It was a horrific event that has, in some ways, been poorly understood by the public ever since.

Friends sometimes ask me how I could spend so much time researching and reporting on mass shootings, as I’ve done for more than a decade. The answer is simple: I want to know more about how these tragedies can be prevented.

For me, this work started in 2012 with assembling a public database of mass shootings, the first of its kind. Then I began hearing about an obscure approach to violence prevention called behavioral threat assessment. America’s debate over gun policies has long been frustratingly mired in partisan politics, and as I looked into threat assessment, I saw an additional solution, one compelling enough to write a book about. I gained access to leaders in this field and began learning of successful interventions—eye-opening cases of near-attacks unknown to the public because disasters had been averted. Threat assessment teams had stepped in with troubled adults and kids and had gotten them potentially life-saving help. The cases contained vivid evidence of people who were desperate, angry, and often suicidal—and in various stages of planning extreme acts of violence.

As in most places in America back in May 2014, the threat assessment approach did not exist in the college town of Isla Vista adjacent to UC Santa Barbara, where perpetrator Elliot Rodger caused devastation. The attack provoked a media frenzy. That helped give rise to “incel” copycat shooters, an ongoing trend fueled by sensationalized and superficial news coverage. The case also prompted the creation of California’s red flag law, a policy for temporarily removing guns from troubled people that would soon spread to nearly half of all states.

I long knew from my research that Elliot Rodger’s attack had been distorted in the media and online, where commentators and YouTubers focused on the vile misogyny of his final video and his book-length, rage-filled “manifesto.” The more complicated realities of his path to catastrophic violence came even more fully into view after a source told me three years ago about a unique development: Elliot’s mother, Chin Rodger, was privately starting to share her experience with threat assessment experts, wanting to help their mission.

“I hope my hindsight will be others’ foresight,” Chin told me, after we began talking in late 2021. She said that she had stayed silent for years because she feared that telling her story would only harm the victims’ families more. But after she learned about threat assessment, she came to believe that this approach could save lives.

[Related: Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother]

I spent a significant part of the next two years investigating the Isla Vista tragedy and figuring out the right way to tell this story. New details about Elliot’s life from Chin and others, and a trove of previously unreported case evidence that I obtained, reveal important lessons. This is knowledge that can help prevent other attacks—but much of it had been buried by the mythologizing about Elliot as the iconic leader of a violent incel “revolution,” and by other unhelpful themes about America’s epidemic of mass shootings.

These new insights and evidence are featured in my Mother Jones cover story, “Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother,” which we are publishing online today. An accompanying Reveal audio investigation will further allow the public to hear from the shooter’s mother for the first time, in her own voice. My new reporting includes:

• Chin Rodger’s extensive account of what she did and didn’t notice, or misunderstood, about her troubled son’s behaviors—warning signs that she had no way of knowing about back then, but that can potentially help experts, and the public, prevent future mass shootings
• Previously unreported case evidence from the perpetrator’s cellphone videos, secret diaries, and private email communications
• Interviews with top threat assessment experts at the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit and elsewhere that cast new light on this pivotal case
• Evidence that calls into question the narrative of Elliot Rodger as an incel ringleader—a narrative that has motivated a decade’s worth of copycat attackers, including at least one mass murderer who in reality had little connection to the so-called incel movement
• Perspective from prevention experts on how red flag laws and threat assessment programs can be key tools for stopping attacks

Digging deep into the story of a mass shooter is delicate and fraught, foremost in terms of how it might affect the victims and their families. There is also the risk of feeding the kind of notoriety that many perpetrators seek. I’ve long reported and warned about these media pitfalls myself.

But as I wrote at the outset of my book, Trigger Points, focusing to varying degrees on mass shooters is integral to understanding the problem, and it reflects how the field of behavioral threat assessment operates and develops research. Reporting in the public interest requires a careful balancing act in this terrain. My purpose is to examine Elliot Rodger’s case in a way that illuminates the potential for thwarting future tragedies. That is possible to an even greater extent because of Chin’s willingness to share her account.

This month marks 10 years since the carnage perpetrated by her son. Ultimately, my hope is that this deeper investigation of the tragedy will serve to improve public understanding of mass shootings—and raise awareness of what we all can do to help prevent the next one.

along the coastal 101 in brilliant blue, the bright May sky beginning to soften toward sunset. Chin Rodger felt a lift of optimism as she exited the freeway and arrived at a sushi restaurant tucked away in the tony town of Montecito, where she greeted her 22-year-old son, Elliot. He looked well. He wore a designer shirt and Armani sunglasses, his dark hair styled, a smile on his boyish face. He was happy to see her and his younger sister, Georgia, a high school senior who often joined their mom for the drive up from Los Angeles.

This was a favorite dinner spot for their monthly get-together since Elliot began attending Santa Barbara City College more than two years earlier. They ordered their usual plates to share and chatted about nothing in particular. Seated across from Chin, Elliot began glancing over her shoulder.

“Look at that couple,” he said, eyeing a young man and woman at another table. He muttered that the guy looked unworthy of his attractive blonde date. Chin was used to his awkward social insecurity, part of his longtime emotional struggles, and she steered him back to positive conversation. She was pleased when the always skinny Elliot ordered an additional roll and began polishing it off.

“Wow, you’re eating a lot,” Georgia said.

He shrugged. “So what?”

Elliot liked this place because it felt far removed from where he lived in nearby Isla Vista, a small bluff-top town hugging University of California, Santa Barbara, whose party scene once attracted Elliot but had become alienating for him. Chin watched him enjoying the meal. It had been about three weeks since he had dropped out of communication for a few days and she found a video he’d posted online about his frustrations over girls. Worried, she’d called a social worker Elliot met with when visiting home, who said they should dial a crisis hotline in Santa Barbara. When police went to Elliot’s apartment for a welfare check, they concluded that all seemed fine with him, and his texts and calls with Chin since then had been encouraging. He’d told her his spring classes were finishing well and talked of promptly paying off a parking ticket, which struck her as part of his emerging self-improvement.

Chin cut the visit a little short because Georgia had plans with friends later that night. Their usual stroll for coffee and dessert would have to wait for next time. They hugged Elliot goodbye in the mild evening air, then got on the road back to LA.

Chin left heartened by her son’s relaxed demeanor and newfound appetite. It would be years before she would begin to learn what those really were: the last in an accumulating trail of warning signs.

The following week, Chin was driving home from work on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend when she got the news that the hot tub at her employer’s estate was malfunctioning. In recent years she had settled into her job as a trusted personal assistant to a family of wealthy philanthropists, while continuing to raise the two kids jointly with her ex-husband, Peter Rodger, a photographer and filmmaker. She pulled over from LA traffic and made a call to line up a quick repair. The forgettable task would soon be seared into her memory as a last bit of normalcy.

