able to say "yeah some dumb, unhelpful things get said in feminist circles, just as dumb, unhelpful things get said by my circles".
I would say that I disagree with this. White people are told that their lives are easier, and that they are getting a leg up, by many groups very regularly. And, for the overwhelming majority of white people it's completely true their lives are factually easier and better because they are white.
However, Perceived awfulness of life is like the sum of two error functions vs actual shittiness. White privilege modifies actual shittiness, whereas the only thing that matters to people is perceived shittiness. This is completely impossible to change, and absolutely fundamental to the way humans work. So perhaps white privilege gave that white family an extra $100 in their pockets every month. Unless it pushed them over one of the humps to the next happiness level, they really didn't notice it.
In the above graph, X is your 'percentile position vs other humans' and Y is how happy you actually feel about that. Clearly, this isn't a super scientific graph, just for clarifying my point! But, most articles about peoples perceived security and happiness bear this out. For most white people, privilege just shunts them about on one of the plateaus. It's only 'in total' that white privilege really makes white peoples lives 'feel easier' on average because it only pushes a small number of people over one of those big "I feel better about my life" humps.
I can’t for the life of me figure out what the graph is graphing. There are no labels. What are the axes?
Some sort of faux graphical representation of why being white isn't amazing because that doesn't mean you are automatically affluent and therefore are suffering as much as minorities and QED give us a white history month nonsense, was my read.
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Also christopher dorner. Everyone remembers, "cant corner the dorner" memes right?
"White" isn't a culture or even a shared experience, so the only groups that form around the idea are racist groups. There are culture groups that are from white cultures, but they're about an actual culture instead of whiteness. There are plenty of primarily-white clubs and organizations, but they tend to devolve into classism. However, there should also be groups that are built around the shared experience of poverty. The YMCA is probably a good place for finding one.
In any event, this isn't why people kill. The killers have been people with plenty of social opportunities rather often in recent years.
Yeah, that does seem to be the end of it. The premise is wrong, whites seem to commit more mass murders because they have committed more of the ones which reach the public consciousness of everyone more strongly.
Having read your article, I would say that it actually is true, but its only true for mass killings which fit the features which call them into attention on the national stage.
As the article clearly states, if a mass killing is defined as one in which more than three people are killed, then the data clearly shows that about the expected number of white people commit those murders.
Conversely, you can use the article to show the contrary fact. If we consider mass killings which are still 'shocking' to us, the ones which reach the media narrative, then white people do commit them more.
So, we should actually ask ourselves, why are those mass killings committed by white people more shocking to us, and more likely to get attention on the national stage. Why are we paying them attention in such great numbers. The answer there is that white people are far more likely to kill other white people, that the people who are killed are likely to be wealthier, that the number of casulties is likely to be slightly elevated (as richer white people can afford more and better weapons, and spend more time practicing with them.
So the answer here to why this post exist is to a great extent the opposite of the posed question. These white people don't have a specific issue, perhaps other than access to very high powered firearms, range training, and the ability to wander into places we believe are 'safe' with fewer questions being asked. But we do have a tendancy to over report the 'fraction of fatalities' that they cause. Why is 'that' the case.
And clearly the answer is, that we report things which are unexpected and 'weird'. We expect poor kids in urban neighborhoods to get shot in drug wars. Or poor schools to get shot up by disgruntled people. We don't expect white people to be massacred at a concert in Las Vegas. We don't expect rich suburban kids to get gunned down. These killers may often come from racist backgrounds, as racism and othering of people is a key part of being able to kill strangers easily, but we are racist ourselves in our reporting of them.
Although, remove the 'white' from the title of this article and you can make a point which statistics do back up on any level. Why do 'males' commit most mass shootings is a topic where you can have a lot of the philosophical discussions about violence, frustration, exclusion, emotional isolation, and the shame of failure that the OP inclines us towards.
Told by who? Therapists? Their family? Their friends?
The person you are talking about has no support structure and is surrounded by nothing but naysayers.
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You can absolutely get support if you feel that way. It's just, the people giving you the support may be a lot more radical and a lot more fringe than we all would like.
Ultimately, there's always groups and ideologies that have room for troubled young men who feel lack proper support structures. At a certain point I think it behooves us to stop asking whether they *deserve* it or not and just provide it ourselves so that people whose ideologies we despise do not do it themselves.
That was a series of shootings, but not a mass shooting.
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Im having trouble parsing the difference, can you help me out with that?
DC sniper also wasn't white.
That was a weird one. WTF even was the deal with that, in the end?
