Half of all mass shootings are associated with no red flags—no diagnosed mental illness, no substance use, no history of criminality, nothing. They’re generally committed by middle-aged men who are responding to a severe and acute stressor, so they're not planned, which makes them very difficult to prevent.

So they are not necessarily in a good emotional state, but they do not have a mental illness.

[–] TheRtRevKaiser 2 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Thanks, I definitely skimmed the article, so missing that is on me.

It's interesting that the profile they mention doesn't really fit what I have in my mind for mass shooters, which would be younger men, not middle-aged. I guess the ones that really stick out to me, like the Columbine, Christchurch, and Uvalde shooters all fit this stereotype that I have, but apparently that doesn't map to reality.

[–] t3rmit3 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

There are several different subtypes of mass shootings, and school shooters and planned hate-crime shootings each have their own distinct characteristics. They get the most media coverage, for sure, and tend to trend younger than other types, but they're the least common type of mass shooting.

The mass shootings the article is talking about, which are the most common, are often workplace or family shootings, and are usually by middle aged men.

The definition of mass shooting used most commonly now is any shooting with 4 or more casualties, which includes a lot of shootings that most people wouldn't really think of as mass shootings, which are generally thought of as being like the ones like you named.

[–] TheRtRevKaiser 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Right, and I was already aware of several lists of mass shooting using that or similar criteria to determine what fits. It's just a little strange to me to group so many disparate types of events into a list, and then do a study to say "most of these things don't involve mental illness" when most of those events are wildly different from each other.

[–] t3rmit3 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Definitely agree with you there. The FBI had traditionally treated different types of shootings as each being unrelated. It was US media that pushed the term mass shooting in its current definition (so they could run big-number stories), and the consolidation of very different profiles under one label has done more harm than good, imo.

If you actually break them apart into distinct groups, there is a much stronger correlation with mental illness among especially e.g. school shooters.

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