When she got home, Georgia was headed out for an overnight with friends, and Chin decided to relax with a bath. A little after 10 p.m., she saw a text message from Gavin Linderman, the social worker helping Elliot. Linderman was one of several young counselors in LA and Santa Barbara enlisted by Chin to give Elliot life-coaching, augmenting the therapy he sometimes did with a psychologist. Chin had texted with Elliot that evening to celebrate the end of his semester, and she figured she’d catch up to Linderman’s message later. Then he called.

“Have you checked your email?” he asked, his voice taut.

“No,” she said, “I just got out of the bath.”

“There’s an email from Elliot.”

An hour before, her son had sent out a 137-page document to nearly three dozen people with a terse message: “Attached is Elliot Rodger’s life story, which explains how I came to be the way I am.” Titled “My Twisted World,” much of it was an extended tirade about his feelings of extreme social isolation and lack of sexual experience, for which he categorically blamed women. He vowed “a day of retribution” and at the end described a plan to commit mass murder. Linderman had also found a seven-minute video that Elliot had just posted on YouTube in which he declared the same intent.

Chin glanced at the materials and quickly tried calling Elliot, but there was no answer. She dialed 911, got connected to the Santa Barbara police, and said she urgently needed to locate her son. She was disoriented: Elliot had messaged with her amicably about three hours earlier, and she had yet to really grasp what the long document and video revealed. She called Peter, who was having dinner at home with his wife and another couple. They set out immediately for Isla Vista.

As Chin left her home in West Hills and drove up the 101 freeway, she called the manager of Elliot’s apartment building and pleaded with him to go knock on Elliot’s door. He told her there was chaos in the area from a shooting and car chase, and that he thought it best to wait until morning. Chin knew Elliot liked to cruise around in the black BMW she’d gotten him—was he somehow involved or hurt? As she pressed on toward the coast, she received a call from Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Detective Joe Schmidt, who asked her a few plain questions, including whether Elliot had firearms. That startled her: Elliot had never shown any interest in guns. She explained that he had social problems and saw a therapist, and that she’d been unable to get him to call her back that day. The detective asked Chin to meet him in the parking lot of a Home Depot near Isla Vista, where Peter also was headed, accompanied by his wife and their dinner companions.

The hour-plus drive felt like forever. Chin reached the meetup location and found Peter and the others, and they waited in the lot anxiously. Around 1 a.m., a police vehicle pulled in. Schmidt walked over with a fellow detective and asked to speak with Chin and Peter privately.

“Where is my son?” Chin implored. “I’m not answering more questions until you tell me where my son is.”

Schmidt conferred for a moment with his colleague. Authorities were still in the early stages of piecing together a string of violent events in Isla Vista. He informed Chin and Peter that police had found a driver’s license on Elliot’s person at the site of a car crash, and that Elliot was deceased.

Chin dropped to her knees. She heard a guttural sound rising from Peter. Beneath her was hard ground, but she felt like she was plummeting.

They would soon learn that the news was far worse. Elliot had perpetrated a horrific massacre, one that still stands apart in America’s epidemic of mass shootings. The case would be documented extensively by investigators and play a unique role: Its unusual range of evidence would show experts more about what leads to such attacks and help advance a growing field of violence prevention. And eventually, Chin herself would join that effort.

Before the sun went down on May 23, 2014, Elliot Rodger ambushed three college students inside his rental apartment in central Isla Vista, stabbing them to death with fixed-blade hunting knives. Two of the victims were his roommates: Weihan Wang and Cheng Hong, both age 20 and students at UCSB. He killed Wang first, in Wang’s bedroom, according to an investigative report from the sheriff’s office. Hong, later returning from class, died second. The third victim, 19-year-old George Chen, a friend of Wang’s who lived on the UCSB campus, had come over after that, around dinnertime. Elliot’s violence escalated with each victim, stabbing them 15, 25, and 94 times. He covered the first body, and then the second, with blankets and clothing, likely to preserve his element of surprise.

He had a history of conflict with his roommates, who had been assigned by building management, a common practice locally with student renters. Four months earlier, Elliot had called the police claiming that Hong stole candles from his bedroom, and then had pressed the building manager in an email to kick out Hong over this “extreme problem.” The 137-page screed he blasted out the night of the rampage described his intent to lure victims to the apartment and make it his “personal torture and killing chamber,” which would require first killing his roommates. According to investigators, crime scene evidence suggested he’d rehearsed by stabbing pillows and slashing at the sheets on his bed.

Though the small apartment was within earshot of others, no one in the two-story complex noticed anything was wrong. Elliot’s roommates often shouted with excitement while playing video games together in the apartment—he’d complained bitterly about that too—and raucous noise was common in a college town. Or maybe the lack of notice was explained by the search history investigators found on Elliot’s laptop: “Quick silent kill with a knife.”

By the end of the day he’d used towels to wipe blood from the walls, removed his bloody jeans and shirt, and showered and put on fresh clothes. Around 7:30 p.m., he went to the Isla Vista Starbucks a few blocks away, where he ordered a triple vanilla latte and texted with his mom. Chin had asked Elliot earlier in the day to call when he was finished with his classes.

“I’ll call you tomorrow when I’m in my car,” he now messaged back. She replied asking why he couldn’t call sooner.

“Feel like relaxing right now,” he said. “Maybe later tonight then. All done with school now.”

“Congrats,” she said.

“Thanks.”

Latte in hand, he walked casually out of the Starbucks and returned to the apartment, where he wrote in a diary he’d been keeping for more than three years. Unlike the other neatly scripted entries, the jagged handwriting spilled down the paper: “This is it. In one hour I will have my revenge on this cruel world. I HATE YOU ALLLL! DIE.”

Just after 9 p.m., fueled by caffeine and Xanax, he sent out his screed, posted the video to YouTube, then drove his car a few blocks and parked. Recently he’d been surveilling what he called “the hottest sorority of UCSB.” This time he brought three semiautomatic pistols and more than 500 rounds of ammunition. He walked up to the front door, wearing extra ammunition strapped to his waist and carrying a filled gas can. He tried the handle, then poked at the keypad, guessing at the entry code. Then he started banging repeatedly on the door. In a fortunate twist of fate, about 40 of the residents were away on a trip to Las Vegas, and the remaining handful felt wary enough not to answer.

He left the gas can at the door, went back to his car, and spotted three sorority members walking down the street. He rolled up on them from behind with the passenger-side window down and opened fire. The burst of bullets gravely injured 20-year-old Bianca de Kock and fatally wounded her friends Katherine Cooper, 22, and Veronika Weiss, 19. Calls to 911 began to flood the system as he drove a few blocks to the front of a deli mart and fired at people who fled inside, killing 20-year-old Christopher Martinez with a single shot from close range. Then he headed for the nearby oceanfront neighborhood, ramming people and firing more shots on his way to the party epicenter of Del Playa Drive. He plowed into some victims with enough force to shatter his windshield and catapult them to the pavement.

