WASHINGTON – The two young men accused of carrying out the massacres in Buffalo and Uwalde followed a familiar path: they legally bought semi-automatic rifles as soon as they turned 18, published images to show their strength and threat – and then aimed their weapons at innocent people. people.
As investigators and researchers determine how the tragedies unfolded, the age of the accused appears to be a key factor in understanding how two teenagers were prompted to acquire such deadly firepower and how it led to mass shootings.
They are in a critical age range – approximately 15 to 25 – which law enforcement officials, researchers and policy experts see as a dangerous crossroads for young men, a time when they are in a storm of developmental changes and societal pressures. it can turn them to violence in general and, in the rarest cases, mass shootings.
Six of the nine deadliest mass shootings in the United States since 2018 are from people 21 or younger, a change for shootings with mass casualties, which before 2000 were most often initiated by men in the middle of the 20s, 30s and 40s.
“We see two clusters when it comes to mass shooters, people in their 40s who do shootings in the workplace, and a very large group of young people – 18, 19, 20, 21 – who seem to be addicted to the social contagion of murder, “said Gillian Peterson, a professor of criminal justice who helped create 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 take part in mass shootings. (Girls and women make up a small percentage of all perpetrators.) But many of the reasons most often cited by law enforcement officials and scientists seem intuitive – online harassment, increasingly aggressive arms marketing of boys, weak state gun laws and federal laws that make the purchase of a semi-automatic “long pistol” legal on the 18th.
The shootings come amid a deteriorating crisis in adolescent mental health that preceded the pandemic but intensified it. Much of the despair among teenagers and young people is inward, with rising levels of self-harm and suicide. In this sense, the perpetrators of mass shootings are an exceptional minority of young people, but it is nevertheless an example of the wider tendencies of loneliness, hopelessness and the darker side of a culture saturated with social media and violent content.
In addition to Buffalo and Uwalde, Texas, there was a mass shooting at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, in March 2021 that police said was committed by a 21-year-old man; the massacre by the authorities, which authorities say was a 21-year-old armed man targeting Spanish-speaking shoppers at Walmart in El Paso in August 2019, resulted in 23 deaths; a shooting at a school 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 murder of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in February 2018 by a 19-year-old former student.
Only two of the 30 deadliest mass shootings recorded between 1949 and 2017 involve armed men under the age of 21: the first was the massacre of 13 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, Connecticut, in 2012.
Wednesday’s shooting in Tulsa, Okla, in which a gunman killed four people and wounded several others before apparently taking his life, opposed the recent model. Police said they believe the unidentified shooter is between 35 and 40 years old.
Frank T. McAndrew, a professor of psychology at Knox College who studies mass shootings, said almost all of the young killers he studied were motivated by the need to prove themselves.
“These are young boys who feel like losers and have a huge desire to show everyone that they are not at the bottom,” he said. “In the case of the Buffalo shooter, it was an attempt to impress this community of racists he had cultivated online. In the case of the kid in Uwalde, it was about going back to the place where you feel disrespected and acting violently.
Ms Peterson added: “And from Columbine, they tend to learn and emulate each other. This is a growing problem. “
In almost every case, social media or interactive online gaming platforms have played a role, reflecting the ubiquity of online youth culture over the past two decades.
Weapons control protesters in Washington held a vigil last week for victims in Uwalde and Buffalo. Credit … Kenny Holston for The New York Times
In the late 1990s, at the dawn of the social media era, one of Columbine’s gunmen set up a blog at AOL to detail his violent thoughts.
The 22-year-old student who killed six people in Santa Barbara, California, in 2014 offered one of the most direct expressions of the shooter mentality in a video posted on YouTube: The gun, he said, gives him a sense of power.
The Buffalo gunman, imitating the 28-year-old anti-Muslim terrorist who killed 51 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, three years ago, is broadcasting live while methodically killing shoppers because they are black. The man accused of the Uwalde murders is using Yubo, a relatively new platform, to share threatening messages in which he seems to be telegraphing his plans.
“It’s a way for children to bend,” said Titania Jordan of Bark Technologies, an online security company that monitors the use of violent content platforms. “It’s a way for them to show strength if they are harassed or abandoned. Now, in all these cases, it’s just part of the story – there’s always a social media component.
There is also biological. Scientists have long known that the teenage and post-teenage periods are a critical period for brain development and a time for most teenagers, often characterized by aggressive and impulsive behavior. Girls of the same age, in contrast, have more control over their impulses and emotions.
In general, boys and young men account for half of all homicides with weapons or other weapons across the country, and the percentage is constantly rising. Exactly 50 percent of all homicides in 2020, with comprehensive data available for the past year, were committed by attackers under the age of 30, according to the FBI’s unified crime tracking system.
Mass shootings, identified by most experts as involving the deaths of more than four people, are rare; shootings on the scale of Buffalo and Uwalde, with more than 10 casualties, are even less common. About 99 percent of all shootings in the country involve fewer victims, are the result of crime or personal disputes, and are motivated by drugs, gang conflicts, domestic violence and personal disputes, according to statistics from the federal government and academia.
“Why are there a disproportionate number of crimes committed by men in their late teens and early 20s?” Asked Lawrence Steinberg, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Temple University who has worked extensively on adolescent brain development. .
The explanation, he said, includes the increasingly well-understood neurobiology of adolescence. During adolescence, a “huge mismatch” develops between parts of the brain that cause impulsive behavior and emotional sensitivity and other parts of the brain that regulate the action of such impulses, Dr. Steinberg said. Men, he added, tend to have an even higher, faster peak of arousal, while women see a higher peak in regulation at an earlier age – and therefore “men are more demanding at every age.”
The height of this discrepancy is usually in the late teens or early 20s. “Then regulatory systems begin to catch up, and you get this gradual improvement in the ability to control thoughts, emotions, and behavior that continued into the early 1920s,” Dr. Steinberg added.
Changes in brain development are accompanied by a disorienting social transition from boy to man, with all the turbulence that leads even in healthy boys. There are “big differences in socialization between men and women related to aggressive behavior, appropriate ways to seek support, how to show emotions and acceptability of firearms use,” said Sarah Johnson, a professor of pediatrics at John University School of Medicine. Hopkins.
Young men are “almost ubiquitously” in transition “in their relationships, life situations, lifestyles, education, profession”, while “at the same time they have significant autonomy from adults in their lives and may be negotiating with a small support or oversight, ”said Dr. Johnson.
A memorial near the Tops grocery store in Buffalo, where 10 people were killed last month. Credit … Kenny Holston for The New York Times
Yet what sets mass murderers apart from other young men who do not act on these impulses is difficult to define, and even more difficult to oppose: insanity.
However, the majority of young men with mental disorders, even serious ones, never commit acts of violence. They are more likely to be victims or impulsively hurt than to carefully plan violence against others.
Responding to Democrats’ calls for tighter gun control, Republicans have called for better school safety and mental health services in the wake of the recent massacres.
Conservatives also oppose efforts by Democrats in Congress to raise the legal age for buying a semi-automatic rifle from 18 to 21. A Republican-appointed federal judge recently rejected California’s attempt to increase the age. The state has enlisted Dr. Steinberg and other experts to prove scientific arguments for keeping such weapons out of the hands of teenagers.
Their arguments did not prevail. “America would not exist without the heroism of the young adults who fought and died …
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