Ask a stupid question, sometimes the data gives you a surprising answer.
The question it occurs to me to ask is, why are most mass shooters male?
And, on a related note, what does that have to do with gun availability - the sheer number of guns we have in America and the ease of access to them?
This is not necessarily “how do we reduce or stop mass shootings”, it should be noted; there’s a variety of feasible-to-unfeasible, and good-to-bad solutions there, from penning children in schools with highly controlled, single exits like prisons (thanks, Senator Cruz) to reducing the availability of guns for people who shouldn’t own them, to simply taking away everyone’s guns, if we’re talking completely blank-slate policy proposals.
I don’t think the prescriptive questions need to be asked so much as the descriptive ones; and those are not well-answered questions.
We are talking about a uniquely American phenomenon, after all, and a relatively recent one in historical terms. These are not trends that tend towards a strongly introspected-towards answer in American life.
The question becomes, I think, a fairly uncomfortable one for an American male (much less the roughly one in three of us who own guns), which is, why are so many American mass shooters male?
If it was completely gender-invariant, and gun availability alone was doing it, then based on the demographics of gun ownership, we could reasonably expect that somewhere between two to three times as many mass shootings would be committed by men as would be committed by women - that’s the difference in gun ownership rates between them.
Quoting Pew Research Center in June of 2017:
Gun ownership varies considerably across demographic groups. For example, about four-in-ten men (39%) say they personally own a gun, compared with 22% of women. And while 36% of whites report that they are gun owners, about a quarter of blacks (24%) and 15% of Hispanics say they own a gun.
White men are especially likely to be gun owners: About half (48%) say they own a gun, compared with about a quarter of white women and nonwhite men (24% each) and 16% of nonwhite women.
In 2020, more recently, in Wolfson, Azrael, Miller “Gun ownership among US women“ (on the NIH’s National Library of Medicine site) that differential is even higher:
Twelve per cent (95% CI 10.6% to 13.6%) of women and 33.3% of men (95% CI 30.3% to 36.5%) personally owned guns. Male and female gun owners are demographically similar and cite similar reasons for owning firearms, but female gun owners own fewer guns (3.6 vs 5.6). Among female gun owners, 40.4% (95% CI 35.5% to 45.5%) own handguns only, whereas 20.7% (95% CI 18.2% to 23.4%) of male gun owners own handguns only. Approximately three of four male (73.4% (95% CI 70.3% to 76.3%)) and female (76.7% (95% CI 71.6% to 81.1%)) handgun owners own guns for protection from strangers. Males and female gun owners are equally likely to store at least one gun loaded and unlocked.
A rate of 98% male mass shooters (according to the Violence Project in May of 2021) cannot be explained as a gender-invariant phenomenon, however. A male in California, with its highly restrictive gun laws, is orders of magnitude more likely to be a mass shooter than a female in Texas.
Nor are mass shootings a time-invariant phenomenon; if there is some aspect of causation between gender and mass shootings, then the level of that causation needs to account for the changing rates in mass shootings. A clear difference in overall levels is visible on either side of the 2004 lapse in the Federal Assault Weapons Ban.
We should note, further, whatever the reason for increased rates of mass shootings, their relative deadliness has been relatively flat, at 10 people per mass shooting on average (per Everytown, USA statistics).
And, quoting their conclusions, on a review of the evidence, mass shootings are often:
perpetrated by someone who was legally prohibited from possessing a firearm;
perpetrated by someone who displayed prior warning signs;
intermingled with acts of domestic violence; and
far deadlier when they involve assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.
We are asking, then, why are men who are often legally prohibited from owning firearms, with prior warning signs, with a tendency towards domestic violence and access to assault weapons with high-capacity magazines, committing violence at higher rates?
Further, given that it’s nearly a statistical given that there are women in America who match that profile with prior warning signs, who are legally prohibited from owning firearms, with a tendency towards domestic violence, and access to high-capacity magazines and semi-automatic small-caliber infantry rifles (there are 331.4 million Americans, someone’s going to line up that way)… why are so many men, rather than women, committing mass shootings?
We have two hurdles to jump before we can start looking at a biological explanation: we need to categorize the phenomenon as something biological, and we need to preclude or dismiss a purely social or cultural explanation.
The latter is established by the 49:1 ratio of male to female mass shooters; for the former, we turn to the biological notion of ‘infanticide’, or the killing of children. It is a frankly uncomfortable word for a lot of people, but biologically speaking, when we examine the record of school shootings in America, that is what we are talking about: infanticide with firearms.
Infanticide is something of a paradox in evolutionary terms: statistically speaking, it’s just not an adaptive practice for a population. It’s actually somewhat foot-shooting in evolutionary terms; if there were species that had biologically-based mechanisms for infanticide, you’d think there wouldn’t be a lot of those species around anymore. At the individual level is where infanticide starts to make biological sense as an adaptive strategy for males.
So, this is probably not an answer that occurs to a lot of people, but, consider the Hanuman langur, or gray langur.
