It’s
been two years since I wrote on this
topic.
At that time, at least 36%
of U.S.
mass
shooters had
been trained by the
U.S.
military. Since then, a grand total of
nobody
at all has written on the topic.
I’m
picking it up again, because people have
started asking about it, prompted by a former
Marine using apparently trained skills to
murder a subway rider in New York, and
shooters in Atlanta and Texas actually being
identified as veterans in news reports — an
extreme rarity.
It’s
been two years since I wrote on this topic. At
that time, at least 36%
of U.S. mass shooters had
been trained by the U.S. military. Since then, a
grand total of nobody at all has written on the
topic.
However,
working from the database of
mass shooters created by Mother
Jones,
I cannot include the Atlanta shooter, who did
not kill at least four people, and I cannot
include any strangulations, because those are
not shootings. In fact, the recent Texas mass
shooter is the only one of the 15 cases
I’ve added
to the database from
the past two years whom I’ve been able to
identify as a veteran. There have of course
been more than 15 shootings, but most of them
don’t make it into the Mother
Jones database,
and some that do I eliminate in order to
create a meaningful comparison. In the United
States, 14.76% of the general population
(male, 18-59) are veterans. By limiting my
database to male U.S. citizen mass shooters,
aged 18-59, I can point out that 32% of them
are veterans.
Needless
to say, out of a country of over 330 million
people a database of 122 mass shooters is a
very small group. 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 over twice as likely to be
veterans as the general population. 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 hard 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 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.
For
more on how I’ve reasearched this and what I
think of it, see my
report from two years ago.
For
my data file click
here.