Cruiser lights and sirens pierced the Isla Vista night as police pursued the black BMW, twice exchanging gunfire with Elliot along Del Playa and the surrounding blocks. On the passenger side of the car were the other pistols he’d purchased at area gun shops over the past 18 months, the extras to ensure he could finish his plan even if one jammed. About eight minutes into the rampage, with a bullet graze to his left hip, he circled back onto Del Playa for another pass. As police closed in, he followed a script common among mass shooters: He raised his Sig Sauer 9 mm to his head and pulled the trigger one last time. Witnesses heard the final shot and watched as the BMW, still moving westbound on Del Playa, swerved to the right and smashed into a parked car.

By then Elliot had murdered six people, wounded and injured 14 others, and traumatized countless more. Where the attack ended was no coincidence.

but exhuming Elliot Rodger’s life and ghastly final actions remains fraught. It risks inflicting further pain for the victims’ families and other survivors, and new revelations could feed the kind of infamy many perpetrators seek. The case stands out among the hundreds I’ve studied in 12 years of reporting on mass shootings. To this day it fuels copycat attackers who fixate on misogyny, making it an ongoing subject of news coverage and various academic and security research. It also helped catalyze policy change, in particular the spread of “red flag” laws aimed at keeping guns away from unstable people.

Yet from the start, this tragedy has been wrongly mythologized in the media and academia and poorly understood by the public, its lessons for prevention buried. The voluminous case evidence casts light on warning signs, the complicated role of mental illness, and other keys to effective intervention. Elliot’s behaviors leading up to the attack also make clear how the common portrayal of mass shooters is misguided and undermines the potential to stop them: They are not inscrutable monsters who suddenly “snap” and attack impulsively, but instead are troubled people who spiral into crisis—and whose brewing plans for violence can be detected, explained, and potentially prevented.

These are among the reasons Chin Rodger eventually decided to speak out about what she did and didn’t notice, or misunderstood, before Elliot’s rampage. By sharing her experience with prevention experts, and by talking with me about a trove of previously unreported case evidence and details of Elliot’s life, she hopes to help foster a clearer understanding of his attack, and, with it, greater potential to prevent violence.

“Inside I was broken into a million pieces,” she recalled about the early aftermath. “It still tears me to pieces—reading about and reliving the events, going over all the conversations I had with him and everyone around him, his writings, his personal things. It’s not just the pain of losing my son but the horrible suffering his actions caused for so many. I will carry this pain for the rest of my life.”

She had always felt close with Elliot, who was intelligent and came across as quiet and polite. Diminutive from childhood, he struggled with developmental disabilities that made him acutely shy and awkward, and his parents moved him between various schools as they sought special education and therapeutic help. He was bullied, but prior to his attack had no history of aggression known to his parents or anyone else around him. It was hard for Chin to comprehend how well he’d hidden his innermost torment, and ultimately his suicidal and homicidal intent. Even today, she hasn’t felt ready to read all of his “life story,” or to go through his two handwritten diaries, which are part of his deeper trail that until now has been almost entirely unknown to the public. She has five sealed boxes of his personal effects sitting in storage, long ago returned to her by investigators. Digging further is often still too painful and heartbreaking, she says, yet she feels compelled to keep going because she believes in the value of spotlighting missed chances to stop Elliot’s plan.

Related

Why I Spent Two Years Investigating a Notorious Mass Shooting

I began speaking with Chin in 2021 as I was finishing work on Trigger Points, my book about preventing mass shootings through the use of behavioral threat assessment. This emerging method has been adopted by businesses and government entities and is now required in public schools in 20 states. It’s a community-based approach that combines expertise from mental health, law enforcement, and other disciplines to intervene with troubled individuals who show signs of planning violence. Even as they descend into rage and despair, many mass shooters remain ambivalent about killing themselves and others—and most engage in observable warning behaviors well before they attack.

Therein lies opportunity to head off catastrophe. The red flags can range from communicated threats and changes in routine to fixation on grievances, guns, and previous killers. Signs of suicidality are crucial, as is evidence of preparation. Successful intervention usually begins after someone close to a troubled person feels worry or fear and reaches out to authorities for help. That’s where a threat assessment team comes in. Made up of psychologists, administrators, law enforcement, and other trained practitioners who meet regularly to handle cases, the team conducts interviews and gathers information to gauge the danger. Then, over weeks or months, they use constructive tools like counseling, social services, and education support to guide the troubled person away from what the field calls “the pathway to violence.”

Think of that person’s life and circumstances as a giant impressionist painting filling a gallery wall. People up close to it—a parent, a teacher, a peer—may notice a few striking details, but what do they show? A threat assessment team has the ability to make sense of the whole picture by stepping back and seeing how all those details come together. There is a well-known adage in the field: “You can’t connect the dots if you don’t collect the dots.” From Virginia Tech in 2007 to Isla Vista and beyond, many mass shootings have been marked by a disastrous lack of information sharing. People spoke up with alarm, but no threat assessment programs were in place to pull together the data and respond.

Threat assessment is about prevention, not prediction. Despite popular belief, there is no such thing as a set of demographic or personal characteristics for profiling potential mass shooters; though overwhelmingly male, they range widely in age, background, and circumstances. It is not possible to forecast with certainty who will commit violence—but experts can see when someone is at growing risk of doing so. The “profile,” so to speak, is a pattern of behaviors indicating danger. Using a method first pioneered in the 1980s, threat assessment teams have deterred scores, if not hundreds, of people who appeared headed for violence in schools, workplaces, and other venues. Often there is no crime to prosecute, and importantly, experts have learned that a supportive rather than punitive approach is more effective in many cases for reducing danger over the longer term.

About five years after Elliot’s attack, Chin discovered threat assessment while researching mass shootings online. When I learned of her interest from a source and contacted her, she waited months to open up. The first time we met in person near a sunny beach in Los Angeles felt a little surreal. Up walked a petite woman with shoulder-length brown hair and dark eyes who radiated a kindness and humor that were at first hard to reconcile with her burden. Her speech was soft, with a lilting sadness. We spoke for an entire day. She wanted to know more about the successful prevention cases I’d been chronicling for the book.

She felt haunted by questions of why therapy, social counseling, and various other efforts over the years to help her son connect with people had failed. After moving away for college, Elliot met with his social worker and sometimes a therapist during his visits home to LA. He’d been prescribed meds for depression and anxiety, though he wrote about refusing to take them. Chin hired an agency to provide Elliot with life-coaching in Santa Barbara; in his final year he met individually 29 times for walks and other activities with three young peer counselors, who encouraged him and focused on building his social skills.

