Jillian Peterson and James Densley believe we should view mass shootings—the kind particular to life in the United States—as “deaths of despair.” This term, coined by economists in 2015, is typically reserved for suicides or fatal overdoses, acts of self-harm that are on the rise in the United States amidst economic stagnation and societal malaise. But Peterson and Densley suggest we also apply this framework to deaths that occur as a result of gun violence as well.
When a person—most often a white man—storms into a public space with the intention of killing as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, this amounts to a death of despair for the perpetrator.
Peterson and Densley are among the nation’s top researchers into mass shootings and those who commit them. Both are based in the Twin Cities, where Peterson is a forensic psychologist professor at Hamline University and Densley is a criminal justice researcher and professor at Metropolitan State University.
Earlier this year, the pair won the 2022 Minnesota Book Award in nonfiction for their book, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic. They also run the nonprofit research center, The Violence Project, which focuses on collecting and analyzing data surrounding mass shootings with the goal of preventing them in the future.
David Remnick of The New Yorker interviewed Peterson and Densley on May 24, just hours before the shooting occurred in Uvalde, Texas. On The New Yorker Radio Hour, they discussed the racially motivated mass shooting that had taken place in Buffalo, New York, on May 14.
But before the interview had even been edited, Remnick explains in the show’s introduction, news broke about the shooting in Uvalde. Remnick called the two researchers back to process this latest horrifying incident of gun violence, adding the additional segment to the show.
Remnick asked the researchers why these shocking and disturbing mass shootings keep happening in the United States. Though there’s no simple answer to this question, Peterson and Densley have extensively studied the patterns that typically accompany such events. When a person—most often a white man—storms into a public space with the intention of killing as many people as possible, as quickly as possible, this amounts to a death of despair for the perpetrator.
The shooter has made a decision on some level, Peterson told Remnick, to end own their life, either by suicide, by being shot by another person on site, or by spending the rest of their life in prison. It is a desperate act, one typically rooted in unaddressed childhood trauma, misery, and some form of radicalization or escapist fantasy.
The shooter takes other lives along with their own because they have become convinced that someone or something is to blame for their pain and anger, whether that’s schoolchildren and teachers, like in Uvalde, or Black people going about their daily lives, like in Buffalo.
While these most recent cases are still very new, Peterson told Remnick that they still fit an identifiable pattern. “I see the same story playing out, over and over and over again,” she said, a pattern marked by warning signs, immersion in hate, and a ready access to firearms.
“It feels like we really should be able to take action by this point,” Peterson said.
“As cops try to spin Uvalde as one bad choice by a bad police commander from a brand new small ‘cowardly’ police department. Please remember these facts.”
So, why don’t we? One reason, it seems, is that we don’t really understand or are unwilling to confront the despair that typically goads mass shooters into action. While talking with Remnick, Densley noted that people who commit these acts are most often experiencing a “suicidal crisis” that morphs into something larger.
This might seem obvious in hindsight, but it also appears to be one of the biggest clues that we collectively ignore until it’s too late. Many Americans live without a social safety net, Densley told Remnick, which is one key reason why all kinds of deaths of despair—from suicide to overdoses to mass killings—are on the rise.
Peterson and Densley said they specifically use data and research to make their arguments to avoid the political firewalls that have effectively blocked gun control legislation in the United States since at least 2004, when the Clinton-era ban on assault rifles expired and was not renewed by Congress.
Focusing on the broader social context that exists in the United States, however, flies directly in the face of the “bad apple” line of thinking that permeates our culture almost as much as guns and violence. As soon as a mass shooting takes place, those responsible are typically cast as “lone wolves” or “deranged” individuals, particularly by Republican leaders who refuse to support any type of gun reform legislation.
This applies to other aspects of our culture as well.
When police officers kill or injure civilians on the job, they are typically dismissed as being “bad apples” rather than representatives of a system built on violence and brutality. This narrative took hold in Minneapolis in 2020, just weeks after George Floyd was murdered by former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
As calls to defund the police in the wake of Floyd’s death grew louder in Minneapolis, local civic and philanthropic leaders instead tried to outsource police reform by contracting with a company that promised to use software to root out “problematic behavior” by individual officers.
And just recently, in Uvalde, the utter inaction by the town’s police force—the presumed “good guys with guns” that Republicans often say will save us—is being spun as a few bad cops making a bad decision.
Alec Karakatsanis warns us not to fall for this rhetoric.
Karakatsanis, the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, a criminal justice reform organization, is a prolific tracker of “copaganda” via his Twitter account, where he posts frequent threads outlining the way pro-police PR seeps into mainstream news reports.
On May 29, Karakatsanis debunked the idea that what happened in Uvalde was somehow another example of bad-apple cops dropping the ball.
“As cops try to spin Uvalde as one bad choice by a bad police commander from a brand new small ‘cowardly’ police department. Please remember these facts,” he tweeted.
He then offered a thread full of evidence regarding the way that federal agents outside of Robb Elementary targeted frantic parents, even after the mass shooting had ended, and how a police cover up, which was supported by Texas governor Greg Abbott, immediately took root.
It’s essential reading if we are to begin to confront the dangers posed by bad-apple theories. And it applies to our understanding of what causes someone to become a mass shooter, too.
Dismissing mass shooters as individual bad actors allows us to avoid our collective responsibility for these deaths of despair. We cannot continue to accept this.