Mass Shooters Mostly Male, Increasingly Driven by Trumpist Hate
One map that South Dakota isn’t on is the Violence Project’s map of mass shootings. They count 171 instances over 50 years of killings of four or more people in public places by firearm and find no such events in South Dakota:
South Dakota, North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Maine, Vermont, and Delaware have yet to join this already too-large club.
All but three of the shooters in the Violence Project’s database were male. They “typically have an experience with childhood trauma, a personal crisis or specific grievance, and a “script” or examples that validate their feelings or provide a roadmap. And then there’s the fourth thing: access to a firearm.” When they break the data down by location, they find mass shooters at K-12 schools, places of worship, and commercial locations are usually white males; college/university shooters tend to be non-white, while workplace shooters show no predominant racial category.
And alas, the Violence Project finds shootings motivated by hatred of certain races, religion, and women on the rise:
The increase in ideologically motivated mass shootings has coincided with the emergence of a newly emboldened far right, who’ve forged national and even international alliances of hate online. The sharp rise in misogyny-inspired shootings also squares with the rise of the “Incels,” short for “involuntarily celibate,” an online subculture comprised of angry young men who deeply resent and blame women for their isolation [David Noriega and Tess Owen, “Nearly All Mass Shootings Since 1966 Have Had 4 Things in Common,” Vice, 2019.11.19].
Read more: http://dakotafreepress.com/2019/11/20/mass-shooters-mostly-male-increasingly-driven-by-trumpist-hate/