Mass shootings happen all at once. River vs. lake, basically.
DC sniper also wasn't a mass shooter.
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No individual shooting incident would qualify as a mass shooting probably
"Hello fellow white person, can I help you up to your room with 20 guns and a few hundred pounds of ammunition?"
"Of course, nothing weird going on here. I'm a white person and therefore not dangerous"
Interesting though that the Pulse Shooting is overwhelmingly described as a terrorist attack. San Bernardino too (also a Muslim couple).
So white and Asian people commit mass shootings.
Islamic people commit terrorist acts
Black people commit gang murders and involved in 'gang wars'
All are 'mass killings' but we report them differently. Motivations do tend to be different, although there is a strong overlap. The killer tends to be someone who ostracizes others for any number of reasons. religion, nationalism, 'gang identity'. But there doesn't seem to be a real underlying 'whiteness'. The killers are people who view those unlike them as inhuman, or desires vengeance after an assumed betrayal. This seems to be an emotional state to which all men are vulnerable regardless of race. White people just tend to do the 'unexpected' more.
I would suspect that men are vulnerable to this due to the fact that their are 'expected' to succeed and never taught how to deal with failure and loss. That men can be shown to be enormously isolated from each other in our society, and to be very poorly 'trained' at expressing positive affection and seeking help.
I know you've got a lot of responses flying your way Cantelope, but I want to address this, because I do see it a lot.
I don't think there's an epidemic of young white boys being told their lives are easy, or they're potential rapists, or whatever. I think occasionally, someone does say it, even though it's unhelpful. Or someone says something that sounds like it, and it gets interpreted that way. Or someone says it as part of a snarky tweet, or hyperbole.
And what happens in each of these cases is that a brigade of defensive white men will take that statement and amplify it. One dumb comment, or a handful of misinterpreted comments becomes "society says this". Suddenly, you have a bunch of guys pissed of at feminism because when they were 12 they got the idea that feminism means female supremacy, instead of being able to say "yeah some dumb, unhelpful things get said in feminist circles, just as dumb, unhelpful things get said by my circles".
See, these "communities" you are describing came about due to white America shutting them out. White people have groups, and communities, and everything else available to them as much as anyone else does.
It's like the argument that there's no "white history month" when, in fact, it's every other month that isn't February.
This is one of those perfect places for the BenderOhWaitYoureSerious.jpg file.
Do... do you think that minorities just have intrinsic clubs waiting to talk about your experiences and give you support? Like 'whelp, time to go down the street to Minority Club for therapy session' sort of thing? This is bonkers. What community exists does do because of exclusion from other community opportunities universally controlled by the white majority. I hate to break it to you, but if you are Black in the US and have no family support you are most certainly not in a better place than a while guy in the same situation, and to think such is to be ignorant of decades of history.
Young white kids have their better funded school counselors (which minorities face gate keeping on by discriminatory funding and districting), have therapists (gate keeping by financial cost), have the vast majority of well funded churches and faith institutions (gate keeping by preventing minority facilities, especially non-christian ones, from being able to open in convenient locations). White kids have the passive benefits of not being assumed to be a threat simply by shopping at the store after sundown or wearing a baggy sweatshirt. The passive cultural bias is substantial.
Also the Ft. Hood shooting. Also the Dallas shooter who ambushed that police rally.
We're up to 5.
Out of... I dunno a couple hundred at this point it's difficult to keep up
Why Do White Males Commit Most Mass Shootings?
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
No, we are not. Don't get snarky about it, we've already disproven the broad statistic - white men do not per capita disproportionately commit mass shootings unless you truncate the definition dramatically enough that there aren't enough mass shootings left to make any general comment about the race of the perpetrators. When you use the federal definition, they commit around 20% fewer mass shootings per capita than other races.
Now I'm just poking at the "I can't even think of one" comment from earlier. It's easy to think of them.
He was going to assassinate his ex wife I think, and was using the other killings as a way to disguise it as a serial killer instead to make it seem random. The judge didn't let them try to use that in the trial though.
First things first.
We have a really hard time accurately studying gun violence in the US because epidemiologists cannot receive federal funding and study gun violence on the whole. America as an institution is largely unwilling to look into this problem as it exists. That means mass shootings, random shootings, shootings during robbery, any of it. There are also no central repositories and crime reporting is not nationalized, meaning that individual police agencies may or may not record all acts of violence.
However, the FBI did perform a study on what is referred to as Active Shooters.
Active Shooters are defined as
This study looked at all active shooter incidents between the years of 2000 and 2013. This was 160 cases. The study did not per se study mass shootings or mass killings in public places but you can see from all the cases that they were indeed mass shootings.
