Whenever there’s a mass shooting, like the three last week, we ask ourselves two questions: Why? And, how can we keep it from happening again?
The Violence Project, a nonpartisan think tank, strives to answer those questions. Under a grant from the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Violence Project has created a database of every mass shooting since 1966. Note that they don’t include shootings that resulted from an underlying criminal activity, like an armed robbery, or from “commonplace circumstances” such as an argument or a romantic triangle.
The database contains information on 160 perpetrators of mass shootings, including details of their lives and the communities and locations where the shootings took place. Researchers interviewed incarcerated shooters, family members, first responders, and survivors, and studied shooters’ social media postings and suicide notes…
Source: San Francisco Examiner
Author: Sally Stephens