• After Mass Shootings Like Uvalde, National Gun Control Fails – but States Often Loosen Gun Laws

    By Christopher Poliquin

    Contrary to the view that nothing changes, state legislatures consider 15% more firearm bills the year after a mass shooting. Deadlier shootings – which receive more media attention – have larger effects. As impressive as this 15% increase in gun bills may sound, gun legislation can reduce gun violence only if it becomes law. And when it comes to enacting these bills into law, our research found that mass shootings do not regularly cause lawmakers to tighten gun restrictions. In fact, we found the opposite. Republican state legislatures pass significantly more gun laws that loosen restrictions on firearms after mass shootings.

  • Why 18-Year-Olds in Texas Can Buy AR-15s but Not Handguns

    By Kiah Collier and Jeremy Schwartz

    The massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, highlights disparities in how federal laws regulate rifles and handguns. The shooter bought two rifles days after his 18th birthday. 

  • The Buffalo and Uvalde Gunmen Bought Their Rifles Legally at 18

    By Jennifer Mascia

    Both teenage gunmen in the Buffalo and Uvalde mass-shootings acquired their rifles legally, through federally licensed dealers. Federal law allows people as young as 18 to buy long guns, including rifles and shotguns, and only a handful of states have enacted laws raising the minimum age to 21. There’s no federal minimum age for the possession of long guns, meaning it’s legal to give one to a minor in more than half the country.

  • What We Know About Mass School Shootings in the U.S. – and the Gunmen Who Carry Them Out

    By James Densley and Jillian Peterson

    Most school shooters are motivated by a generalized anger. Their path to violence involves self-hate and despair turned outward at the world, and our research finds they often communicate their intent to do harm in advance as a final, desperate cry for help. The key to stopping these tragedies is for society to be alert to these warning signs and act on them immediately.

  • U.S. 'Active Shooter' Incidents Surged in 2021: FBI

    By Masood Farivar

    The FBI defines an active shooter as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” Amass shooting is typically defined as a shooting that involves four or more victims and can take place in public or private spaces. There were 61 “active shooter” incidents in the United States last year, an increase of more than 50% from 2020 and more than twice as many as five years ago, the FBI reported.

  • Buffalo Attack Footage Spread Quickly Across Platforms, Has Been Online for Days

    The livestream of the accused Buffalo shooter’s deadly attack at a Buffalo supermarket was available briefly via Twitch, but the footage spread quickly across online platforms, and remains online for public consumption.

  • DOJ Steps Up Hate Crime Prosecutions

    By Masood Farivar

    DOJ says that with hate crimes on the rise, U.S. federal prosecutors have charged more than 40 people with bias-motivated crimes since January 2021, obtaining over 35 convictions.

  • The Buffalo Shooting Suspect Once Threatened a Mass Shooting. Why Wasn’t He Disarmed?

    By Jennifer Mascia

    The Buffalo mass shooter was taken into custody by police last June after he threatened to carry out a shooting at his Western New York high school. He was ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation, and released a couple of days later. None of that prevented him from buying a gun, or keeping the ones he already owned. New York has a red flag law, but it wasn’t invoked.

  • Accused Buffalo Mass Shooter Had Threatened a Shooting While in High School. Could More Have Been Done to Avert the Tragedy?

    By James Densley and Jillian Peterson

    There is a $3 billion industry in U.S. school safety focused almost entirely on hardening schools with active shooter drills, metal detectors and armed security. In recent years, however, behavioral threat assessment teams – teams in schools that get troubled people help before they turn to violence – have been touted as key to bridging the gap between hard security and soft prevention.

  • A Quest for Significance Gone Horribly Wrong – How Mass Shooters Pervert a Universal Desire to Make a Difference in the World

    By Arie Kruglanski

    There is a mental and psychological dimension to the problem of mass shooting, to be sure, but it is not illness or pathology. It is the universal human quest for significance and respect – the mother, I believe, of all social motives.

  • California Church Shooting Exposes Little-Known Tension Between Two Groups of Taiwanese

    By Ralph Jennings

    Americans of Taiwanese descent belong to two distinct groups: Members of the first group come from families which had lived in Taiwan for hundreds of years. Members of the second group descend from families who were part of a wave of people from China who were exiled to Taiwan in the 1940s under the Chinese Nationalist government as the Communists took over mainland China. Members of the first group vehemently oppose China, while members of the second group are more conciliatory toward China and its regional ambitions. The two groups’ historical differences and ongoing tensions became evident on Sunday in a shootout at a Taiwanese Presbyterian church gathering in Southern California.

  • More Mass Shootings Are Happening at Grocery Stores – 13% of Shooters Are Motivated by Racial Hatred, Criminologists Find

    By Jillian Peterson and James Densley

    Mass public shootings in which four or more people are killed have become more frequent, and deadly, in the last decade. And the tragedy in Buffalo is the latest in a recent trend of mass public shootings taking place in retail establishments.

  • U.S. Gun Homicides Spiked 35% From 2019 to 2020: CDC Report

    By Rob Garver

    The U.S. firearm homicide rate spiked 35 percent in 2020, the first full year of the coronavirus pandemic, rising to the highest level in almost three decades of record-keeping. The CDC reported 19,350 firearm homicides in the U.S. in 2020, and 24,245 cases of suicide by gun during the same period.

  • News Media Heeding Call to Limit Naming Perpetrators in Mass Shootings

    By Thomas J. Hrach

    Is reducing the number of times the perpetrator’s name is used in news coverage in the public interest? It certainly diminishes the notoriety of the perpetrator and reduces any incentive to become famous. Yet when the name is not used, other more relevant details, such as the person’s motives and background, may also not be reported.

  • Co-Offenders Likely to Violently Turn on One Another: Gang Study

    Researchers use over a decade of data from Thames Valley Police to reveal ‘mechanisms’ that generate and sustain violence within networks of organized crime.