Exploring Motives and Warning Signs in Mass Murder Cases

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Jun 10, 2024

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1 Final Project: Milestone One – Literature Review Kathy Spencer Southern New Hampshire University PSY 444 – Senior Seminar in Psychology Dr. Nickolas Dominello November 5, 2023

2 Introduction In recent years, mass murders using guns have occurred with high frequency. They have become a hot topic within our society. Past research suggests this may have happened due to a contagion effect, along with a desire to copycat the crimes. As of today, there have been over seven hundred and sixty mass shootings across the United States. Mass murders/shootings are defined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as four or more people killed in one event. Another definition of a mass murderer’s violent act is that they typically occur around closely related moments in time and are also located at one or sometimes a few areas that are within a reasonable distance from each other. Questions have started to arise about what the motivation behind the perpetrators is, and why has the frequency of them increased over the years. For this study, the definition of mass murder will comprise both the abovementioned definitions and exclude shootings that could be linked to drug or gang-related violent acts. Some mass murderers have displayed mental health issues, which has ultimately contributed to their behavior. Although most mass murderers do not conceive of themselves as criminals, their criminal careers usually terminate with their apprehension. Gender is something else that has also been examined over the years, precisely because the majority of mass murderers are male. Is there a correlation between the age of the perpetrators and the violent acts committed using a gun? The literature review examines studies on the warning behaviors of the perpetrators, the characteristics as they relate to predicting casualties and fatalities, possible genetic factors that might come into play, and the possibility that mental illness does or does not play a role.

3 Review Abel, Chermak, and Freilich (2022), wanted to examine pre-attack warning behaviors of adolescent school shooters in the US. They investigated whether or not the shooters had displayed warning behaviors before the attack, whether anyone in the perpetrator’s life was aware of the warning behaviors, and what, if any, actions were taken in response. Abel, Chermak, and Freilich used a case-study analysis to examine the per-attack behaviors. The authors used open-source data while they examined each adolescent’s history and applied a life- course perspective. In the study, twenty adolescent shootings were sampled, ten of which were fatal and ten that were non-fatal. During their case study, the authors broke up their findings into five sections. First, were the high-risk shooters, the type of incident they were involved in, fatal or non-fatal, and if they had warned others about their behaviors. Second, they looked at low-risk shooters, the type of incidents, and whether they warned others. Third, they looked at the characteristics of the warning behaviors and the nature in which the leakage occurred. Fourth, they looked into the modality of the warning behaviors. Lastly, they looked into the timing, response, and the outcomes of those warning behaviors. The results of the study matched the experimenter's hypothesis. The focus is on the im- portance of multidisciplinary threat teams and the impact of critical events and stressors. It also showed that school officials and the authorities had clear opportunities to intervene before most incidents occurred. In fact, 16 of the 20 perpetrators had made their intentions clear to other peo- ple, before they committed the violent act. Something they noted within this study was the differ- ences across modality, type of warning behavior, and the time lapse between the warning behav- ior and the incidents.

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4 Gammell, Connell, and Huskey’s (2022) study provided a descriptive analysis of shooter, school, and incident level characteristics as they relate to the predicting casualties and fatalities in school shooting incidents. The authors explored the relationship between several vital factors of school shootings using data that spanned the last fifty years. They gathered their data, which included shootings outside of the more commonly used rampage and mass shooting definitions. They looked at a total of 785 shooting incidents on K-12 school campuses, which also included athletic fields and parking lots, in the United States between January 5, 1970, and November 25, 2020. As they expected to find, handguns and long guns resulted in more casualties and fatali- ties. The authors also found that elementary schools had higher non-perpetrator casualties and fa- talities since that age group is less likely to carry guns. However, they may be at a higher risk for victimization as most shooters are adults in those incidents. There were limitations found with the open-source data. Perpetrator race information was only available for a subset of the shooting incidents, a total of 285. The authors also exclude the three most high-profile shootings in recent history: Columbine High School (1999), Sandy Hook Elementary School (2012), and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (2018). There may be situations in which people feel that the reason someone commits a crime is the genes, In the study by Jay Joseph (2001), he performed a critical review of twin and adoption studies looking at possible genetic factors in criminal and antisocial behavior, The author looked at the assumption that the twin method of monozygotic-dizygotic comparison is predicated on the assumption that both types of twins share equal environment, is a false assumption. He also states that previous studies have suffered from bias and severe methodological errors.

