Introduction to the special issue on global mass shootings

ABSTRACT

For decades now, mass shootings have been viewed as a uniquely American problem, a crime issue that is specific to the culture, politics, and history of the United States. Only recently has research started to investigate the global context of mass shootings to assess exactly how unique the United States is, and how or why mass gun violence occurs in other countries. This special issue offers insight on global mass shootings from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, featuring three innovative articles covering international differences and similarities in motivation, behaviour, and warning signs among mass shooters around the world.

KEYWORDS:

• Mass shootings
• international crime and justice
• rare violence
• gun violence
• comparative criminal justice

Introduction

Mass shooting incidents are seemingly rare events across the globe. In the United States, mass murders constitute less than 1% of all homicides, while mass shootings that occur in public account for just 0.03% of the annual homicide rate (Duwe et al., 2021). Other nations have far fewer mass shootings (Lankford, 2016a; Lankford, 2019, 2020). Nevertheless, mass shootings, especially those carried out in public, are newsworthy crimes (Duwe, 2000) that dominate policy discussions about the at-large gun violence problem. There is often substantial public concern about the risk of mass shootings, exacerbated by the apparent geographic randomness of these crimes, the potential for high casualties, and the indiscriminate victimisation of citizens (Duwe, 2000).

Mass shootings are among the most contentious public safety issues in the United States (Research Center, 2021). From gun policy to the role of mental illness and individual rights, to gender and race issues, politicians, policymakers, media, and laypeople rarely agree on why mass shootings occur and how to prevent them. Academia is not immune to this contention: scholars routinely disagree about the simplest characteristics of mass shooting (Sandel & Martaindale, 2022), including how to define these incidents, how they are best prevented, and recently, if they are endemic to the United States.

News media, public opinion, and politicians often characterise mass shootings as a uniquely American problem. In the aftermath of the 2019 shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, President Biden remarked that he was “struck [that] these kinds of mass shootings rarely happen anywhere else in the world” (Bayoumi, 2022). It has become a common, if morbid, trend for American news articles and media sites to keep a running tally of the year’s mass shooting incidents thus far. Satirical newspaper, The Onion, perhaps best sums up the prevailing media sentiment on American identity and mass shootings with the same headline it prints after every mass shooting: “No Way To Prevent This,” Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens’ (The Onion, 2014).

Early research (Lankford, 2016a) suggested that these public and media perceptions are somewhat true: the United States does experience more mass shootings than other countries, and furthermore, mass shooters in the United States may be distinct: compared to mass shooters in other countries, they tend to attack softer targets and use more firepower. In 2017, a New York Times article suggested that the United States is an unfortunate anomaly relative to the rest of the world because of American gun culture and the historical role that guns played in the early foundations of the country (Fisher & Keller, 2017). Critics (Lott, 2018; Lott & Moody, 2019) allege that comparative research has inflated the number of American mass shooting cases, but subsequent scholarship has consistently reported critical differences in trends, prevalence, and characteristics between mass shootings in the U.S. and other countries (Lankford, 2019, 2020; Silva, 2022). The United States is home to less than five percent of the global population, but it experienced 30.8% of the public mass shootings that occurred worldwide between 1966 and 2012 (Lankford, 2016b).

The issue of mass shootings in America has driven a great deal of research focusing on the context and prevention of American mass shootings. Research comparing the international rates and characteristics of mass shootings across the globe have consistently indicated a higher incidence of mass shootings in the United States (Lankford, 2016a, 2016b, 2019, 2020; Lemieux, 2014; Silva, 2022), suggestive of uniquely American characteristics underlying this type of violence. Moreover, American mass shootings may be more lethal than mass shootings in other countries (Anisin, 2022; Lemieux et al., 2015), potentially because American mass shooters tend to arm themselves with more guns, and more fatal guns (Lankford, 2016a; Lemieux et al., 2015). This lends to the pervasive image of America and Americans as entrenched in violence.

