The 22-year-old college student who killed six people in Santa Barbara, California, in 2014, offered one of the most direct expressions of a gunman’s mindset in a video on YouTube: The gun, he said, gave him a sense of power. .
The Buffalo gunman, who impersonated the 28-year-old anti-Muslim terrorist who massacred 51 people in Christchurch, New Zealand, three years ago, livestreamed himself while methodically killing shoppers for being black. The man accused of the murders in Uvalde used Yubo, a relatively new platform, to share threatening messages in which he appeared to telegraph his plans.
“It’s a way for kids to bend,” said Titania Jordan of Bark Technologies, an online safety company that monitors the use of platforms for violent content. “It’s a way for them to show strength when they’re being bullied or left out. Now it’s just part of the story in all these cases – there’s always a social media component.”
There is also an organic. Scientists have long known that the teenage and post-teen years are a critical time for brain development and for most teenage boys a time often characterized by aggressive and impulsive behavior. Girls of the same age, on the other hand, have more control over their impulses and emotions.
Overall, boys and young men are responsible for half of all homicides involving firearms or any other weapon nationwide, a percentage that is steadily rising. Exactly 50 percent of all homicides in 2020, the last year of comprehensive data, were committed by attackers under the age of 30, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Tracking System.
Mass shootings, defined by most experts as the deaths of more than four people, are rare; shootings on the Buffalo and Uvalde scale, 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 drug activity, gang conflict, domestic violence and personal disputes, according to statistics compiled by the federal government and academics.
“Why are there a disproportionate amount of crimes committed by men in their late teens and early 20s?” asked Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Temple University who has worked extensively on issues related to adolescent brain development.