Chin’s trauma was exacerbated by an enduring media-driven narrative that depicts her son as a totem of misogynistic evil, the putative leader of a violent movement made up of aggrieved men who call themselves “involuntary celibates,” or “incels.” Elliot voiced grotesque hatred of women in his writings and videos, and in his final year had posted comments on a fringe website that drew men from this online community. But, for Chin, the idea that incel ideology was the core explanation for what Elliot did seemed a distortion. She was determined to understand more clearly what had led him to carry out catastrophic violence and how it could have been prevented.

The public rarely hears from parents of mass shooters apart from brief statements of sorrow in the aftermath. (A notable exception was the mother of one of the Columbine school shooters in 1999, Sue Klebold, who became devoted to raising suicide awareness and later published a bestselling memoir.) The prevailing theme has long been that no one can see the violence coming, the parents included.

But that theme no longer holds, especially in light of a recent tragedy that could remake the legal landscape. Earlier this year, the mother and father of a 15-year-old mass shooter at Oxford High School in Michigan were convicted of involuntary manslaughter—an extreme case in which they’d ignored their son’s mental deterioration and gave him a gun just before he attacked in November 2021. In many ways, that scenario could not have been more different from Elliot’s. The Oxford shooter was an openly distressed minor living at home who was given no mental health care but access to a weapon. Elliot, by contrast, was a young adult out in the world who got extensive counseling and family support and skillfully hid his intent. Both cases, however, speak to the role of parents as potentially key to prompting expert intervention.

In a decade-plus of investigating mass shootings, I had never before heard of a perpetrator’s mother making the grueling choice to become a student of her son’s case. None of the nearly dozen threat assessment experts I spoke with for this story suggested they thought that Chin, or anyone else in Elliot’s life, was at fault for failing to anticipate what happened. Yet, Chin came to believe that there had indeed been warning signs, even though she’d had no way of knowing back then what they were. She feels she can help spread awareness, especially for people whose own loved ones might be turning dangerous. “I hope my hindsight will be others’ foresight,” she says.

In 2020, she spoke with FBI experts to provide additional details about Elliot, and, in a unique development for the field, threat assessment leaders soon began inviting her to share her perspective at trainings. Those leaders caution against overstating retrospective conclusions, given that some warning signs are more reasonably identifiable than others prior to violence. But they concur that Chin has helped further the field’s knowledge of pre-attack behaviors and circumstances, and prospects for intervention.

People close to perpetrators often hesitate to seek help and will minimize or rationalize concerning behaviors, according to Dr. Karie Gibson, unit chief at the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. In her view, Chin’s account is powerfully humanizing and will encourage others to come forward.

“I believe that prevention is possible right up until the attack happens,” Gibson told me, noting that because the public tends to regard the family members as monsters, “when you hear individuals [like Chin] tell their stories, and the personal impact, it challenges that stereotype and breaks it down. You see the realness of a mother or father, or a sister or brother connected to the individuals who go on to commit these attacks, and they also suffer in that reality.”

Chin’s experience illuminates a challenging paradox: While parents can be among those best positioned to notice warning signs, they are also likely to have the biggest blind spots to anomalous and disturbing behavior. Consider what it would really mean to realize one’s own child might be planning lethal harm. “A concerned parent may be looking for the positive, for things that are comforting, and that can cloud the ability to see certain things they may not want to see,” another threat assessment leader familiar with Elliot’s case told me.

Take what happened that night at the sushi restaurant. Elliot’s conspicuous change in demeanor and appetite had reassured Chin. But that shift in him was what experts call “unexpected brightening,” an indication of rising danger. Once a perpetrator becomes more resolved and prepared for a suicidal attack, a heightened sense of purpose and calm sets in. Elliot exuded less turmoil because he was finally ready to act.

The recently paid-off parking ticket was also not what it seemed. Whereas Chin saw her son taking responsibility, the writings and videos Elliot left behind suggest a different potential motivation: He was keen toward the end to avoid any attention from authorities, lest they possibly discover his plans. His skills of manipulation and deception had also played into the tragic miss when police went to his apartment for a welfare check in response to Chin’s concerns, just a few weeks before the mass murder.

Psychologist Stephen White, a top expert in the field who authored a definitive case study on the attack, says Chin’s engagement with threat assessment reflects extraordinary courage and resilience. “It’s the ultimate curse to be the parent of a mass murderer,” he says, with the entire world rendering a judgment of failure and culpability. “It’s confronting an enormity of shame that you’re left with. You either descend into letting that bury you, or you do the bleak work of redefining the meaning of your life. She made it her purpose to try to help, and she has.”

Those first days after were brutal. The drive back to LA to tell Georgia the crushing news. Anguished thoughts of the victims and their families. A swarm of media outside the house, then an escape to a local hotel. A hasty family meeting at a Denny’s joined by a friend of Peter’s who would help handle PR matters. A call overseas to her own mother, who’d helped care for Elliot as a child, so she wouldn’t find out from watching TV.

A gutting emptiness. The death of her son.

Chin and Peter cooperated exhaustively with police, but they struggled with how else to respond. Peter wanted to speak out and express the family’s sorrow. Chin wanted to remain in seclusion, though she recognized the pressure Peter felt to comment publicly—the intense media coverage was also spotlighting his career, particularly his recent work as an assistant director on The Hunger Games, the blockbuster tale of youths forced to hunt down and kill each other. In 2012, Elliot had joined Peter on the red carpet for the film’s LA premiere. Graphic Hollywood entertainment had been baselessly blamed for causing mass shootings ever since the Columbine massacre. One prominent film critic wrote a column arguing that Elliot’s “delusions were inflated, if not created, by the entertainment industry he grew up in.”

A month after the tragedy, Peter sat down with Barbara Walters on ABC’s 20/20 to convey the family’s condolences and devastation. He described Elliot’s long-standing issues and the family’s various efforts to help him. When Walters prodded him about public reaction, he said Elliot was “far from evil” but that “something happened to him, and then I think he became very mentally ill.” He emphasized that no one had ever thought Elliot would become violent: “What I don’t get,” he told Walters, “is that we didn’t see this coming at all. None of us.” (When I contacted Peter this spring, he declined to comment further.)

It was clear from the ABC interview that Elliot’s parents, aided by educators and therapists, had struggled to help an increasingly troubled kid—but the broadcast also engaged in a form of TV sensationalism that is now more understood to be unhelpful or even reckless in how it pushes myths about mass shooters. It played multiple segments from Elliot’s videos and used news clips, witness interviews, and voiceover narration to depict him as “a madman,” “psychotic,” “the face of the devil,” and a quiet boy turned “monster.” This reinforced the notion that mass shooters are inexplicable demons who can’t be stopped—and who can indeed capture the major media attention many crave.

