Gun Baby Gun. Iain Overton
and that evening the news the world over led with the blood Saari had shed and the name of Kauhajoki. Bulletins showed the rows of flickering candles and teddy bears outside the school. Images of the Finnish emergency services standing around awkwardly were transmitted across the world. And the shooter’s vicious videos and his ugly testimonies were replayed endlessly.
Of course, this was a big story, not only because it was the second mass shooting that Finland had had in two years, but also because it was the death of young, hopeful white people. Such things are important in Western news agendas, because prejudices and priorities dictate the amount of airtime a story is given – what has been called a ‘hierarchical news structure on death’.3 A white shooter killing twenty kids in the US will dominate the global press. Twenty black adults dying in a hail of bullets in Nigeria will barely register. And when it comes to mass shootings, schools will always get more coverage than anywhere else, even though in the US businesses are almost twice as likely to be the blood-soaked epicentres of mass shootings.4
What it means is that, while mass shootings may only constitute about 1 per cent of all gun deaths in the US, their impact in terms of headlines and column inches is profound.
Some say it is too much, that the media’s saturated coverage of a mass shooting encourages others to carry out copycat attacks – tortured souls seeking to burn out in a blaze of infamy.5 They have a point. In 356 BC, a Greek called Herostratus torched the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. It was, contemporaries wrote, an attempt to immortalise his name.6 And it worked. The fact we know the arsonist’s name, the destroyer of one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, shows us that terrible crimes can achieve eternal fame. In the same way we know the names of Adam Lanza, Seung-Hui Cho, Anders Behring Breivik and, possibly in small part because of my efforts, Matti Saari.
This idea that the media can influence extreme behaviour is perhaps best illustrated by looking at the time when newspapers agreed to cooperate with the authorities following a spate of suicides in the 1980s subway system in Vienna. Negotiations led to local Austrian papers changing their coverage by avoiding any simple explainers as to why someone threw themselves in front of a train, by moving the tragic stories off the front page and keeping the word ‘suicide’ out of headlines. Subway suicides there fell by 80 per cent.7
This led some to ask: ‘Would the same happen if there was a media blackout on mass shootings?’ Certainly there have been very vocal critics of the media’s saturation coverage of some mass shootings. A forensic psychiatrist told ABC News the airing of the Virginia Tech killer’s video tape was a social catastrophe: ‘This is a PR tape of him trying to turn himself into a Quentin Tarantino character . . . There’s nothing to learn from this except giving it validation.’8 Others have said that the gory details of shootings help ‘troubled minds turn abstract frustrations into concrete fantasies’.9
Perhaps these things are true. But the media’s focus also highlights things like the inadequacies of existing national gun law. The fierce coverage of Kauhajoki, for instance, encouraged the Finnish government to reduce the number of handgun licences and to raise the minimum age of gun ownership. The media helped do that.
So, when journalists descend on a sleeping town where lives have been shattered by the sharp retort of gunfire, they should tell themselves they are there to report on these horrors for one reason and one reason only – to try to stop this happening again. Not to titillate, but to warn.
We thought of these sensitivities as we lined up outside the school’s entrance that night – a straight run of white broadcast trucks in front of pools of candles and stunned locals. Then London called, and we were on-air.
In 1966, a twenty-five-year-old ex-marine called Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the University of Texas tower. He carried with him three rifles, three handguns and a sawn-off shotgun. By the time he was killed a few hours later, Whitman had shot forty-eight people, sixteen of whom died, and the world was introduced to a very unique, modern monster: the mass shooter.
Of course, the terrible visitation of mass death on schools and offices is not just an American tragedy. The deadliest mass shooting was by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway in 2011, where sixty-nine died in a shooting spree, and a further eight lost their lives in a bomb blast. Before that, the world’s deadliest attack by a lone shooter was in a small farming community in South Korea. There, in 1982, a policeman called Woo Bum-kon killed fifty-six. His rampage was triggered when the woman he was living with woke him from a nap; she had swatted a fly that had landed on his chest.10
Despite these global killings, the greatest media focus is on those carried out in the US. An Associated Press list of twenty of some of the ‘deadliest mass shootings around the world’ featured eleven US attacks.11 It’s been calculated that there have been over 200 such incidents in the US since 2006.12
And if you define a mass shooting as one where at least four people are wounded, not killed, then in 2013 there were 365 American incidents: a mass non-lethal shooting every single day.13 It’s also seemingly getting worse. According to the FBI, the rate of deadly mass shootings went up from one every other month between 2000 and 2008 (about five a year) to over one per month between 2009 and 2012 (almost sixteen a year).14 Of the dozen deadliest shootings ever to have taken place in the US, half have been since 2007.15
Of course, the media focus not just on the numbers killed and the frequency of the killings, but also on the people who wielded the guns. People ask: ‘Who would do such a thing?’
It’s difficult to give a definitive answer. The US secret service looked at the phenomenon of mass shooters and concluded there was no single ‘profile’ of a school shooter. Each shooter differed from others in numerous ways. Despite this, there is a consensus that some trends exist. In 2001 a study looked at forty-one adolescent American mass murderers: 34 per cent were described as loners; 44 per cent had a preoccupation with weapons; and 71 per cent had been bullied.16 Other traits seem to dominate, too.
Mass shooters are almost always male. There’s only been a handful of cases of female mass shooters: one such was Jennifer San Marco, a former postal worker, who killed five at a mail-processing plant in California, as well as her one-time neighbour, before shooting herself.17 Why mass shooters are so disproportionately male is unclear. Some see men as having a different approach to responding to life’s disappointments. Others see their violence as highlighting gender differences in testosterone levels and mental development.18 Each reason is frustratingly nebulous, though, and, apart from banning access to guns to all men, does little to help us work out how to put an end to such murders.
Mass shooters are loners. In rare instances, there may be two shooters working together, such as in the Jonesboro massacre, where Mitchell Johnson, aged thirteen, and Andrew Golden, just eleven, shot dead four students and a teacher and wounded ten others.19 But, generally speaking, a mass shooter typically acts alone and is not affiliated to any group or cult, again making it hard for authorities to identify them and act preemptively.
They are relatively young; the Congressional Research Service puts US mass shooters average age at thirty-three.20 It’s rare for them to be very young, though – ages eleven and thirteen are untypical. There are various things that go towards explaining why adolescents don’t go on rampages: children’s access to guns, the fact that teachers and parents are often able to intervene when adolescents exhibit worrying behaviour, and the reality that shorter lives are often not so filled with disappointment all play a part.
We know that mass shooters are typically socially awkward. They rarely have close friends and almost never have had an intimate relationship, although they sometimes have had failed flings. They don’t tend to have problems with alcohol and drugs, and they are not impulsive – indeed quite the reverse.
This might lead many to assume that mass shooters are all blighted with a long history of mental ill health. Not so. Obviously they all have a warped and broken view of the world to do what they do, but a diagnosed mental-health