Mass public shootings (MPS) are not random, despite appearances.

Though the Gun Facts Project has uncovered some amazing insights about these events, some induced downtime gave us leisure to explore niches in the MPS data… and we uncovered some new perspectives.

The Big Database Bust

At Gun Facts, we have an internal project to warehouse crime data and other data for rapid recall and creative exploration. During the conceptualization phase, the project was jokingly named “Data Whore.” Unfortunately, the name stuck.

We had loaded the old FBI Uniform Crime Reports going back to the 1980s with county-level demographic and population numbers, had built a few handy data views (SQL views for our fellow geeks), and more.

Then the database crashed, got massively corrupted, and led to a week-long recovery and migration to a new database technology that isn’t as prone to failure under massive operations (we were deleting 22M rows of data when the technology melted down).

Since our next major project depended on this database, we suddenly had some free time and decided to pull up the latest version of the Gun Facts Mass Public Shooter Database and explore sundry topics we had not previously. This new look was also instigated by a church/school shooting in Minnesota that thankfully did not qualify as a MPS due to “only” two people being killed. The perp in that sad affair was clearly bonkers (to use the scientific term) and we wondered if school shooters were any more nuts than all MPS perps.

And with that, we were off to the races…

MPS Venues and Mental Health

Many of the perps for K12 school shootings were not well in the head. But were they any more deranged than MPSs at large? That was our first question.

The surprising answer is “no.” K12 shooters have mental health issues at about the same rate as all such mass murderers.

But they appear to take psychotropic medications nearly 50% more frequently than the average for all MPSs.

There is a huge warning here: The total number of K12 perps is small and there is not 100% insight into all of their mental health and management issues. The spike in medication usage might be a small-sample-size aberration. Don’t read too much into this data point.

Age of Perpetrator and Venue

The results of looking at these two factors are rather unsurprising. Adolescent MPSs are most likely to attack a K12 school, normally their own. Likewise, when deranged people enter the work force, they are more likely to commit a MPS in their place of work.

But consistent up until old age is that businesses are the second most targeted place for an MPS. We at Gun Facts offer no explanation aside from businesses being both a source of grievances and a place where a high body count might be more likely, and thus attractive to fame-seeking perps.

Race of Perpetrator and Venue

Long ago, we made the casual observation that black perpetrators of MPSs more often did it at their workplace.

The data supports the casual observation. Workplace MPSs by blacks occur at about twice the rate for whites, and even more often compared to Hispanics.

Interestingly, blacks have a much lower rate for planning their MPSs than other races. Specifically, they plan their attacks at 1/3^rd the rate of whites. If workplace grievances are the key motivation for black MPS perps, then we might assume that knowing the workplace well does not require any additional planning per se.

There are very few Asians in our MPS database… less than 6% of all perpetrators, and that is a little less than the 7.2% of the U.S. population that are Asian. So, the numbers for MPS perps of Asian heritage are thin, and thus the fact that Asian MPSs targeted colleges should be taken as statistically fragile.

Prior Police Encounters

Well Planned Average  Killed Yes 10.7 No 6.0

“He was not on police radar,” is a phrase too often heard after an MPS. But this is not always the case.

In about 62% of MPS events, the perp either had a violent crime history or were known to the police.

There is no surprise about the bulk of “known” suspects being in early adulthood. This is when bad behaviors are commonly exposed. But the lack of bad public behaviors of adolescents is also a reason K12 school shooters are not on police radars.

Race is a different matter, and one that will bring forth some claims of racial profiling in policing. 61% of white MPS perps were known to police, but an average of 76% of blacks, Hispanics and Asians were. This may be due to higher policing of non-white races and thus having more people of those races under police magnifying glasses. But it may also be a factor of urbanization. Whites are much more prevalent in suburbs and rural areas, and metro areas are higher in crime. Hence, non-white races may have localized attitudes toward violence at higher rates and thus also be subject to police investigations at higher rates.

Well Planned Mass Public Shootings

Now we get to an interesting topic.

We know that well-planned attacks tend to be more deadly. Nearly twice as deadly. So, knowing who plans their attacks is important.

We see some skewing to adolescents when it comes to planning their attacks. This tendency comes from being both primarily K12 school shooters and being intimate with the internet as a research tool.

Planning is not exclusively their domain. Even into late life, some MPS perps take time to plan. But that the younger generation is “comfortable” with scanning the web to better prepare means that in the future a higher percentage of MPSs will be planned and thus bloodier.

Much Ado About Some Things

There are no grand conclusions from this brief review of corner issues in MPSs. But awareness of these elements might bring greater awareness to warning signs and thus opportunities for intervention.