What spurs mass shootings?
Movie theaters, schools, conference rooms, shopping malls, health clinics — in recent years, mass shootings have struck all across the country. Everyday locales have been turned into crime scenes, unknown perpetrators have become household names: Adam Lanza, Jared Loughner, Robert Lewis Dear — and now Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook.
What drives these incidents? MPR News host Kerri Miller spoke with three individuals about some of the factors behind these types of violence.
On the personality types of mass shooters
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Peter Langman studied 48 different perpetrators for his book, "School Shooters: Understanding High School, College, and Adult Perpetrators." The shooters profiled range in age from 11 to 62, and Langman identified three common personality types they displayed: profoundly narcissistic, psychotic or traumatized.
Of those he studied, "all of them fall into one of those three types, except for a few people who seem to have traits of two of the three types," Langman said. Though his book focuses on school shooters, Langman said much of what it his research showed could hold true for other mass shooters.
On the rise of violent rhetoric
Sarah Stoesz, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota, identified what she called "an alarming rise in incendiary and inflammatory language in this country related to Planned Parenthood and the provision of abortion services."
Stoesz said that "since July of this year, the rate at which clinics have been attacked and our personnel, staff and doctors intimidated has been really quite alarming." The recent shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Col., has been the most visible incident, but Stoesz cited other attacks and arson incidents at clinics around the country.
She connected the rise in violent rhetoric against Planned Parenthood to the July release of videos that purported to show Planned Parenthood "engaged in something they weren't engaged in, related to fetal tissue research."
The language people opposed to Planned Parenthood use is important, Stoesz said. She pointed to anti-abortion activists who "openly and repeatedly call for justified homicide against abortion providers."
"That's not the same kind of rhetoric that we see elsewhere, and it's not tolerable and it's not acceptable in most of society, but we have allowed this to occur around abortion providers," Stoesz said.
"I'm not saying that we should legislate against free speech, that's not my point at all. My point, though, is that we need to maintain some standards around speech. We don't allow people to call out 'Fire!' in a crowded theater. There are limits to free speech, and speech that incites violent action, condones violent action should not be condoned and should not be tolerated."
On gun laws
Christopher Ingraham, a reporter for the Washington Post, said estimates put the number of firearms in the country at roughly one gun for every man, woman and child in the U.S. — "or we may even have more [guns] than we have people."
The sheer number of guns makes access easier for those who want to carry out violent acts. Different counties, cities and states have attempted to pass gun control laws of their own, but the piecemeal nature of this legislation may be the reason it has not had a clear effect.
People often cite Chicago, Ingraham said, as a place with strict gun control laws but one of the highest rates of gun-related homicide. People point to this and say, "Actually, gun laws don't do anything." But Ingraham argued that it could be showing something else — that gun laws passed only in small areas lack power. Guns flow into Chicago from every direction. Without stronger legislation in surrounding areas, the city's laws can be ineffective.
Research into gun-related deaths could inform legislators considering gun control, but right now, there are numerous barriers to studies that tackle such topics. This resistance is unnecessary, Ingraham said.
"We research motor vehicle accidents as a public health issue, right? But no one's saying we have to ban cars or we have to restrict cars. We use the research on motor vehicle accidents to help us craft sensible policy and regulations that help make cars safer," Ingraham said. "In a similar way, we could do similar things with guns. We could look at it as a public health issue and use that to figure out what the causes are, and what are some types of legislation that might really help to reduce the total universe of gun deaths, without imposing undue burdensome restrictions on gun owners."