In the aftermath, the world made little sense to Chin. She wouldn’t turn on a TV unless it was set to a cooking channel. She wanted to reach out to the victims’ families but feared that would only hurt them more. A mother of one of the murder victims sent her a condemning letter that was shattering to read. Only later would she know about the press conference the day after the carnage where anguished father Richard Martinez assailed politicians and the National Rifle Association for complicity in his son’s death. “They talk about gun rights—what about Chris’ right to live?” he beseeched in his wrenching remarks. “When will this insanity stop?”

Martinez agreed to a meeting with Peter at a friend’s house 10 days after the massacre, the details of which they kept private at the time.

“I got a box and put together a bunch of Chris’ stuff,” Martinez told me recently. “Pictures of him, trophies and sports jerseys, different things about Chris. Mainly a lot of photos.” They sat together in the backyard for more than an hour and Martinez did most of the talking, he recalled. Peter appeared deeply saddened and sorry. “He didn’t really talk about his son. I had the table between us full of Chris’ stuff, and I was just showing him and telling him about my son. It just felt like the right thing to do. I wanted him to know my son. I wanted him to understand our loss.”

Survivor Bianca de Kock, recovering from five bullet wounds, had also decided to speak out in the early aftermath, to grieve her murdered friends: “They were both two very incredible, beautiful people,” she told a TV reporter through tears, “and that’s how I want them remembered.” The reporter noted in the broadcast that de Kock’s parents had acknowledged that Chin and Peter also must have been “hurting terribly.”

Chin felt she would never get over what happened. “For many, many months I was just so numb,” she recalled. But an entry in her personal journal five weeks after the massacre, from just after she’d taken Georgia to stay temporarily with family abroad, suggested something more. “If you look at me now,” she wrote, “you’ll see the saddest human being on earth. But my spirit is OK, it is strong.” She would focus on caring for Georgia, and beyond that would withdraw into work, her small circle of friends and family, and her Buddhist faith.

After Georgia went away to college, Chin began to immerse herself in reading about reconciliation and violence prevention. Eventually she began reaching out to others who knew calamitous violence. She contacted Scarlett Lewis, whose 6-year-old son, Jesse, had died in the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, and who was working to boost social-emotional learning in schools. Amid tearful conversations, the two grew close from opposite ends of shared horror.

“I think it was healing for Chin to be able to talk to a victim’s parent who understands and has compassion,” Lewis said when we spoke. “I love Chin like a sister. We are sisters in grief.”

Of Chinese descent, Li Chin Tye grew up in Penang, Malaysia, and moved at age 17 to England, where she trained in health care and later worked as a unit nurse on the productions of The Princess Bride and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. A photo from the late 1980s that circulated online after Elliot’s attack showed her with George Lucas, Harrison Ford, and Michael Jackson. She met and soon married Peter, whose father was renowned British war photographer George Rodger, and Elliot was born in July 1991. When Elliot was 5 and Georgia was an infant, the family relocated to California.

By then, Elliot was showing behavioral issues. He was shy and sometimes withdrawn, and struggled with speech. He was prone to repetitive behaviors like tapping his feet and was sensitive to overstimulation—the colorful chaos of Disneyland made him cry intensely. His parents, who would soon divorce, began what would become years of therapeutic and special education support, seeing some progress as they tried different schools and as Elliot made some friends and his speech improved. But he was bullied and continued to struggle socially. The mother of an elementary school friend quoted in the New York Times remembered Elliot as an “emotionally troubled” boy who would come over to their house and just hide, leaving her and her husband apprehensive.

In high school, Elliot was diagnosed with “Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified,” a term covering a range of behavioral issues that today are categorized under autism spectrum disorder. His evaluation scores, however, landed below the threshold for ASD. The broad PDD diagnosis was intended to qualify him for special education resources, an approach sometimes used by psychologists seeking help for a troubled kid.

The ambiguity of whether Elliot was on the spectrum only underscores an egregious failure of the media frenzy—one headline labeled him as “Autistic Santa Barbara rampage killer.” Worse than just highlighting an unverified claim, various coverage misled about the possible role of the disorder and amplified a damaging stigma. Less than two years prior, the Sandy Hook massacre had stirred fear around autism when the public learned that the 20-year-old shooter had an ASD diagnosis among multiple conditions. But implied blame on autism is fundamentally wrong, as White and several colleagues made clear in research published in 2017 in the Journal of Threat Assessment and Management. “Most individuals who fall on the spectrum of ASD are neither violent nor criminal,” they wrote, affirming multiple previous studies.

That echoed decades of research showing that the link more broadly between mental illness and violence is small and has no predictive value. In an obvious basic sense, no mass shooter is mentally healthy, but the vast majority of people with mental health struggles or developmental disorders do not commit violence. Any influence of ASD among some killers studied by threat assessment experts is nuanced and requires an understanding, crucially, of comorbid factors. As White found in his case study, Elliot’s situation involved “likely features of autism spectrum disorder, narcissism, psychopathy, and depression. A predominant theme is the role of extreme social isolation and severe, pathological envy, fueling the eventual attacks.”

The media skewed the picture of his mental health in further ways: White and other experts later concluded that the large volume of forensic evidence showed that Elliot—notwithstanding how Barbara Walters had labeled him for an audience of millions—was not psychotic, a state of mental disconnection from reality. The myth that mass shooters are all insane and lack command of their actions strongly implies that they are driven by hallucinations or delusions, yet psychosis is present in only about 5 percent of all cases, according to in-depth FBI research and a study by Columbia University psychiatrists.

In reality, many mass shooters are just deeply isolated, angry, and desperate. They have decided that death is their only way out and have settled on their justification for taking others with them. Most key for prevention, then, is not a mental health diagnosis per se, but instead the recognition of a behavioral trajectory and its context. How might Elliot’s situation and lengthy planning for the attack have been identified and addressed effectively?

After mass shootings, we frequently hear that mental health treatment is paramount, a generalized assertion often used to deflect from debate over gun laws. But as Elliot’s case makes evident, conventional therapy and counseling are no magic solution when it comes to detecting and preventing planned violence.

“In a lot of cases you’ll see attempts at intervention but they aren’t landing, and that’s because something key is missing,” says FBI unit chief Karie Gibson, who is a licensed clinical psychologist. Threat experts have found that for many potential attackers, only a “thin line” separates suicidal and homicidal intent—so a priority is to discern whether a person has crossed over and is driven by both. “Someone could be in therapy but not feel comfortable or safe enough to share those deepest, darkest thoughts,” she says. Threat assessment extends concern and care but also collects information more broadly—background checks, scrutiny of social media, interviews with family, peers, and others—to evaluate the significance of specific behaviors. That includes understanding the individuals’ core grievances, Gibson adds, even if unfounded. “Whether what happened to them is real or only perceived, that’s a fact they’re living by.”

