In their article for New York Times, Glenn Thrush and Matt Richtel try to understand why a disproportionate number of crimes are committed by males in their late teens and early 20s.
Glenn Thrush and Matt Richtel / New York Times
The two young men accused of carrying out the massacres in Buffalo and Uvalde followed a familiar path: They legally bought semiautomatic rifles right after turning 18, posted images intended to display their strength and menace — and then turned those weapons on innocent people.
As investigators and researchers determine how the tragedies unfolded, the age of the accused has emerged as a key factor in understanding how two teenagers became driven to acquire such deadly firepower and how it led them to mass shootings.
They fit in a critical age range — roughly 15 to 25 — that law enforcement officials, researchers and policy experts consider a hazardous crossroads for young men, a period when they are in the throes of developmental changes and societal pressures that can turn them toward violence in general, and, in the rarest cases, mass shootings.
Six of the nine deadliest mass shootings in the United States since 2018 were by people who were 21 or younger, representing a shift for mass casualty shootings, which before 2000 were most often initiated by men in their mid-20s, 30s and 40s.
“We see two clusters when it comes to mass shooters, people in their 40s who commit workplace type shootings, and a very big cluster of young people — 18, 19, 20, 21 — who seem to get caught up in the social contagion of killing,” said Jillian Peterson, a criminal justice professor who helped found the Violence Project, which maintains a comprehensive national database of mass shootings.
There is no single, easy explanation for why young men are more likely to engage in mass shootings. (Girls and women make up a small percentage of all perpetrators.) But many of the causes cited most often by law enforcement officials and academics seem intuitive — online bullying, the increasingly aggressive marketing of guns to boys, lax state gun laws and federal statutes that make it legal to buy a semiautomatic “long gun” at 18.
The shootings come against a backdrop of a worsening adolescent mental health crisis, one that predated the pandemic but has been intensified by it. Much of the despair among teenagers and young adults has been inwardly directed, with soaring rates of self-harm and suicide. In that sense, the perpetrators of mass shootings represent an extreme minority of young people, but one that nonetheless exemplifies broader trends of loneliness, hopelessness and the darker side of a culture saturated by social media and violent content.
In addition to Buffalo and Uvalde, Texas, there was a mass shooting at a supermarket in Boulder, Colo., in March 2021 that the police said was carried out by a 21-year-old man; a massacre by what authorities said was a 21-year-old gunman targeting Hispanic shoppers at a Walmart in El Paso in August 2019 that resulted in 23 deaths; a school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas, in which a 17-year-old student is accused of killing eight students and two teachers in May 2018; and the killing of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., in February 2018 by a 19-year-old former student.
Only two of the 30 deadliest mass shootings recorded from 1949 to 2017 involved gunmen younger than 21: The first was the massacre of 13 people by two teenagers at Columbine High School in 1999, and the second came when a 20-year-old killed 27 people, most of them children, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in 2012.
A shooting on Wednesday in Tulsa, Okla., in which a gunman killed four people and wounded several more before apparently taking his own life, defied the recent pattern. The police said they believed that the gunman, whom they had not identified, was between 35 and 40 years old.
Frank T. McAndrew, a Knox College psychology professor who studies mass shootings, said almost all of the young killers he has researched were motivated by a need to prove themselves.
“These are young guys who feel like losers, and they have an overwhelming drive to show everybody they are not on the bottom,” he said. “In the case of the Buffalo shooter, it was about trying to impress this community of racists he had cultivated online. In the case of the kid in Uvalde, it was about going back to the place where you felt disrespected and acting out violently.”
Ms. Peterson added: “And since Columbine, they have tended to study and emulate each other. It’s a growing problem.”
In almost every case, social media or interactive online game platforms played some role, mirroring the ubiquity of online youth culture over the past two decades.
You can read the full article here.