Why so few Latin American mass shooters?

One explanation given for the high number of mass shootings in the USA, compared to other rich countries, is that the USA is an unusually violent country.

Compared to European countries, we have much higher rates of homicides and violent crime, combined with a much greater access to lethal weapons.  So it is not surprising we have more mass shootings.

But virtually no mass shooters in Latin America

But what about Latin America?  On average, Latin American countries have much more crime and more fatal shootings than the USA does.  Yet mass shootings are virtually unknown.

Paul Hirschfield, writing in Foreign Affairs, noted that in the Philippines, guns are sold openly in shopping malls and gun violence is endemic. The gun homicide rate in 2018 was 50 percent higher than in the USA.  Yet mass shootings are rare.

He pointed out that countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela have gun homicide rates far exceeding the USA’s.  But the Latin American region, which has 2.5 times as many people as the United States, has had only nine known lone-gunman style mass shootings since 1998.  Why?

One possible explanation, he wrote, is that the kind of suicidal loners who become mass shooters in the USA have different outlets in Latin America.  They may work out their rages by working as hit men or for police, military, terrorist or criminal organizations.

But he thinks the real answer is culture.  Extended family ties play a far greater role in Latin America than in Europe and North America.  Well-off Latin Americans on average live in larger households, have family nearby and usually live with their parents until marriage.  

This way of life promotes values such as loyalty, solidarity and interdependence that help counter-balance individualist values.  People who feel stigmatized or victimized are more likely to be defended by their kinfolk.

Of course not all Latin Americans enjoy the protection of extended families.  Hirschfield noted that Brazil’s infamous school shooter, who killed 12 children in a Rio de Janeiro school in 2011, had been adopted and lived alone.

But Latin Americans are notable for the ability of unrelated individuals to form voluntary associations and join together for mutual support.  This is called “relational mobility.”  Levels of relational mobility are above average among US Americans, but the level is twice as high in Mexico.

Hirschfield said that multiple studies have demonstrated that in a variety of situations, Latin Americans are more likely to display socially engaging emotions such as empathy, warmth, trust, and affection, and less likely to express socially disengaging emotions, such as pride and anger, than their counterparts in Europe and the United States.  So Latin Americans in crisis may have more moral support available than US Americans do.

My own take on this is that Latin Americans on average may be just as violent as we US Americans, or maybe more so, but they are much less suicidal.  Mass shootings are forms of suicide as well as homicide. 

Why so many US American mass shooters?

THE VIOLENCE PROJECT: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic by Jillian Peterson, PhD, and James Densley, Phd (2021)

Mass shootings are horrible, fascinating and distinctively American.  No nation has anywhere close to the number of mass shootings that occur in the USA.  They are so common it seems as if they are impossible to prevent.

A mass shooter is someone who, out of rage and frustration, opens fire on people in a public place.  Frequently mass shooting is a form of suicide; the shooter kills himself or is killed by police.

Fewer than 1 percent of U.S. firearm homicides are by mass shooters.  It is not a significant risk for US Americans generally, but the nature of the crime makes it fascinating and frightening. 

Two criminologists, Jillian Peterson and James Densley, took it upon themselves to create a data base of every mass shooting since 1966 who killed four or more people in a public place, and every shooting incident at schools, workplaces and houses of worship since 1999.

They compiled detailed life histories of 180 shooters, talking to their wives, parents, siblings, childhood friends, work colleagues and teachers.   They also talked to five convicted mass shooters serving life sentences in prison, and also found several people who planned a mass shooting but changed their minds.  The Violence Project is the result of their research.

According to The Violence Project, virtually all mass shooters have four things in common:

• Early childhood trauma and exposure to violence at a young age
• An identifiable grievance or crisis point
• Study of the actions of past shooters and validation for their methods and motives
• The means to carry out an attack

There is a whole subculture of mass shooter fans on social media.   They regard mass shooters as heroes, because they’ve struck back at a world that marginalized them and made a name for themselves in a world that ignored them.

Roughly 70 percent of mass shooters are suicidal and 60 percent of mass shootings end with the death of the shooter.

It is like the ancient Greek story of Herostratus, who destroyed the world’s most beautiful temple in order that his name would be remembered.  And in fact, Herostratus is remembered, but the name of the builder of the temple is not.

News accounts spotlight today’s Herostratuses and provide scripts on how to act out their fantasies.    A mass shooting took place last May in a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket, about 70 miles west pf where I live.  This was the top news story in my local Rochester, N.Y., newspaper for about a week.  Our many local homicides (76 last year) are usually reported on an inside page.

Most murders overall are by people known to the victims, most others are the byproduct of other crimes, but these kinds of crimes are more understandable than mass shootings.  The nature of mass shootings generates curiosity, which generates news coverage.

Peterson and Densley speculate that the reason for a decline in the number of serial killers is that mass shooters got more publicity.  They suggest that the names of accused mass killers be suppressed and that newspapers concentrate on reporting about the innocent victims and heroic resisters. 

