Time Has Proved the Slow-Riot Theory of Mass Shootings
We don’t actually know how to solve the crisis.
We’ll begin with two scenarios and explore which one is worse. In the first scenario, we know there’s a crisis, and we know there’s a solution to the crisis, yet we lack the political will to solve it. This is often the way we talk about mass shootings, and it’s wrong. We do not, in fact, have a solution to the crisis, and the very thought that we do is further tearing at the fabric of American life—wrongly pitting those who think they’ve solved the problem against those they view as callous or indifferent to the loss of innocent life.
The second, true, scenario is this—we don’t know how to solve the mass-shooting problem. We don’t even really know how to make it better. We have good-faith ideas, but we don’t have sufficient evidence that they work.
Let’s discuss first what we know, and then we’ll explore why that might be. The “what” is best stated by a Rand Corporation review of studies of the effects of 18 policies designed to address mass killings. Its conclusion: “We found no qualifying studies showing that any of the 18 policies we investigated decreased mass shootings.” To be clear, for nine of the policies (including red-flag laws and arming teachers), there were no studies that met Rand’s standards for quality and rigor. We don’t know the effects of those policies on the present crisis. It’s too soon to tell.
But nine policies were rigorously studied, and they include many of the most popular gun-control proposals in America, including background checks, bans on the sale of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines, minimum age requirements, and waiting periods. This finding is consistent with a famous fact-check by The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler, where he found that neither enhanced background checks nor assault-weapons bans would have prevented recent, deadly mass shootings.
At first blush, this seems to make little sense. After all, don’t assault-weapons bans put high hurdles in the way of a mass shooter who wants to use an AR-15? Won’t magazine-capacity restrictions limit death tolls? But again, the evidence doesn’t support our instincts. And the reason why relates to the nature of the crime itself.
In 2015 Malcolm Gladwell wrote the single best, most insightful, and most sobering work yet written about mass shootings. The piece is complex, but the thesis is relatively simple—the United States is in the midst of something like a slow-motion riot, where each mass shooter is lowering the threshold for the next. The Columbine murders kicked off the “riot,” and we’ve been living with the consequences ever since.
Gladwell relied heavily on the work of Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, and Granovetter argues that it’s a mistake to view each incident on its own:
In his view, a riot was not a collection of individuals, each of whom arrived independently at the decision to break windows. A riot was a social process, in which people did things in reaction to and in combination with those around them. Social processes are driven by our thresholds—which he defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.
Gladwell focused on school shootings, and there his thesis is most compelling. It’s not that Columbine invented school shootings, but it altered the narrative, decisively:
The sociologist Ralph Larkin argues that Harris and Klebold laid down the “cultural script” for the next generation of shooters. They had a Web site. They made home movies starring themselves as hit men. They wrote lengthy manifestos. They recorded their “basement tapes.” Their motivations were spelled out with grandiose specificity: Harris said he wanted to “kick-start a revolution.” Larkin looked at the twelve major school shootings in the United States in the eight years after Columbine, and he found that in eight of those subsequent cases the shooters made explicit reference to Harris and Klebold. Of the eleven school shootings outside the United States between 1999 and 2007, Larkin says six were plainly versions of Columbine; of the eleven cases of thwarted shootings in the same period, Larkin says all were Columbine-inspired.
Gladwell’s conclusions were controversial. As Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic in 2017, Gladwell’s theory was “mocked for its suggestiveness.” Thompson pointed out that there was “some data that mass shootings often occur in bunches, which indicates that they ‘infect’ new potential murderers, not unlike a disease.” A 2015 paper out of Arizona State University found “significant evidence that mass killings involving firearms are incented by similar events in the immediate past.” Suicide and terrorism were “likewise contagious.”
But what about the phenomenon makes it resistant to common gun-control measures? After the Pulse nightclub shooting, in Orlando, Gladwell told CBS This Morning, “Let’s not kid ourselves that if we passed the strictest gun control in the world that we would end this particular kind of behavior.” And Gladwell isn’t opposed to gun control. The reason lies in the script—mass shootings tend to be among the most deliberately planned crimes in America, and deliberate planning assists in evading even the most rigorous American gun-control regimes. (For example, the Buffalo shooter bought a rifle that was lawful under New York’s assault-weapons ban and then modified the rifle to make it more deadly.)
Thus we continue to see mass shootings even in states that have enacted the entire wish list of gun-control measures, including assault-weapons bans, magazine restrictions, universal background checks, and waiting periods.
I share this not to cause us to abandon either hope or efforts to end the American scourge of mass shootings, but rather to ask us to refocus. And one way to refocus is to use the script of mass killings against mass killers. As I wrote last week, that script—which includes meticulous planning—also tends to include “leaking” plans before the attack, thus raising the possibility of early intervention. That’s where red-flag laws have a chance to work.
But refocusing also means understanding that many of the arguments around mass shootings and gun control are deeply flawed. Gun control has costs. Increases in criminal penalties risk magnifying the American challenge of mass incarceration—especially in those vulnerable and marginalized communities that encounter the police more often. Placing additional obstacles in front of law-abiding gun purchasers can inhibit their ability to promptly purchase a gun that’s necessary for self-defense.
In fact, I wish the gun debate included more voices of people who have faced threats to their lives without the wealth and resources to employ armed security guards. That’s my family’s story. We’re law-abiding, and we’ve faced threats from white nationalists and white supremacists. Preventing me from purchasing a semiautomatic firearm with a standard-capacity magazine would place me at a disadvantage against the most likely kind of attacker we’d face.
Let’s debate the proper response to mass shootings, but let’s do so with an open, sober mind. The “riot” is ongoing, more and more shooters are following the same deadly scripts, and many of our nation’s most popular gun-control policies haven’t been proved to make a material difference. Against this backdrop of deadly uncertainty, two things are clear—no one has the answer, and unless we approach the question with a proper sense of humility, we could close our minds to creative and new responses that just might work.