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OP is ignoring most of the mass shooters in order to bolster his point.
Omar Mateen, 29 - Pulse Nightclub
Snochia Moseley, 26 year old trans female - Maryland Rite Aid
Stephen Paddock, 64 - Las Vegas
Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27 - San Bernardino
Gregory Paul Ulrich, 67 - Buffalo Medical Clinic
Aminadab Gaxiola González, 44 - Orange, California
Samuel James Cassidy, 57 - Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority
IMO, mental illness plays a factor in many of the mass shootings, more so than age/sex of the shooter(s). Still, young males are overrepresented so OP is not entirely wrong.
Most of the U.S. Military will henceforth use slingshots.
Having trained young men and women in firearms safety in a military setting, the uniformed services can in fact provide a bit of insight. Because if my experience is anything to go by, you can take a group of young men, put them in uniform, teach them to respect command authority almost instinctively, and hammer home, again and again, that failure to obey orders to the last damn comma will call down the Wrath of God Almighty.
But when you put them on a firing line for the first time, you still have to watch them like a hawk, because for a non-trivial percentage, the combination of testosterone and gunpowder leads to a sort of giddy excitement that partially erases the capacity for sound decision-making.
Most young men under strict oversight can be trained to become safe firearms users. But it's a really, really bad field in which to employ learning-by-experience.
I was once a teen as well. Strangely, I made it to adulthood without blowing away a school full of children. And I even had several guns. Still have them. Still haven't shot anyone. I guess I'm a black swan.
Salvador Ramos (Uvalde, TX) - male, age 18
Payton Gendron (Buffalo, NY) - male, age 18
Patrick Crusius (El Paso, TX) - male, age 21
Nikolas Cruz (Parkland, FL) - male, age 19
Dylan Roof (Charleston, SC) - male, age 19
Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook, NJ) - male, age 20
Eric Harris (Columbine, CO) - male, age 18
Dylan Klebold (Columbine, CO) - male, age 17
Maybe we don't need sweeping gun control laws. We don't need to take guns away from women, or from middle-aged men. There is a very specific cohort here. Why don't we concentrate on keeping guns out of the hands of young men?
Unless one has served in the Israeli military, those under age 27 are ineligible to apply to purchase a firearm.
The super majority of those ages 17-24 in the US do not enlist and of those who attempt to do so, the reject rate is high due to lack of high school diploma, inability to pass basic qualification test and obesity.
Salvador Ramos (Uvalde, TX) - male, age 18
Payton Gendron (Buffalo, NY) - male, age 18
Patrick Crusius (El Paso, TX) - male, age 21
Nikolas Cruz (Parkland, FL) - male, age 19
Dylan Roof (Charleston, SC) - male, age 19
Adam Lanza (Sandy Hook, NJ) - male, age 20
Eric Harris (Columbine, CO) - male, age 18
Dylan Klebold (Columbine, CO) - male, age 17
Maybe we don't need sweeping gun control laws. We don't need to take guns away from women, or from middle-aged men. There is a very specific cohort here. Why don't we concentrate on keeping guns out of the hands of young men?
How many of them were known to law enforcement before committing mass murder?
The common demoninators are mental illness and psychotropic drugs.
Agree 100%. However there is danger of making false conclusions based on a simple statement like that. Without the help of psychotropic drugs would rates of mass shootings be even higher….. or would they be lower? The answer is unknown. It’s easy at that point to say “well decades ago less people were on psychotropic drugs and there were less mass shootings, but that’s just a surface level observation not based on any real proof. It doesn’t take into account vastly changing culture, the effects of social media, the variance in gun availability (if any, idk just giving examples), and likely hundreds of other factors that differ from back in the 50a or 60s. Essentially I’m saying that with such a complicated and intricate problem, we have to be very careful not to draw non-scientific conclusions. Doing so won’t help anyone in the long run.
How many of them were known to law enforcement before committing mass murder?
2/8 were known to LE before becoming a mass shooter.
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