Why so many suicidal mass gun killings?

Vigil for mass shooting victims in Las Vegas in 2017. Source: VOA.

The mass shootings that regularly occur in the United States are mostly also suicides.

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They are the ultimate “deaths of despair.”

The killers do their shooting in public places and are almost guaranteed to be gunned down in their turn, if they don’t kill themselves first.

They are comparable to the suicide bombers in the Middle East and elsewhere, except that the jihadist killers are sometimes trying to achieve a specific military objective, like the Japanese kamikaze pilots during World War Two.

Among all the rich Western nations, the United States is the only one in which mass shootings occur on a regular basis.

That is not to say that ordinary Americans, and visitors to the United States, are in grave danger.  As a risk factor, mass shootings rank far below traffic accidents.

Click to enlarge

But the fact that they occur says something about our society.  For every man (the shooters are almost all men) who kills others and then himself out of rage and despair, there must be a hundred others who feel the same rage and despair and don’t act it out.

Some people blame availability of guns, and I agree it would be better if the government restricted sales of rapid-firing firearms with large ammunition clips and magazines.  Casualties from mass killings were fewer during the assault weapons ban, but they still occurred.

Click to enlarge

Some people blame ideologies based on hatred of black people or hatred of immigrants or hatred of women.  But the mass shooters can be of any race, and the percentage of white mass shooters is slightly less than the percentage of whites in the general population.

The killers profess all kinds of professed political and social motives and some profess no motives at all.  The only common denominator is that the killers are almost all suicidal men.

Hatred and bigotry have long been motives for killing.  The new thing is that the killers are suicidal.

There are ways to commit murder without sacrificing your life in the process.  (The methods are obvious, but if you can’t think of them, I see no benefit to society in helping you out.)

I think the root cause of mass killings are feelings of powerlessness and feelings of meaninglessness.  Your life is meaningless, so you give it up.  But you take others with you, so you do have some power after all.

I don’t have a good answer for this.  Calling for a greater sense of community or a stronger sense of values isn’t going to bring these things about.  Greater availability of mental health counseling probably would help some, but it won’t in itself empower people or make their lives meaningful.

White nationalists aren’t the only mass shooters

I deplore the way President Trump inflames racial antagonism, and I think it would be a good idea to restrict the sale of rapid-firing rifles that use large ammunition clips and magazines.  But I don’t think either of these things is a root cause of the mass shootings that plague the U.S.A.

The root cause of mass shootings is deeper than any particular ideology, whether that be white nationalism, Islamic jihadism or something else.  The fact that it is not just due to white nationalism is shown by the racial diversity of the shooters.

And no, we don’t need a renewed “war on terror,” this one aimed at white nationalists.   [Added 8/9/2019]

LINKS

The War on White Supremacist Terror by C.J. Hopkins for The Consent Factory.  [Added 8/9/2019]  Good article.

Mass shootings aren’t growing more common—and evidence contradicts common stereotypes about the killers by Charles J. Ferguson for The Conversation.

Five things to know about mass shootings in America by Frederic Lemieux for The Conversation.

Why Do We Have Mass Killers? by Rod Dreher for The American Conservative [Added 8/9/2019]

A handy list of black mass murderers who were taken alive (for people who think that being taken alive for mass murder is a ‘white privilege’) by Will Shetterly for it’s all one thing.  [Added 8/11/2019]

I added the text, changed the headline and added links the morning after I posted the chart.

Mass shootings in U.S. are an almost daily event

Mass shootings are getting to be virtually an everyday occurrence in the United States.   While American gun violence and murder rates are declining overall, this one particular form of senseless violence holds steady, for reasons that aren’t clear to me.

About 64 percent of the shooters were white men, according to a survey by Mother Jones, about the same as the white percentage of the total population.  Black people were 16 percent of the total shooters, Asians were 9 percent and Latinos, native Americans and people of unknown ethnicity made up the rest.

I honestly don’t know what can be done, realistically, to eliminate mass shootings.  Obviously mass shootings could not take place if the shooters could not obtain firearms.  But gun prohibition has been ruled un-Constitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, and I don’t think it would work even if it could be tried.

The typical mass shooter is a young man obsessed with weapons and images of violence, frustrated with work, school or relationships, with a history of minor acts of violence.  Mark Follman wrote a good article in the current issue of Mother Jones about efforts to identify potential mass shooters, and turn them away from violence.  Possibly a lot of violent incidents have been headed off this way.

But, as he wrote, there are “legions” of angry young men who own guns and like violent movies and video games, and yet never commit crimes.   I don’t see how it is feasible to monitor them all.

The baffling question is why this particular type of crime should be on the increase.   Follman talked to experts who said part of the reason is social media, which gives mass shooters a perverse kind of fame.   Mass shooters are typically people leading lives that are meaningless to themselves who want to make an impact—any kind of impact.