Since its foundation, the United States has weathered the perception of being an especially violent nation. At a National Institute of Justice sponsored seminar, sociologist and historian Randolph Roth traced the patterns of American violence throughout its short history, noting that the U.S. rate of homicide between unrelated adults is the highest among other affluent nations (Roth, 2013). The American homicide rate continuously exceeds that of other developed nations (Everytown Research and Policy, 2022). According to the Washington Post (Iati et al., 2022), police in America kill civilians – usually with guns – at a much high rate than any comparable nation, with a record high of 1,055 police-involved homicides in 2021. Some critics – most notably, Hannah Arendt (Bayoumi, 2022) – have linked the deeply rooted history of apparently wanton violence in America to its colonial origins, noting that the act of settling far from one’s home country offered a chance to oppose moral regulations and traditions in pursuit of libertarianism and independence (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2018). And nothing seems to better symbolise the so-called American spirit of manifest destiny than the complicated and contentious relationship between Americans and guns.

Few Americans would disagree that guns are deeply rooted in American culture and history. The United States Constitution offers the right to bear arms the same fierce protection as the right to individual liberty, freedom of thought and speech, and religion. Guns were central to the American Revolution, post-Civil War expansion and the “Wild West,” and they continue to pervade American society and culture (Lemieux, 2014). The National Rifle Association, America’s pre-eminent gun club, has evolved throughout the years to become a political and financial powerhouse of influence, and an unrelenting proponent of gun ownership in the face of increasing concerns about gun suicides and mass shootings. Although the precise number is likely to elude us, experts estimate that there are around 300 million guns in the United States (Mascia, 2023). Recent research has sought to connect the abundance of guns in America to violence rates, and particularly, the consistent trend of mass shootings. In a way, mass shootings have come to represent the issue of gun control and gun culture in the United States, despite their comparatively rare frequency (Duwe et al., 2021). A core component of this issue is the idea that mass shootings are tied to American gun culture, and thus are exclusive to America.

We know far less about the contexts of mass gun violence in other countries. While scholarship has directed renewed attention at global mass shootings, there remains a gap in research explaining how and why mass shootings in other nations occur – a topic that American studies routinely engage (e.g., Capellan et al., 2018; Fridel, 2022). Part of the challenge in international comparative research may lie in methodological issues: reconciling different definitions of mass shootings across countries, evaluating whether mass shootings should be differentiated from terroristic violence, and grappling with a lack of data standardisation from international sources. American scholars and government groups have developed rigorous definitions, protocols, and standards for studying mass shootings because of the salience of mass shootings in American society. This is not the case worldwide, which has limited the amount of comparative international data.

The articles in this special issue explore the global context of mass shootings with a focus on theoretical and motivational frameworks that help explain why mass shootings occur outside of the U.S. This not only gives us an opportunity to investigate the as-yet understudied top of international mass shootings, but to also develop a more nuanced understanding of the influences, ideologies, and behaviours that underlie mass shootings across the world. Gaining this global context will undoubtedly lead to innovation in research and refinement of prevention and intervention strategies. As discussed, most mass shooting research retains a narrow focus on American mass shootings. The articles forthwith add to the growing scholarship aiming to widen this narrow lens to an international stage.

Silva & Lankford’s paper dives into mass shooter motivation by presenting a novel perspective on the phenomenon of fame-seeking mass shootings in a global context. The concept of fame-seeking as a motivation underscoring mass shootings was first explored by Lankford (2016a). Focusing on an American sample, Lankford originally described a typology of shooters whose primary motivation for committing a mass attack seemed tied to their expressed desire for infamy and attention. In the era of 24-hour news cycles and endless social narratives about mass and school shootings, fame-seeking mass shooters pose a particularly troubling problem for prevention: short of censoring and restricting media coverage of mass shootings, which could represent a constitutional violation, there is perhaps limited opportunity to address this motivation. Moreover, fame-seeking shooters often find inspiration in the acts of previous mass shooters, some of them decades old and well-preserved on the internet. In their innovative article, Silva and Lankford situate American fame-seeking shooters in a global context and compare the profiles, behaviours, and role models of international and domestic fame-seeking mass shooters. Their research sheds light on the enormous impact of the American mass shooting problem in a global theatre: international fame-seeking mass shooters were more likely to have been inspired by historic mass shooting incidents in the United States, rather than their own countries. This study is the first to examine the prevalence of the fame-seeking motivation around the world, and as such provides a much-needed jumping-off point for future study.

