Why do we care so much about a mass shooter's motive?
We're still asking the wrong questions about gun violence.
Welcome back to What Went Wrong?, a newsletter about the failures, inefficiencies, and screw-ups that define 21st-century American life, written by Harry Cheadle. Above photo by Flickr user Jon Jordan.
Mass shootings in America seem to come in bunches. A week after a gunman killed eight people, six of them women of Asian descent, at spas in Atlanta, another armed attacker killed ten people at a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, on Monday. Nothing connects the attacks except a sense of horror, and the use of guns. As mass shootings often are, these were acts of violence so monstrous that we struggle to make sense of them, and all journalists and public commenters can do is try, fruitlessly, to construct a narrative explaining why these people lost their lives.
In the case of the Atlanta shooting, the discourse rapidly coalesced into a debate about whether the alleged killer was motivated by racism. A local police spokesperson, in a much-criticized statement, said that the suspect himself claimed to be lashing out at businesses he blamed for his sex addiction; as many people subsequently pointed out, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a hate crime, given the way Asian women are hypersexualized. (Notably, it hasn’t been reported that any of the victims were actually sex workers.) If the rationale for the shooting was some muddle of misogyny and hatred of sex workers, surely some of that was rooted in racism.
We know even less about the Boulder shooter’s motivations. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, a number of people assumed he was white and spurred on by white supremacy. When it turned out the suspect in police custody was of Syrian descent, a bunch of right-wingers on Twitter took the opportunity to mock liberals for that assumption. Social media being what it is, this led to a lively debate about whether Arabs counted as white. Meanwhile, the Federalist, a right-wing outlet, initially reported that the suspect was sympathetic to ISIS before deleting those references “barring further corroboration,” proving that making poorly informed assumptions is a bipartisan exercise.
As a journalist who has written about gun control and mass shootings many times over the years, watching the same news cycle spin once again is deeply frustrating. We could treat gun violence as a public health problem that kills tens of thousands of people every year and could be alleviated if federal and state governments made gun control a priority. Instead, discussions about mass shootings inevitably devolve into yet another way for pundits to fight culture wars. What gets the most focus is the motive of the mass shooter, whether he (it’s almost always a he) was motivated by white supremacy or radical Islam or misogyny. Both the media and the public seem gripped by a need to name an ideology responsible for the shooting, maybe because it’s comforting to identify an enemy, maybe because we’d rather a killing spree be motivated by some sense of logic, no matter how twisted, than be truly random.
Racism and misogyny are serious problems, of course, and sometimes mass shootings can spur useful discussions. Even before the Atlanta killings, hate crimes against Asian Americans were on the rise, but the media attention on this particular case opened up a broader conversation about anti-Asian racism. The shooting provides a “peg,” to use journalist slang, to cover a form of prejudice that is often under-discussed—but the thing worth focusing on here is the trend of violence against Asian Americans and how Asian women in particular are targeted and mistreated by society and pop culture. Coverage of those issues is far more valuable than investigations into whether one guy with a gun was a racist, a sexist, or both.
In the past, tidy narratives about a shooter’s motive have turned out to be wildly wrong. The Columbine killers were not actually outcasts getting revenge on their bullies. The 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting was likely not motivated by the gunman’s hatred of its LGBTQ patrons; rather, the target was picked more or less at random, later evidence revealed. But another problem with devoting so much energy to the motivations of mass shooters is that it distracts us from the much larger and more systemic problem of gun violence in America.
A record 41,500 people in America died by gunfire in 2020, according to the Gun Violence Archive. It’s unclear what exactly caused this spike in deaths, but the pandemic disrupted work, school, and social services, upending millions of lives and likely leading to more violence than in a typical year. “As these critical supports have been shuttered, the void has been filled with gun violence,” the gun control group Everytown wrote in a 2020 report. Gun homicides disproportionately impact Black Americans, with a government report on 2019 figures noting that “37% of gun homicide victims were Black males between the ages of 15 and 34–although they made up only 2% of the US population.” There are even more gun suicides than gun homicides, and the number of Americans who use guns to kill themselves has been rising for years.
Mass shootings seem uniquely tragic because of the vileness of the perpetrators and the terrifying notion that a spa, supermarket, or school could become a killing zone in a matter of seconds. But everyday gun homicides and suicides, which receive far less media attention, kill many times more people. When considering the scale of the problem and possible paths to saving lives from guns, it seems almost pointless to consider the motives of individual killers. Sometimes a victim of gun violence is also the victim of a hate crime. More often, they are the victim of an abusive relationship. In some cases, they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Statistically, if you die because of a gun it is likely because you used it on yourself.
From a thousand-foot view, gun violence is a public health problem and it calls for the unsexy kinds of policies that combat public health risks. States and cities can pass laws allowing the authorities to take guns away from people who are a danger to themselves or others. They can impose waiting periods on gun purchasers to prevent someone from buying a weapon in a heated moment and immediately using it, as the Atlanta shooter apparently did. States could also ban certain types of “assault weapons,” though handguns kill far more people than rifles. More broadly, reducing the number of guns in the country seems like a good way to reduce gun violence. Large-scale gun control measures at the federal level aren’t viable for political reasons—and courts have become extremely sympathetic to the argument of Second Amendment absolutists—but if the country as a whole wanted to enact strict licensing laws or ban handguns, as other nations have done, it could. That would almost certainly drive down the number of gun deaths and mass shootings.
People didn’t die in Atlanta because the killer was a racist or misogynist or hated sex workers. They died because that guy had access to a gun. People didn’t die in Colorado because of whatever hatred was in their killer’s heart. They died because that guy had access to a gun. The right question to ask after a mass shooting isn’t why did they do it? It’s what will it take for our gun laws to change?
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