another Shooting America has been shaken. Even as the arms debate breaks out in the United States, it is accompanied by gruesome incidents of gun violence, now occurring with almost alarming regularity.
Even as the nation overturned the massacre of 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, there were several mass shootings over Memorial Day weekend in both rural and urban areas. Single-death incidents still account for the majority of gun deaths.
Gunfire broke out at a festival in the town of Taft, Oklahoma, early on Sunday, sending hundreds of fun-goers and customers inside the nearby Boots Cafe to dive for cover. Eight people aged 9 to 56 were shot and one of them died.
Six children aged 13 to 15 were injured Saturday night in a tourist quarter in Chattanooga, Tennessee. An altercation broke out between the two groups and two people in one of them pulled out a gun and started firing.
Ten people were injured, and three law enforcement officers were injured in a shooting incident at a Memorial Day Nighttime Street gathering in Charleston, South Carolina.
And at a club and liquor store in southwest Michigan’s Benton Harbor, a 19-year-old man was killed and six others were injured in a gunfight between a crowd around 2:30 a.m. Monday. The police found several shell shells of various calibers.
He and others met a general definition of a mass shooting, in which four or more people are shot. Such incidents have become so routine that their news is likely to fade rapidly.
But America has long been grappling with its own gun violence problem.
A disturbing ‘new trend’ of young attackers
And as investigators and researchers determine how the tragedies unfolded, the age of the accused has emerged as a key factor in understanding how the two teens were able to acquire such a lethal firepower and what led them to mass shootings. How inspired to do, the New York Times said in one. report good.
They fit into a critical age range – around 15 to 25 – that law enforcement officers, researchers and policy experts consider a dangerous crossroads for young men, a period when they are in the throes of developmental changes and societal pressures. Which can turn them towards violence. In general, and, in the rarest cases, mass shootings.
Six of the nine deadliest mass shootings in the United States since 2018 were perpetrated by people 21 years of age or younger, representing a shift to shooting mass casualties from those before 2000. Most were started by men in their 20s, 30s and mid-40s.
“When it comes to mass shooters, we see two groups, people in their 40s who do workplace type shooting, and a much larger group of youth – 18, 19, 20, 21 – who Get caught up in social contagion. Murder,” said Jillian Peterson, a criminal justice professor who helped found the Violence Project, which maintains a comprehensive national database of mass shootings.
There is no single, easy explanation as to why young men are more likely to engage in mass shootings. (Girls and women make up a small percentage of all criminals.) But many of the reasons often cited by law enforcement officials and academics seem innocuous — online bullying, increasingly aggressive marketing of guns to boys, lax state gun laws and federal Law that makes it legal to purchase a semi-automatic “long gun” at age 18.
a worsening mental health crisis
The shooting comes against the backdrop of a worsening teenage mental health crisis, which preceded the pandemic but was intensified by it. Most despair in adolescents and young adults has been internally directed, with increasing rates of self-harm and suicide. In that sense, perpetrators of mass shootings represent a vast minority of young people, but nonetheless exemplify widespread trends of loneliness, hopelessness, and the dark side of a culture saturated with social media and violent content.
In addition to Buffalo and Uvalde, in March 2021 there was a mass shooting at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, which police said was carried out by a 21-year-old man; In August 2019, a 21-year-old gunman targeted Hispanic shoppers at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, called a massacre, resulting in 23 deaths; a school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, in which a 17-year-old student is accused of killing eight students and two teachers in May 2018; And in February 2018, 17 people were murdered by a 19-year-old former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
Of the 30 deadliest mass shootings recorded from 1949 to 2017, only two involved gunmen under the age of 21: the first was the 1999 massacre of 13 people by two teenagers at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, and the second then In 2012, the 20-year-old at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, killed 27 people, most of them children.
Wednesday’s shootings in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which a gunman killed four people and injured several others and apparently took his own life, violated recent patterns. Police said they believe the gunman, whom they did not identify, was between 35 and 40 years old.
Entering ‘manhood’
Frank T. McAndrew, a psychology professor at Knox College who studied mass shootings, said nearly all of the young killers he researched were motivated by the need to prove himself.