Next, Schildkraut et al. contribute a comparative case study to highlight prevention insights in a global context, analysing pre-attack behaviours in two hauntingly similar mass school shootings in Parkland, Florida and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This qualitative study is grounded in the Path to Intended Violence model (Calhoun & Weston, 2003), a progressive illustration of how grievance develops into attack along six stages. The Path to Intended Violence model is a well-known tool in threat assessment circles, where it can be implemented to assess risk for committing targeted violence. Thus far, the model has largely been analysed in an American context, with single-case studies that lack meaningful points of comparison.

With an international comparative case study, Schildkraut and colleagues highlight cross-national similarities in pre-incident behaviour, motivations, and leakage, and importantly, note a similar constellation of prevention failures associated with these events, as both perpetrators advertised their homicidal intentions before committing the attack. Despite differences in culture and geographic location, these two shooters shared similar attributes, attitudes, and behavioural tendencies that identified them as individuals of concern to their peers – including abusive behaviours towards women and misogynistic attitudes – and both progressed in a remarkably similar fashion along the path to violence. Understanding the origins and manifestations of this pathway behaviour, even across different countries and cultures, can help refine and improve prevention efforts. As research in the area of threat assessment and the path to violence matures, there is an evolving need for complementary qualitative and quantitative studies incorporating probability samples to generalise these important findings.

Finally, Langman offers a psychologically-rooted study of ideological mass murderers’ rationale – or lack thereof – across the world. It is a common assumption that anyone committing atrocious violence like a mass shooting attack must harbour strong ideological or grievance-driven motivations for their actions, although scholars have debated the relative importance of ideology in terrorism and extremist violence. Langman argues that some ideological mass killers throughout the globe adopt vicarious or fictional motivations, laying claim to causes that exist on the periphery, if at all, of their experiences. Importantly, these disconnected justifications transcend temporal and geographic borders, culture, and ideological orientation. Langman highlights the role of these “irrational rationales” in mass violence using case examples that offer a complementary psychological perspective to the criminologically-focused studies in this special issue, and help to round out our understanding of how ideologically-driven grievances can emerge in the absence of direct experience.

As practitioners, policymakers, and politicians continue their efforts to address the issue of mass shootings across the globe, research like the studies featured in this special issue play an essential role in guiding prevention and intervention efforts. There is a critical need for academic scholarship to keep up momentum. The mass shooting subfield within criminology is relatively new, but over the past few decades it has been characterised by prolific and diverse scholarship, and now, with renewed attention to the global scope of mass shootings, the breadth of this scholarship has broadened. Future research may consider highlighting the overlap and differences between mass shootings and other forms of mass violence, such as bias crimes or terroristic violence, across the globe, in addition to building off current studies examining motivation, ideology, and warning signs.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emily A. Greene-Colozzi

Emily Greene-Colozzi is an Assistant Professor in the School of Criminology and Justice Studies at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Her research focuses on the situational correlates of public mass gun violence, school violence, and extremist violence. Additional research interests include advancing and improving open-source data reliability, transparency, and integrity.

Joshua D. Freilich

Joshua D. Freilich is a professor in the Criminal Justice Department at John Jay College, and a Creator and co-Director of four open source database studies. Freilich's research has been funded by DHS and NIJ and focuses on the causes of and responses to targeted violence and extremist cyber offending; open source research methods and criminology theory, especially situational crime prevention.