On Mass Shootings, Contagion, Mental Illness, and Feeling Terrorized
Originally written April 11, 2023, updated May 11, 2023
My city mourns the senseless loss of life that occurred April 10th when a 23-year-old gunman entered his former place of work and killed five colleagues while wounding nine others.
The shooting in Louisville marked the 146th mass shooting – where four or more people not including the shooter are shot or killed – in the U.S. this year. Edit: in the month following the Louisville shooting, the number of mass shootings has risen to 210.
If it feels like such violence is escalating, you’re correct. According to the non-profit research group Gun Violence Archive, 209 people have been killed in mass shootings this year, a record pace. At this time last year, 145 people had been killed.
Herein lies a cruel paradox for the survivors, loved ones, and all of us who care about the safety of our friends, families, neighbors, and communities. On the one hand, it feels necessary to remember, to understand, to contextualize, to make sure that none of this is forgotten. We owe it to the victims to use their tragic deaths to make our nation safer for everyone who inhabits it. To forget is to succumb to cool indifference or to personal anxiety or to political agendas threatened by the epidemic we confront.
But in remembering and keeping memories alive we make future tragedies more likely, at least in the short-term. That’s right. Mass shootings are contagious, like an infectious disease. Data scientist Sherry Towers has found that a mass shooting increases the probability of future shootings for up to about two weeks, with each mass shooting inciting on average 0.2 to 0.3 future attacks. More recent work in 2022 by researchers Michael Jetter and Jay K. Walker found that increases in news coverage of mass shootings predicted an increase in mass shootings for up to a month after. The shooting in Louisville was preceded two weeks by a school shooting in Nashville that received prominent media coverage. The more media coverage these tragedies receive, the more they are prone to influence future shootings. Tragically, the shooting in Louisville may inspire similar acts. Edit: Indeed, the Louisville shooting was proceeded by high profile mass shootings in Dadeville, Alabama on April 15th, killing 4 and injuring 32, in Cleveland, TX on April 28, killing 5, and in Allen, TX, on May 6, killing 9 and injuring 17. It’s eerie how they all fell within the two week period of influence.
Well-publicized suicides produce a similar spread. For example, in the months following the suicide of Robin Williams, the suicide rate increased by 10%. Criminologist Jillian Peterson has interviewed living mass shooters in prison and those that knew them and has concluded that many of these killers start out feeling suicidal. She believes that in a tiny number of cases, suicidal individuals end up engaging in “angry, horrible suicides” that take others out with them. Think of it horrifically as suicide by mass shooting.
These incidents and the extensive coverage they receive don’t cause mentally healthy individuals to make such fatal decisions, but they do push along individuals with proclivities or leanings to hurt themselves or others. Hearing that someone else has killed others may signal to mentally troubled individuals that this is a legitimate option, or something that other people in similar circumstances have decided is correct. Even non-disturbed individuals look at the behaviors of others before deciding which action is correct, classified in social psychology as informational social influence or independently, social proof. In the case of mass shootings, these basic psychological comparison processes go totally awry.
But let me make an important pivot here, because the problem of gun violence is not really about mental illness. The vast majority of the mentally ill are not violent. As the acclaimed psychologist Albert Bandura points out in his classic Moral Disengagement, those in the gun industry, the NRA, and other proponents of lax gun control deliberately aim to shift the focus from unjustifiable lethal firearms to the mental health of the shooters and to the inadequacy of mental health services of the nation. You may have heard the refrain, “It’s more of a mental health problem than a gun problem,” or certainly the cliché that “guns don’t kill people; people kill people.” But psychology and law expert John Monahan has noted that only about 4% of all violence toward others is attributable to mental illness – even if mental illness could somehow magically be cured, we would be left to face 96% of the violence that is caused by other factors.
What’s been buried in the understandable recent outcry over mass shootings is how they constitute a relatively small percent of deaths from gun violence in the U.S. every year. For example, in 2021, the CDC reported that 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S. About 43% were murders inflicted upon others (20,958), and 54% upon the self by suicide (26,328). These deaths dwarf the 706 deaths from mass shootings that year.
What I am suggesting is that for some time now in the U.S., we’ve had a gun problem – mass shootings are only awakening us to this reality.
The key difference, of course, is that the unpredictable nature of mass shootings makes us feel so much more endangered. The other gun murders result from drug wars, gangs, organized crime, and are largely restricted to impoverished “dangerous” neighborhoods. Stay clear of these dodgy situations, and America’s gun problem remains largely invisible. All bets are off with mass shootings though. They seemingly can happen anywhere. To you, when you go shopping or to work, or to your children when they go to school. We have reached the point where psychologically, it feels there is nowhere to hide to ensure total safety.
And this leads to my final point: living in the contemporary U.S. increasingly feels like living in a state afflicted with terrorism. Hyperbole? I don’t really intend it to be but urge you to consider the comparison seriously.
The Global Terrorism Index (GTI) is a comprehensive study analyzing the impact of terrorism for 163 countries representing over 99% of the global population. The nation with the highest overall terrorism index score, Afghanistan, suffered 633 fatalities from terror attacks in the last year reported. Our 706 deaths from mass shootings exceeds this figure and surpass the deaths caused by terrorist attacks in seven of the ten nations with the highest terrorism index score. Israel, albeit paying a cost of strict security measures and militarization, only experienced 28 fatalities from terrorism.
To be clear, I am not labelling every mass shooter a terrorist because the term terrorist has a precise meaning, rooted in adherents identifying with a certain group perceived to be aggrieved, trying to promote group values, and to achieve certain political objectives. But in the sense that traditional terrorists want to create fear and uncertainty far beyond the victims and those close to them, what is the difference? People are increasingly afraid to visit public spaces, to drop their kids off at school, to hear what devastating tragedy affected some part of the nation today.
The enemy is not some external entity but rather an internal division testing our resolve and determination to end senseless violence. How many of us need to be sacrificed to protect our right to bear arms?