Two
U.S. military veterans allegedly shot and killed
at least three people each recently,
Thomas Jacob Sanford in Michigan, and Nigel Max
Edge in North Carolina. So, it is a safe bet
that they will both be added (with, almost
certainly, no mention of their status as
veterans) to the database maintained by Mother
Jones that
I have for years been using as a starting point
to track statistics on mass shootings.
It’s
been almost two years since I posted an update.
In that time, Mother
Jones has
added seven mass shootings to its database.
These two new ones will make nine. Of those
other seven, one of the shooters — bizarrely,
and I hope nobody gets reprimanded — is actually
identified as a veteran by Mother
Jones.
Another of the seven was 14 years old and yet
another was 67; they don’t factor into
calculations about men under 60. Another was a
veteran of an institution that uses the word
“veteran” to associate itself with the military:
football. He blamed his football injuries for
his crime. He counts statistically as NOT a
military veteran. In a quick internet search,
I’ve been unable to identify any of the others
as military veterans either, so will count them
as non-veterans. But it’s worth noting that
often in the past I’ve managed to find out about
veteran status only after lengthy searching.
So, the
data has
now changed from 40 of 127 mass shooters (who
are men under 60) being military veterans when
last I wrote about this to now 43 of 134 mass
shooters being military veterans. That’s 32%, up
from 31%. That figure has been between 31% and
36% for as long as I’ve been doing these
calculations
In
the United States, only a
very small percentage of
men under 60 are military veterans.
In
the United States, at least 32% of male mass
shooters under 60 (which is almost all mass
shooters) are military veterans.
As I
reported in June 2023,
a University of Maryland report touching on this
topic was virtually ignored by media outlets.
But
here are the facts:
Looking
at males, aged 18-59, veterans are well over
twice, maybe over three times as likely to be
mass shooters compared with the group as a
whole. And they shoot somewhat more fatally.
The
numbers have changed slightly since I began
writing about this:
· October
28, 2023: ABC
News Report Claims No Past Mass Shooters
Have Been Veterans; At Least 31% Have Been
· October
26, 2023: At
Least 31% of Mass Shooters Were Trained to
Shoot by the U.S. Military
· May
10, 2023: At
Least 32% of U.S. Mass Shooters Were
Trained to Shoot by the U.S. Military
· March
23, 2021: At
Least 36% of Mass Shooters Have Been
Trained By the U.S. Military
· June
4, 2019: Updated
Data: Mass Shooters Still
Disproportionately Veterans
(At
this point it was 35%)
· November
4, 2018: Mass
Shooters’ Histories in the U.S. Military
Most Amazing Coincidence
(At
this point it was 35%)
· November
14, 2017: U.S.
Mass Shooters Are Disproportionately
Veterans
(At
this point it was 34%)
The
training and conditioning and arming of shooters
is of far less interest to media outlets than
“motivation,” but what we should actually know
about shooters’
ideology is
not unrelated to the disproportionate presence
of military veterans in the list of mass
shooters. These are people who have been armed
and trained and conditioned at public expense
and then generally thanked for the supposed
service of what they’ve done when it has not yet
included shooting any of the wrong people.
All
sorts of correlations are carefully examined
when it comes to mass shooters. But the fact
that the largest institution in the United
States has trained many of them to shoot is
scrupulously avoided.
Many
of those mass shooters who are not military
veterans tend to dress and speak as if they
were. Some of them are veterans of police forces
with military-sounding titles, or have been
prison guards or security guards. Counting those
who’ve been in either the U.S. military or a
police force or a prison or worked as an armed
guard of any kind would give us an even larger
percentage of mass shooters to consider. The
factor of having been trained and employed to
shoot is larger than just the military veterans,
yet carefully ignored by every single U.S.
corporate media outlet (that sounds like an
exaggeration, but can you prove it wrong?).
Some
of the non-military mass-shooters have worked as
civilians for the military. Some have tried to
join the military and been rejected. The whole
phenomenon of mass-shootings has skyrocketed
during the post-2001 endless wars. The
militarism of mass-shootings may be too big to
see, but the avoidance of the topic is stunning.
Needless
to say, out of a country of over 330 million
people a database of 134 mass shooters is a
very, very small group. Needless to say,
statistically, virtually all veterans are not
mass shooters. But that can hardly be the reason
for not a single news article ever mentioning
that mass shooters are very disproportinately
likely to be veterans. After all, statistically,
virtually all males, mentally ill people,
domestic abusers, Nazi-sympathizers, loners, and
gun-purchasers are also not mass-shooters. Yet
articles on those topics proliferate like NRA
campaign bribes.
There
seem to me to be two key reasons that a sane
communications system would not censor this
topic. First, our public dollars and elected
officials are training and conditioning huge
numbers of people to kill, sending them abroad
to kill, thanking them for the “service,”
praising and rewarding them for killing, and
then some of them are killing where it is not
acceptable. This is not a chance correlation,
but a factor with a clear connection.
Second,
by devoting so much of our government to
organized killing, and even allowing the
military to train in schools, and to develop
video games and Hollywood movies, we’ve created
a culture in which people imagine that
militarism is praiseworthy, that violence solves
problems, and that revenge is one of the highest
values. Virtually every mass shooter has used
military weaponry. Most of those whose dress we
are aware of dressed as if in the military.
Those who’ve left behind writings that have been
made public have tended to write as if they were
taking part in a war. So, while it might
surprise many people to find out how many mass
shooters are veterans of the military, it might
be harder to find mass shooters (actual veterans
or not) who did not themselves think they were
soldiers.
There
seems to me to be one most likely reason that
it’s difficult to find out which shooters have
been in the military (meaning that some
additional shooters probably have been, about
whom I’ve been unable to learn that fact). We’ve
developed a culture dedicated to praising and
glorifying participation in war. It need not
even be a conscious decision, but a journalist
convinced that militarism is laudable would
assume it was irrelevant to a report on a mass
shooter and, in addition, assume that it was
distasteful to mention that the man was a
veteran. That sort of widespread self-censorship
is the only possible explanation for the
complete whiting out of this story.
The
phenomenon of shutting down this story does not
exactly require a “motive,” and I would like to
recommend to reporters on mass shootings that
they, too, devote a bit less energy to the often
meaningless hunt for “a motive,” and a tad more
to considering whether the fact that a shooter
lived and breathed in an institution dedicated
to mass shooting might be relevant.
UPDATE
SEPTEMBER 29, 2025:
Shockingly,
CBS News did one article on this topic two years
ago. Here
it is.
The seven people who wrote it used a database
from the Violence Project and did not separate
out men or men of any particular age. They
concluded that 26% of mass shooters were
veterans, as compared to 7% of all people. In
other words, a mass shooter is over 3 times as
likely to be a veteran.
It’s
always seemed more relevant to me
to
remove the very few mass shooters
who
are female or young or old, and
then
compare to 18-59-year-old men in
the
general population. The closest I can
come
to putting an exact number on that
is
like this. The U.S.
Census says
that in
2024,
males 19-59 were 88,300,644 or
25.96%
of the population. (This is
imperfect
because it looks at only one
year,
because it is an estimate, because
it
leaves out 18 years olds, and because
it
includes non-citizens who were not
eligible
for or did not live in the United
States
at the age for being in the U.S.
military.)
According to the Department
of Veterans
Affairs,
of men aged 20-59
(so,
missing 18-19-year-olds), 6,565,138
as
of 2024 were veterans. That’s 7.43%
of
all men aged 19-59. If we compare
32%
with 7%, mass shooters are over
4.5
times more likely to be veterans.
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