This study was published in 2013 after an Obama administration commission to study this specific topic.
I think this is a good data set because it allows us to look before our current year (where we can bias ourselves due to ongoing issues occurring around us). We can use it as a case study so to speak.
The first observation this study made is that the number of active shooter incidents per year is on the rise.
The number of incidents doubled over the span of 7 years.
Additionally, 40% of these active shooter incidents qualify as "mass shootings" under the new FBI regulations for what constitutes a mass shooting, which is three or more killings in a single incident.
The second observation is that casualties also increased over the span of 7 years.
56% of these active shooter incidents were ended by the shooter either through suicide, stopping shooting, or fleeing the scene.
Almost all of the 160 events studied were committed by a male. Additionally, almost all of the events were committed by a lone male.
Only 1.3% had multiple shooters and only 3.8% had a female shooter.
This is this first conclusion we can make about active shooters. They are nearly exclusively committed by men and there is typically only one male shooter per active shooting.
The next thing the study looks at is where the shootings take place.
The type of locations active shooters become active in is broken down.
45% of active shootings occurred in places of business: open, closed, or malls.
The next biggest location was in educational environments at 24%.
This is the second conclusion we can make about active shootings. They occur mostly in businesses and schools.
Now we get into the murky part that everyone wants to talk about: motivation, age, ethnicity.
The study found no correlation between age and active shooter. I demonstrated this myself by graphing all the ages of the active shooters. There is a slightly higher peak at 18-30 and again at 40-80. But it is a very weak bimodal distribution. In reality, anyone at any age can become an active shooter but there were slightly less active shooters from the age of 30-40.
There is however an interesting correlation regarding motivations.
Active shootings at closed businesses were employees or former employees. Indicating that one reason to become an active shooter is a work-related dispute.
A subset of active shooters choose to target family members and another subset choose to target spouse or girlfriend. This means that active shooting is in and of itself an act of domestic violence in some cases.
When you jump into the case studies there are many keywords that demonstrate this qualitatively. Active shooters shoot after being fired, or being reprimanded at work. Active shooters shoot after getting divorced, exiting a relationship, and after estrangement.
All in all, the data from this study demonstrate that there really aren't good correlates for who will become an active shooter.
I do think the study is really important though because it challenges some of our biases regarding active shooters in the news. We have a knee-jerk bias to think of active shooters as angry teenagers, but in reality, any male at any age can become an active shooter. We also focus heavily on school shootings, and understandably so because it is heartbreaking, but we tend to focus less on workplace active shootings. I am interested in opinions as to why we tend to cover factory or job-related active shootings less.
I myself was surprised to see there was no age bias. I was quite certain that there would be a large spike in active shootings by teenagers but that really doesn't show up in this study. That being said, this is only a single study. The study also excludes gang violence, which really I think should be included in mass shooting studies. That is part of the problem. We don't really seem to have a good base metric for defining the criteria so that we can measure changes.
Some people make the argument that mass shootings aren't on the rise but that news coverage is. I don't think this study supports that hypothesis.
There are also some really good newspaper articles on this topic and that is how I found this study and went through it. This study did not cover race and it didn't test any hypotheses regarding a social theory of entitlement.
I think the social theory of entitlement is interesting and partially explanatory but honestly from the data it looks to me like a person can snap at any time and there are certain times that these people snap: divorce, estrangement, firing, et cetera. You could argue that entitlement breeds a person who is unable to withstand or be resilient to failure outside of their control but I think that really needs to be established first.
When he snapped, he was able to walk out of the mental institution he was at, steal cash to take a bus to where my family lived, buy a gun with said stolen cash without either background check nor waiting period, killed and injured a number of people in my family while hunting for the rest of us, and then returned the gun the next day because "it pulled to the right" and used the refund to then try and flee the country on yet another bus.
He wasn't bullied. He wasn't a victim. He was a sick man who decided that, in his mind, the best thing he could do to make his life better was to kill everyone he was blood related to. He later hung himself in a higher security place.
A guy I grew up with also did a mass shooting, killing one of my friends, a girl they were sheltering, and injuring several others. He was a white male, who had his girlfriend leave him and, in a fit of jealous rage, crashed his car into the house she was staying at and shot 6 people, two of which were killed. There were many, many threats of physical violence beforehand, and the police had no ability to do anything about it due to where laws on digital threats were at the time.
He also wasn't bullied. He wasn't a victim. He was an asshole who hit his girlfriend one time he got angry, in public, and lost her. Leading to him building up resentment and hate until he could somehow get to the point where murder was fine.