So much of Elliot’s inner rage was focused around his perception that the whole world was rejecting him. But this was wrapped up in his acute “shy narcissism,” according to White, which kept his shame and envy mostly hidden until near the end.

After high school, Elliot attended local community college briefly but was getting nowhere with school or social life. Chin and Peter hoped to expand his horizons when he expressed interest in moving 70 miles up the coast to enroll at Santa Barbara City College. Emails he wrote during this period show he felt bitter toward Peter, whom he blamed for failing to teach him how to be a successful “gentleman”—an oddly aristocratic term Elliot used in his 137-page screed that would later feed the incel mythologizing of him.

I contacted several people who worked to help Elliot during his two-plus years away from home: Gavin Linderman, the young LA social worker who’d helped instigate the welfare check in Isla Vista and called Chin the night of the massacre, did not respond to multiple inquiries. Nor did a psychologist in LA who treated Elliot periodically over the years, including near the end. A director of the agency whose three young counselors coached Elliot in Santa Barbara spoke with me, but asked not to be named. She said she noticed from the start that Elliot was keenly aware of how hard he struggled to be more normal socially, and that he had an edge to him. She explained that he liked his two male counselors but also envied their social charisma and sometimes made bitter comments in their presence about girls. He connected well with a kind female counselor, but resented the implication he needed paid female companionship.

“He deeply wanted a fairytale ending and it wasn’t coming,” the counseling director recalled.

Mental health specialists know that high-functioning youth with disabilities can become more aware of lacking progress as they grow older, which can fuel anxiety and feelings that they won’t succeed in life. Threat assessment calls this “downward drift,” says White. “That can contribute to depression, a sense of despair.”

In Elliot’s final year, Peter had enlisted a longtime friend, Hollywood producer and screenwriter Dale Launer, to try to help mentor him. The two corresponded by email and met up in LA, but that led nowhere, according to Elliot’s writing in “My Twisted World” and Launer’s own account in an essay and interview with the BBC. Launer long knew Elliot was troubled and by this point noticed he had an unhealthy entitlement about women. “We met three or four times, for a couple of hours each time,” Launer told the BBC, “and each time I had to index my expectations lower and lower.” He saw Elliot as paralyzed by timidity, and suggested he try an acting class to overcome it, but said he never got an inkling of Elliot’s “violent nature.” (Launer did not respond to a request for comment.)

I found no evidence that anyone in Elliot’s orbit ever thought he might hurt or kill people. His suicidality, a key warning factor in threat assessment, also was elusive to friends and family. Chin told me repeatedly in our many interviews that she never felt Elliot wanted to take his own life. “It’s very, very difficult to see all of this when you are in it,” she reiterated. “Now I can see that, but at that time, no way.”

The counseling director told me that when the male counselors had brought up some dark outbursts from Elliot, she didn’t think too much of it because young people facing social deficits often feel discontent and act out: “I live in the world of disabilities. Unusual behavior is all day long.”

“Chin was the most engaged parent I’ve ever seen,” she added, noting that social counseling often can succeed with high-functioning individuals. Still, she’d sensed in the final months that they were in over their heads. “We’re trying to apply social skills with this guy,” she said. “I felt that this whole situation was way beyond what I was brought in to do.”

It’s important to remember that this was early in the era of escalating mass shootings, when threat assessment was unknown to the public and even to most in mental health and law enforcement. White pointed to the implications in his study of Elliot’s condition: “Such complex difficulties are not the domain for ‘life coaches’ or ‘social skills counselors,’ however well-intentioned.”

Elliot also showed positive signs. His social counselors reported that he spoke of interest in political science clubs and volunteer work, and a document charting his goals included his aspiration to transfer to UCSB. Based on such feedback, the counseling director told Chin in late 2013 that Elliot seemed “headed in the right direction.” They saw him trying hard to improve, but he was also propping up certain illusions of progress. And his diaries were just the start of what he was concealing.

 

“It’s not just the pain of losing my son but the horrible suffering his actions caused for so many,” Chin said.

“I will carry this pain for the rest of my life.”

The term traces back more than four decades to FBI research on serial killers and certain behaviors they exude that point to their crimes. Later applied to mass shooters, it evokes how perpetrators signal their plans to attack. Threat assessment experts have found that these communications can be subtle, taking the form of innuendo, bragging, blame, or predictions. Veiled or more explicit threats show up in talk, writings, online posts, or other personal expressions—a few cases have even involved tattoos, including in homage to a Columbine shooter. Hours before gunfire erupted at Oxford High in Michigan, whose district had no threat assessment team, a teacher found a drawing of a shooting by the perpetrator labeled with comments such as “Blood everywhere” and “My life is useless.” The behavior arises from personal deterioration, as a cry for help, or both.

Elliot’s case also exemplifies a more recent insight. In 2018 research examining 63 active shooters, FBI experts found that despite the perpetrators’ self-isolating or erratic behaviors, four out of five had dodged empathetic or suspicious questioning from concerned people around them. (School shooters often claim to be just “joking” with their threats.) The research confirmed a long-standing theory: Many shooters engage in both leakage and subterfuge.

If Elliot’s troubling behaviors had come to the attention of a threat assessment team, odds for effective intervention would have jumped. He announced his intent most clearly via email and YouTube at the last moment, but other leakage appeared in his diaries going back more than four years, and in talk and actions he recorded on cellphone videos in the final months. Threat assessment leaders I reviewed this material with said his planning could have been uncovered through empathetic questioning and reviews of his online posts. “We certainly would have encouraged him to talk to us about what was burdening him and pursued other lawful ways to look into his communications,” one longtime practitioner told me.

The diaries reveal Elliot’s thinking contemporaneously and more reliably than his autobiographical screed, which he wrote in the final months and to some extent is a retrospective performance of his grievance and rage. That’s made clear by another document, “Life Story Structure Notes,” in which he outlined methodically how he would depict his early childhood as blissful yet tainted by grief, anger, and a purported focus on getting revenge against a social “enemy” at the tender age of 6. He completed his performance the day before he struck, when he parked at a palm-lined beach and recorded two takes of his final video announcing his attack. The first version of the seven-minute diatribe was disrupted by a jogger going by. The second version, the one he posted, was smoother, with his face lit more cinematically by the setting sun. “I’ll be a god, exacting my retribution on all those who deserve it,” he declared with an almost cartoonish villainy.