The first place I read the idea was Carl Zimmer in Discover Magazine in 1996, which is still probably the best non-academic introduction to the phenomenon extant. Quoting:
The langurs are considered sacred by many Indians and so are regularly fed by the people with whom they come into contact. Consequently, near towns, Hanuman langurs live in extremely dense populations, and apparently this unnatural density had led to unnatural, pathologically violent behavior. There had been several reports of adult males killing infants. So there I was, listening to Ehrlich, says Hrdy, with this adolescent desire to go do something relevant with my life, and I thought, ‘I am going to go study the effects of crowding on behavior.’
Hrdy traveled to dry, deforested Mount Abu and began to get acquainted with the sandy-bodied, dark-faced Hanumans. Before long she decided the assumption that had propelled her to India had been wrong. It happened pretty fast. I was watching these very crowded animals, and here were these infants playing around, bouncing on these males like trampolines, pulling on their tails, and so forth. These guys were aloof but totally tolerant. They might show some annoyance occasionally, but there was nothing approaching pathological hostility toward offspring. The trouble seemed to be when males came into the troop from outside it.
The langurs of Abu are arranged into two kinds of groups. In the first, a single male--or, rarely, two--lives with a group of females and their infants. The infant females, when they grow up, stay put; the males leave to join the other kind of group, a small all-male band.
Eventually a grown male lucky enough to be in a troop of females will come under attack, either from the all-male bands or from the male of another mixed troop. Odds are that sooner or later the resident male will be chased out by a new one. Hrdy witnessed many such takeovers, and she noticed that afterward the new male would often chase after the babies in the troop, presumably all of which were offspring of the old male’s. Before long some of these infants would disappear. She didn’t actually see what happened to the infants, but townspeople around Abu told her that they had seen a male killing baby langurs. Soon after these takeovers, the new resident male would mate with the females.
I realized I needed a new explanatory model, says Hrdy. Her new model would become one of modern biology’s most famous--and in some circles, notorious--hypotheses about animal behavior. There was nothing pathological about langur infanticide, she suggested. On the contrary, it actually made a chilling kind of sense: While a langur mother nurses, she cannot conceive; when she stops nursing, she can. Thus if a male langur kills her infant--one that is not related to him--she can bear the infanticidal male’s own offspring. In Hanuman langur society, in which a male’s sojourn with a harem averages a little over two years, the time saved can be critical. After all, for any offspring to survive, they should ideally be weaned before a new, potentially infanticidal male shows up. Seen in this light, infanticide could actually be an adaptive evolutionary strategy for fathering as many offspring as possible.
In the quarter century since Hrdy first conceived this idea, naturalists have reported cases of infanticide among a wide range of animals. Some now argue that the threat of infanticide is such a pervasive and powerful influence that it can shape animal societies. A few theorists even claim that infanticide was an important factor in human evolution. \
Originally advanced in 1979, Sarah Blaffer-Hrdy’s work since has developed multiple forms of causation for infanticide rates and established the phenomenon as effectively accepted science.
So, infanticide has now been observed in multiple species, including non-primates, and the “infanticide as adaptive strategy” explanation has been borne out by genetic testing, in Hanuman langurs, infanticide rates tend to vary based on the rate of turnover in primate sexual hierarchies (Moore, 1999), which in turn may also have to do with population density and food availability.
In humans, infanticide tends to be gender based and occurs as a form of sexual selection; China is one such example. NPR in 2016 quotes “(t)he Nobel economist Amartya Sen (who) estimated there were about 100 million missing women, women that were never born or killed or aborted across Asia.” Societies that practice infanticide are rare; in at least one case, the Kamayurá of Brazil, cultural relativity questions emerge in whether or not there exists a right to kill one’s own children, examined in Foreign Policy Magazine in 2018.
Given the rate at which firearms are killing children in America, I think we have to accept whether we like it or not, America is a society - like the Kamayurá of Brazil - that practices infanticide as a custom
If we accept that infanticide rates are a biologically driven phenomenon, then what if there is a biological basis for mass shooting rates that is time-sensitive, or at least historically time-variant, and feeds into firearms availability?
Again, this might be a surprising place for people think of answers as coming from - especially in the context of evolutionary biology - but a ready source for analysis of human male culture and its interplay with violence and firearms is actually feminist critique theory.
Consider, for instance, the Bushmaster “Man Card” ads that preceded their usage in the Sandy Hook massacre (via BusinessInsider)
When we start out asking “why are so many mass shooters American men?”, with a focus on “men”… the “why” of it is relatively clear, I think, based on science.
It’s probably the basis of another “stupid question, interesting answer” by itself (“what might feminist theory say about American gun culture?”), at least if a man asks it. But I think it’s a worthwhile one to ask.
When we ask that, the other factors stated above - legally prohibited from owning firearms, with prior warning signs, with a tendency towards domestic violence and access to assault weapons with high-capacity magazines, committing violence at higher rates - start to line up as a complex of masculinity, even the question of where people live.
As we’ve seen in Texas, that seems to mean making life-or-death decisions about accepting nearly ubiquitous carry and usage of firearms, including sometimes around and towards children.