Clues sought on why young turn killers

An analysis of 196 mass shootings in the United States since 1996 shows that nearly 98 percent of the perpetrators－all but five of them－were males, and more than two-thirds were committed by shooters aged under 18. The analysis found that the median age for school shooters was 16.

The analysis by The Washington Post shows a shift in the age of those committing mass shootings, which before 2000 were most often initiated by men in their mid-20s, 30s and 40s.

Why are more young boys and men involved in mass shootings in the country, especially school shootings? There is no single answer, but researchers say there are common threads emerging from the statistics.

"Age is the untold story of all this stuff," psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl, who is also a sociologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, told the Post. "There's a lot of research about how their brains are not fully developed in terms of regulation. Studies show the prefrontal cortex, which is critical to understanding the consequences of one's actions and controlling impulses, doesn't fully develop until about age 25."

In that context, Metzl said, a shooting "certainly feels like another kind of performance of young masculinity".

Frank McAndrew, a psychology professor at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, told China Daily that there are different kinds of mass shooters and the ones that are driven by ideology tend not to choose schools.

"Those who go to schools tend to be people who are in the same town that they're from. And they go back to the place where they felt alienated, where they felt ostracized, where they felt disrespected," he said.

"For young men in particular, they're at a time of life where status and respect from other people is very important. And if they feel like they're losers, that they are not getting the attention and respect that they think they deserve, they have a response to this," McAndrew said.

"It's an actual biological response. They're full of testosterone and this results in all kinds of negative emotions like envy and rage. And so for a male of that particular age is really susceptible to these kinds of negative experiences. And then when you combine that with how easy it is to get a very powerful weapon, that's what sets the stage for trouble."

In an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, gunman Salvador Ramos, 18, killed 19 children and two teachers. He was a student at the high school and began his massacre by shooting his grandmother because he was enraged over his failure to graduate that week, according to a neighbor.

Friends and relatives said he had been bullied throughout middle school for a speech impediment－a stutter and lisp, according to the Post.

Jillian Peterson is a professor of criminal justice at Hamline University and James Densley is an associate professor at Metropolitan State University, both in St. Paul, Minnesota. They created a database of mass shootings that have taken place in the US since 1966.

All the mass shootings at schools in their database were carried out by men or boys; the average age was 18. Twelve of the 14 school shooters in their database were either current or former students at the schools.

They say their research shows that workplace attacks have been mostly carried out by men in middle age. School shootings, on the other hand, involve perpetrators mostly in their late teens or early 20s.

Ramos was 18, and the person charged in the Buffalo, New York, supermarket shooting that left 10 black people dead, Peyton Gendron, is also 18.

"I think it is this kind of coming out of adolescence: not knowing your place in the world and being depressed and isolated and more vulnerable to what you are reading online," said Peterson, a criminologist who studies the life histories of mass shooters.

Peterson and Densley found that most of the school shooters they have studied experienced early childhood trauma and/or exposure to violence, as was the case with Ramos in Uvalde.

"Most school shooters are motivated by a generalized anger. Their path to violence involves self-hate and despair turned outward at the world, and our research finds they often communicate their intent to do harm in advance as a final, desperate cry for help," the researchers wrote in an article for The Conversation, a news website.

School shooters tend to preempt their attacks by leaving posts, messages or videos warning of their intent, they said.

On the morning of the Texas mass shooting, Ramos reportedly messaged a teenager in Germany he had met on Yubo, an app used by tens of millions of young people worldwide, that he planned to do something. Minutes later, Ramos messaged: "I just shot my grandma. I'm going to shoot up an elementary school."

"For most perpetrators, the mass shooting event is intended to be a final act," Peterson and Densley said in their research.

'Masculine' solution

So far in 2022, there have been more than 246 mass shootings in the US, according to the Gun Violence archive. Mass shootings are defined by most experts as involving the deaths of more than four people.

Beyond mass shootings, boys and young men account for half of homicides involving guns, or any other weapon, nationwide. Fifty percent of all killings in 2020 were committed by assailants under 30, according to the FBI's uniform crime data tracking system.

What differentiates mass killers from other young men who may suffer a mental disorder but don't do such acts is hard to define, say the experts. The vast majority of young men with even serious mental health disorders rarely commit acts of violence. They are more likely to be victims, or impulsively hurt themselves, say experts.

Eric Madfis, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Washington at Tacoma, suggests the perpetrators are trying to regain control through a "masculine" solution after a long period of frustration.

"We teach boys and men that the only socially acceptable emotion to have is not to be vulnerable and sensitive, but to be tough and macho and aggressive," he told the Post.