This final video was his bid to broadcast omnipotence in place of failure. But for a long time prior, a part of Elliot appears to have wanted his plans discovered. “I didn’t write about this before because I was scared someone might find and read my diary,” he stated in a June 2013 entry noting his purchase of a second gun and plans to stockpile ammunition. And yet, knowing he planned to attack in November (later postponing that to the following spring), he chose to create that evidence months in advance: “Since the Day of Retribution may be happening soon, perhaps even this year, I figure I’ll write it down now.” Later that June he wrote, “I am now armed and it makes me feel powerful,” describing a suicidal mission to “slaughter all of my enemies.” In that same entry, though, he also described feeling “sick with anguish” and a desire to escape his predicament.

“One of the values of this case is how extensively he documents his ambivalence,” notes White.

Such ambivalence is common among perpetrators, a pattern first highlighted two decades ago in the Safe School Initiative, a landmark federal study done by threat assessment experts after Columbine. That investigation of 37 school shooters showed how some had wavered and likely would have been receptive to help. Most young shooters leak their intent to peers, who seldom fully grasp the situation or tell an authority figure. By Elliot’s own account, he voiced biting contempt for girls to a friend he’d grown up with and then assuaged him when the friend responded that Elliot shouldn’t do anything “rash.”

His fantasies of vengeance were intercut with desperate longing throughout the nearly 200 pages of his diaries. “I really, really wish there was a way out,” he wrote in another entry. “Perhaps I should give the world another chance…I don’t want to have to resort to violent, final retribution. I want a happy life!”

“I think deep down all he really wanted was to find someone to love and have a family with, and he would say that,” Chin told me. She recalled talking with Elliot when he was attending community college in LA and hanging out at a local Barnes & Noble. One day he described looking out the window at a father helping his young kid from the car. “I wish I could have that,” he told her.

A week after the massacre, Chin received a letter from the young female social counselor who had met with Elliot over several weeks in early summer 2013. She recounted how he had opened up on their walks together, sharing laughs and bonding over an appreciation of the coastal scenery. “This is the Elliot I remember and knew,” she wrote. “A gentle, reflective, curious, clever, conscientious, and kind man. I am so incredibly sorry for your loss.” She said she’d been sad to move away from Santa Barbara and stop working with Elliot.

Later that summer Elliot was focused on “a last ditch effort” to lose his virginity before his 22nd birthday. On July 20, 2013, he got up his nerve with some shots of vodka and entered the Saturday night scene along Del Playa Drive. Around 11:30 p.m., he ventured into a house where college kids reveled in beer pong and hip-hop tracks from a DJ. Feeling ignored, he went back outside and up onto a wooden platform running along the top of the front fence line. These makeshift structures were common on Del Playa, a place for partygoers to hang out and drink while overlooking the action on the street. Around him he saw Isla Vista at its “wildest state.” When a few others came up on the platform, Elliot began insulting them—and then tried to shove a couple of the young women off the roughly 8-foot drop, toward the street. He failed and ended up on the pavement himself, fracturing his ankle. It’s unclear whether he was pushed off by guys who intervened, as he later claimed, or he jumped off, as one eyewitness said. He made his way to another nearby house party, where he also got into a confrontation. He was pummeled by a group of “obnoxious brutes,” he later wrote, only to drag himself back to his apartment in the wee hours, alone.

Later that morning Peter drove from LA to take Elliot to the hospital and help him file a police report. (No one was ever charged.) He was bruised and had facial abrasions and a swollen left eye. His ankle needed surgery. But even worse for Elliot was the shame.

“AAARGH!!! I sit here in defeat, and I am fuming with rage,” he wrote two weeks later, recovering from surgery back in LA. He wrote that his actions had been wrong, but he was horrified that “everyone in Isla Vista saw what happened” and no one had come to his aid. “That was the final straw,” he continued. “I ended up beaten, crippled, and humiliated.”

A neighbor interviewed by CNN after the massacre would recall seeing Elliot when he came back from Del Playa Drive, beaten up and sobbing uncontrollably. According to the neighbor, Elliot said, “I’m going to kill all of them. I’m going to kill myself.”

“Shame is a core motivator for many mass shooters,” says White, who observed in his case study that Elliot was mired in “pathological, insidious envy—a painful state of unworthiness related to shame that leads to the wish to destroy goodness in others.”

To some degree Elliot knew this himself: “Jealousy and envy,” he wrote in his 137-page screed, “those are two feelings that would dominate my entire life and bring me immense pain.”

In addition to his hostility toward his roommates, who were of Asian background, some of Elliot’s writings suggested self-loathing over his mixed racial identity. This included his belief that girls should be more attracted to his English heritage than they would be to “full-blooded Asians”—the “gentleman” side he imagined cultivating. Experts told me perpetrators respond to futility and shame by seeking a sense of power and control through violence. Often that includes trying to shape public perception of their attacks with bids for media attention, such as voicing racism or hateful ideology.

The party ordeal was also pivotal in Elliot’s attempt at violence. On prior occasions he had tried to splash drinks on young couples he saw in public and then quickly fled, a way he would feed his envy and anger. But this time he had sought to cause major physical injury—an escalation known as “novel aggression,” essentially a test of one’s capacity to do harm. These risk-taking behaviors also indicated Elliot’s suicidality, White told me.

As mass shooters become consumed with anger and despair, they build justification. Various extremist ideologies can serve to validate their conclusion that the only answer to their suffering is lethal violence. For years, Elliot had harbored suicidal thoughts and blamed others for his pain. But his humiliation on the party scene was a key triggering event, and it soon combined with a stirring interest in online extremism.

before his attack, Elliot began engaging with an obscure website frequented by incels, a subculture of disaffected men who lament their lack of romantic success and blame women for denying them sex. Immediately after the massacre, extremism researchers and journalists highlighted disparaging comments he’d posted online. They cited his menacing final video and his widely republished “manifesto,” as the media called it. (Though rife with ugly rants against women and grandiose ideas of violence, the book-length work is more accurately described as an autobiography of sorts.) The attack also compelled women to share stories of misogynistic abuse they’d suffered in their own lives, marked by the viral hashtag #YesAllWomen.

Internet trolls depicted Elliot as the iconic leader of an incel “revolution,” which he had said in one comment “needs to happen.” He’d posted a couple other comments about provoking fear in women and “struggling as an incel.” This drove a pat explanation of Elliot’s self-identity and motive. The media, academics, and policymakers have run with this narrative of him ever since.

The reality of Elliot’s connection to incels is more complicated. Mass shootings inevitably set off a clamor to blame an ideology as the fundamental cause, often fed by the perpetrators’ social media, but rarely do thorough investigations produce any such clear explanation. From a threat assessment perspective, Elliot’s hyperbolic misogyny is better understood as the particular way he found to channel his long-brewing suicidal despair.