5 Jay Joseph (2001), noted that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the role of genetic factors in crime was widely accepted. He looked at the “classical twin method,” which compared the correlations of reared-together identical twins to the same measures of reared-to- gether same-sex fraternal twins. A limitation found was there have not been any studies done of reared-apart criminal twins. When it comes to the adoption studies, the author states that they have been promoted as an ideal way of separating nature from nurture, since an adoptee receives his or her genes from one set of parents but is raised in the family environment of another. The author does state that several other authors have calculated or attempted to popularize heritability statistics for crimi- nality and other traits that are misleading. In the end, the author concluded that the evidence from family, twin, and adoption studies does not support the existence of a genetic predisposition for any criminal, psychopathic, or anti- social behavior. The idea of a genetic predisposition for these behaviors, therefore, finds little ba- sis for support. The study by Metal, Piemonte, and McKay (2021), outlines a four-part strategy for future research in mental health and complementary disciplines that will broaden understanding of mass shootings and multi-victim gun homicides. They feel that researchers must abandon the starting assumption that acts of violence are driven primarily by diagnosable psychopathology in isolated “lone wolf” individuals. Second, mental health professionals and scholars must carefully scruti- nize any apparent correlation of violence with mental illness for evidence of racial bias in the of- ficial systems that define, measure, and reword psychiatric diagnosis, as well as those that influ- ence laws and impose criminal justice sanctions. Third, to better understand the role of firearm access in the occurrence and lethality of mass shootings, research should be guided by an overar-

6 ching framework that incorporates social, cultural, legal, and political, but also psychological, as- pects of private gun ownership in the United States. Finally, effective policies of mass shootings over time, and to prevent severe acts of violence more generically- will require an expanded body of well-funded interdisciplinary research that is informed and implemented through the sus- tained engagement of the researchers with affected communities and other stakeholders in gun violence prevention. The authors examined how acts of mass murder can implicate the psychology of perpe- trators. Another area they researched was how symptoms of mental illness by themselves hardly ever cause violent behavior, and, therefore, cannot reliably predict it. They also looked into the ability to acquire reliable data on the causes and consequences of gun violence. The authors con- cluded that a diagnosis of a mental illness alone is a negligible factor in any effort to explain, predict, and prevent mass shootings or other acts of serious gun violence. According to the article, “Public Mass Shootings: Database amasses details of a half- century of U.S. mass shootings with firearms, generating, psychosocial histories: individuals who committed public mass shootings in the United States were commonly troubled by personal trauma before their shooting incidents. The research examined an era of marked increase in the number and deadly effects of mass shootings in the United States. The research adopted a mixed method approach combining objective, or readily quantified, data to populate the database and interviews of a small sample of persons in prison who had committed mass shootings. The research team coded more than 160 variables for database inclusion. The database includes tabs on more than 370 firearms used in mass shootings and 1,239 individuals who lost their lives, plus another 2,020 who were injured.

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7 During the research, suicidality was found to be a strong predictor of perpetration of mass shootings. In fact, 30% were suicidal before the shooting, 39% were suicidal during the shooting. When it came to the younger shooters, those K-12 students, 92% were found to be suicidal. As for college/university students, they were found to be 100% suicidal. Now, as for traumas, past childhood traumas accounted for 31% of individuals who perpetrated mass shootings, whereas, 80% of the perpetrators were in crisis. Furthermore, they found that 48% of the perpetrators leaked their plans to others in advance. Seventy percent knew at least some of their victims. When it comes to the use of guns, 77.2% used handguns, while 25.1% used assault rifles. Of the guns that were used, 80% were stolen from family members, 77% of the guns were purchased legally, and 13% were purchased illegally. Of 172 individuals, 97.7% were male, 52.3% were White, 20.9% were Black, 8.1% were Latino, 6.4% were Asian, 4.2% were Middle Eastern, and 1.8% were Native American. Finally, they found that 64.5% had a prior criminal record, 62.8% had a history of violence, 27.9% included domestic violence, and 28.5% had a military background. Conclusion The thesis aims to understand the correlation between the age of the perpetrators and the violent acts committed using a gun. Analysis of the literature allowed the exploration if warning behaviors of the perpetrators, the characteristics as they relate to predicting casualties and fatalities, possible genetic factors that might come into play, and the possibility that mental illness does or does not play a role in mass murderers. Future research regarding correlation needs to focus on quantitative measurements.

8 References Abel, M.N., Chermak, S, & Freilich, J.D. (2022). Pre-attack warning behaviors of 20 Adolescent school shooters: A case study analysis. Crime & Delinquency , 68(5), 786-813. https:// doi-org.ezproxy.snhu.edu/10.1177/001128721999338 Gammell, S. P., Connell, N. M., & Huskey, M. G. (2022). A descriptive analysis of the charac- teristics of school shootings across five decades. American Journal of Criminal Justice , 47 (5), 818–835. https://doi-org.ezproxy.snhu.edu/10.1007/s12103-021-09636-7 Joseph, J. (2001). Is Crime in the Genes? A Critical Review of Twin and Adoption Studies of Criminality and Antisocial Behavior. The Journal of Mind and Behavior , 22 (2), 179–218. https://eds-s-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.snhu.edu/eds/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=2cf5be3a- 758e-4af9-b316-88f06ac1b5d3%40redis&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc2N - vcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#AN=edsjsr.43853952&db=edsjsr Metzl, J. M., Piemonte, J., & McKay, T. (2021, January 8). Mental illness, mass shootings, and the future of psychiatric research into American Gun Violence . Harvard review of psy- chiatry. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7803479/ National Institute of Justice, "Public Mass Shootings: Database Amasses Details of a Half Cen- tury of U.S. Mass Shootings with Firearms, Generating Psychosocial Histories," February 3, 2022, nij.ojp.gov: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/public-mass-shootings-database-amasses-details-half- century-us-mass-shootings

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