“These are young people who feel like losers, and they have a tremendous drive to show everyone that they are not down,” he said. “In the case of the Buffalo shooter, it was about trying to influence this community of racists that they cultivated online. In the case of the kid in Uvalde, it was about going back to the place where you humiliated.” felt and acted violently.”
“And since Columbine, they tended to study and imitate each other. That’s a growing problem,” Peterson said.
In almost every case, social media or interactive online game platforms played some role, reflecting the ubiquity of online youth culture over the past two decades.
social media problem
In the late 1990s, at the beginning of the social media era, one of Columbine’s gunmen created a blog on AOL to elaborate on his violent views.
A video posted to YouTube, the 22-year-old college student who killed six people in Santa Barbara, California, in 2014, offered one of the most direct manifestations of a gunman’s mindset: the gun, he said, gave him power. Gave the feeling
Imitating the 28-year-old anti-Muslim terrorist who killed 51 people in Christchurch, New Zealand three years ago, a Buffalo gunman livestreamed himself as he killed shoppers because they were black. The man accused of the murders in Uvalde used a relatively new platform, Yubo, to share dangerous messages in which he appeared to be telegraphing his plans.
“It’s a way for kids to flex,” said Titania Jordan with Bark Technologies, an online security company that monitors the use of platforms for violent content. “It’s a way for them to show strength if they are bullied or left out. It’s a part of the narrative now in all these cases – there’s always a social media component.”
‘Biological’ impulsivity in young men
There is also an organic one. Scientists have long known that adolescence and the post-adolescent period are a critical time for brain development and a time for most teenage boys, often characterized by aggressive and impulsive behavior. Conversely, girls of the same age have more control over their impulses and emotions.
Overall, boys and youths account for half of all murders by guns, or any other weapon, across the country, a percentage that continues to rise. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Data Tracking System, 50% of all murders in 2020, the last year comprehensive data is available, were committed by attackers under the age of 30.
Mass shootings, defined by most experts as the deaths of more than four people, are rare; Scale shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde with more than 10 victims are even less common. According to data compiled by the federal government and academics, nearly 99% of shootings in the country involve fewer victims, are the result of crime or personal disputes and are motivated by drug activity, gang conflict, domestic violence and personal disputes.
“Why is there a disproportionate number of crimes committed by men in their late teens and early 20s?” Lawrence Steinberg, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Temple University who has worked extensively on issues related to the development of the adolescent brain.
The explanation, he said, involves the increasingly well-understood neurobiology of adolescence. During adolescence, a “huge mismatch” develops between the parts of the brain that cause impulsive behavior and emotional sensitivity and other parts of the brain that control acting on such impulses, Steinberg said. Men, he said, typically have a higher, sharper peak in arousal, while women see a higher peak in regulation at an earlier age — and so “at every age, men are more sensational.”
The height of that mismatch occurs in the late teens or early 20s. “Then the regulatory system starts to take hold of the impulses, and you’ve got this gradual improvement in your ability to control the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that’s going on in your early 20s,” Steinberg said.
Along with changes in brain development there is also a social path of disorientation from one boy to another, with all kinds of disturbances occurring even in healthy boys. Sarah Johnson, a professor of pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said, “The major differences in socialization for men and women related to aggressive behavior, appropriate ways to seek support, how to display emotion and acceptability of firearm use.” .
Young men are “almost universal” in transitioning “in their relationships, life situations, lifestyle, education, occupation”, while “at the same time they have substantial autonomy from the adults in their lives and can self-support or supervise themselves.” Can negotiate,” Johnson said.
Racial hatred behind most shopping site shootings?
a recent report Conversation It also analyzed whether racial hatred was a factor in mass shootings at shopping sites. It found that racial hatred characterizes approximately 10% of all mass public shootings, according to a database developed by criminologists Jillian Peterson and James Densley. “Our analysis shows that when it comes to retail shooters, about 13% are motivated by racism – so slightly above average for all mass shooting incidents,” it said.
with input from new York Times, The Associated PressAFP.
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