Both of these are white males committing mass murder.
But being white and male isn't the important thing here. In Orlando alone there are hundreds of murders each year, not counting bizarre high-volume deaths like the Pulse shooting. Women and men alike kill people. People of all ethnicities.
Hell, sometimes you all post the news articles for the more bizarre ones as part of the running 'Florida Man' joke.
Access to a firearm while angry, or mentally unfit, is the important thing here. Anyone can be driven to the point of rage by enough stress. Some people are more likely to get there by mental disposition, but I would really hesitate to say it has anything to do with race. We have mass shootings because our gun laws are dumb and loose. Fix that, and the opportunities for the angry and mentally unstable will be reduced somewhat in the short term and greatly in the long term.
You're going to need to provide some kind of proof for this claim RE that an FFL is "likely" to risk their business and their freedom to not perform the federally required NICS check for a purchase.
I would say that I disagree with this. White people are told that their lives are easier, and that they are getting a leg up, by many groups very regularly. And, for the overwhelming majority of white people it's completely true their lives are factually easier and better because they are white.
However, Perceived awfulness of life is like the sum of two error functions vs actual shittiness. White privilege modifies actual shittiness, whereas the only thing that matters to people is perceived shittiness. This is completely impossible to change, and absolutely fundamental to the way humans work. So perhaps white privilege gave that white family an extra $100 in their pockets every month. Unless it pushed them over one of the humps to the next happiness level, they really didn't notice it.
In the above graph, X is your 'percentile position vs other humans' and Y is how happy you actually feel about that. Clearly, this isn't a super scientific graph, just for clarifying my point! But, most articles about peoples perceived security and happiness bear this out. For most white people, privilege just shunts them about on one of the plateaus. It's only 'in total' that white privilege really makes white peoples lives 'feel easier' on average because it only pushes a small number of people over one of those big "I feel better about my life" humps.
The one that ruminates on school shootings?
Done at a gun show?
No risk to business when it's not legally required.
If you have the FFL all your sales count as regulated sales and need the background check im pretty sure. Like i don't think you can make unregulated "private" sales as an FFL. I'm willing to accept i might be wrong about that.
I mean that's literally the "Gun Show Loophole."
I guess my point here was not described in detail enough. 'Waving the background check' was a glib comment which likely is not true. Actual gun stores do usually follow what background check rules exist.
However, it is true that 'hobby shooting', 'hunting' and the ownership of legal firearms for defence is overwhelmingly a white activity. So, when a white guy walks into a gun store and asks to buy an AR-15 and some ammo, he is likely to encounter a sympathetic fellow white person who will be seeing what he expects. A white person, come to the sporting goods store to buy some guns for legitimate purposes. That white person isn't going to face any extra grilling, or be asked, "You aren't planning on using this for some kind of drugs stuff right?" or "Are you planning on doing one of those mass shootings". Instead he is likely to both expect, and encounter a friendly shop owner and the most likely pressure he will encounter is some up sell to buy a second gun and a nice holster.
Conversely a black guy planning to buy a gun, from a sporting goods store where they sell AR-15s and similar, sees and expects a different experience. For one thing, he'll be going into an overwhelmingly white, armed, environment. So he'll be concerned from moment one. His behavior will be more stressed and concerned. The owner will then see something odd. A black guy in his store looking at the rifles. Thats not who usually buys those. What's going on? The owner is concerned. Is the black guy planning on using this for drug stuff? Robbing people? He'd better make sure. Quiz the guy a little bit.
And so black people are marginally more limited in their access to high powered firearms. Hell, simple access to these sporting goods stores which sell these guns is hard for many urban people who don't own the cars to get to the suburbs where they are.
FFLs are required by federal law to conduct a NICS check for every purchase regardless of venue. State law determines whether a private citizen who does not have an FFL is required to perform a NICS for a private sale, but by federal law one cannot be "in the business of selling arms" without an FFL.
I do like how you put these in quotation marks because that's exactly the point. Make it a private sale, boom, done. People often purchase out of their own stock and then sell it as a private reseller. Ez pz.
But this is veering off topic, I fear.
Virginia Tech shooting
I suspect that number is less now, as it was already on a downward trend, but there are still plenty of folks out there who get guns without checks.
I put it in quotes because I was quoting the language used specifically.
Some sort of faux graphical representation of why being white isn't amazing because that doesn't mean you are automatically affluent and therefore are suffering as much as minorities and QED give us a white history month nonsense, was my read.