Though his comments referencing incels were seized upon to show that his violence arose from that world, there is substantial evidence to the contrary. He never once used the term “incel” in his voluminous diaries or other private writings, and some of his online comments suggest he did not identify as one. While incels often attribute their failures to what they see as their physical and genetic inferiority, Elliot asserted his sense of superiority: “How dare you speak to me like that,” he retorted when one commenter insulted his looks. “I am perfection incarnate.” In a final comment posted two nights before the massacre, he told off users who labeled him a “low-class incel,” linking to video of himself accompanying his “high status” dad and stepmom at the Hunger Games premiere. “You’re all jealous of my 10/10 pretty-boy face,” he wrote. “This site is full of stupid, disgusting, mentally ill degenerates who take pleasure in putting down others. That is all I have to say on here. Goodbye.”

He appeared to engage in these forums primarily to fuel his anger and justify ideas for violence that he’d nurtured for at least a year before this activity, as his writings show and experts affirmed to me. That is, incel forums were not the source or cause of Elliot’s violent planning, but rather a tool he used to psych himself up as he prepared to act. He would also rewatch his self-recorded video rants over and over to boost his rage and resolve, case investigators told me.

This suggests that when it comes to preventing future massacres, explaining why people commit these crimes—the often murky question of motive—may ultimately be secondary to knowing the process of how they reach the point of carrying out an attack. Put another way: Elliot’s engagement with incel forums was one of many steps he took along his way to a specific form of suicide. Many mass shooters are people who have decided to end their pain by also taking out others they feel have wronged them—that’s the crossing over of the “thin line”—whether they justify their suicidal nihilism with misogyny or other strains of extremist thought.

Chin recalled Elliot telling her about the websites he’d found, but she wasn’t tech savvy and paid little attention, figuring it was “just some harmless online activity” that young people did. “I wish I’d investigated more,” she said. “I think he was telling me, ‘Look, Mom, there are other people suffering like me and this is what they are.’ But I don’t think he saw himself as one of them—he saw himself as opposite.”

The totality of case evidence does not support the idea that Elliot sought or expected to lead a violent incel movement, White told me. “He wrote well, and he used some language about social change, but he knew it was grandiose. It wasn’t some grand philosophy or manifesto. He was talking to himself about his own pain, and falling into his self-loathing.” White added that much commentary citing or analyzing Elliot’s case does not hold up from a threat assessment perspective. “You see all these articles about him from the standpoint of sociology and so on, focusing on the misogyny, and then they wander into ‘This is what caused the attack.’”

The narrative of Elliot as incel ringleader distracts from what can be learned about prevention from his case—and even worse, it fuels attention-seeking imitators. Since the Isla Vista massacre, dozens of plotters and attackers have cited incel ideology or Elliot directly as their inspiration (including in several alarming cases threat assessors have shown me that are not public). Chatter about Elliot has metastasized on incel forums, where he has a “martyr-like importance,” according to researchers. A 2018 van attack on pedestrians in Toronto that killed 10 people and injured 16 others, frequently highlighted as the deadliest incel case, stands as a remarkable example.

“The Incel Rebellion has already begun!” the 25-year-old perpetrator, Alek Minassian, posted on Facebook as he began his rampage. “All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”

Interviewed by police after his arrest, Minassian echoed Elliot’s own story, insisting that he, too, had been humiliated at a party by women who rejected him in favor of “obnoxious brutes.” He also said he’d communicated online with Elliot prior to the Isla Vista attack. The media ate it up. A Rolling Stone headline declared Minassian was “Radicalized by Incels,” atop an article parroting his claims from the police transcript.

It was all a ruse, as he later admitted to mental health practitioners who evaluated him for trial. He told them he wanted to become an infamous killer rather than “rot in obscurity.” He believed he could achieve “upgraded” notoriety by focusing on Elliot and using associated catchphrases “to boost my name.”

The trial judge in the Minassian case ultimately ruled that he was cognizant of his crimes and that his incel motive “was a lie.” That outcome, more than two years after the van attack, drew far less media attention than the story that Elliot’s massacre directly inspired Minassian’s own. (Even some threat assessment experts I flagged this for were not aware.)

By then it was also too late to stop a grim compounding effect. A 17-year-old who attacked two women in Toronto in 2020 with a large knife, killing one, had cited Minassian as his own inspiration. He too sought notoriety, and had carried a handwritten note: “Long Live the Incel Rebellion.”

Essential to threat assessment research is building a detailed panoramic view of a case subject’s life, to conduct what the FBI’s Karie Gibson calls an analysis “from cradle to grave.” In the earlier days of social media, it was rare for a mass shooter to leave behind a large trove of lucid personal evidence, and that made Elliot’s case an opportunity. I’d long compiled research on it myself, some of which raised questions about the role of the location where Elliot carried out his attack.

On a cool spring morning in March, as the pillowy marine layer began to lift over Isla Vista, I walked the blocks of Del Playa Drive where the catastrophe played out. The shabby party houses where he’d gotten hurt looked unchanged. No one was home at the one with the platform for hanging out at the fence line, which had a ragged couch sitting on top of it. Just across the street, behind facing houses and an apartment complex, the bluffs dropped down several stories to the Pacific crashing below. It was midweek, but along the block the densely parked cars, surfboards standing against a wall, and music drifting from a nearby balcony all suggested only a brief morning lull to party life. It was from one of these balconies that witnesses had heard the final gunshot and watched the black BMW crash.

A short distance into the center of town, at the Starbucks where he’d gotten his last latte, college kids in sweats and hoodies scrolled on their phones and talked about spring break plans. I wondered if they even knew what happened to some of their counterparts here a decade ago.

Soon I met up with Joe Schmidt, the lead detective on the case, now a lieutenant with the sheriff’s office. Also joining us in his unmarked SUV was his colleague Dr. Cherylynn Lee, a clinical psychologist and threat assessment expert who leads the department’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, developed in the years since the tragedy.

“The freshmen who are here now were 8 years old when it happened,” Schmidt said, as we began retracing the path of the carnage. “So they might’ve heard about it, but most of the people who I ask that question have no idea. I’m always taken aback, because to me it feels like it happened last year.”

Behind the wheel, in casual sheriff’s tan and green with a baseball cap on his clean-shaven head, Schmidt recounted from an encyclopedic knowledge of the case. He has briefed law enforcement nationwide ever since on lessons learned. He went through the names of every victim injured or killed, what happened to them, and where.

We stopped to look at a bullet hole that still marks the top of a cooking range inside the deli mart, then two others pocking the exterior wall of a building along the route to Del Playa Drive. College kids whizzed by on bikes and skateboards, past the sandwich shops and more apartment buildings. We paused at a small park where four officers had fired on the black BMW, trying to stop it, then arrived at the house on Del Playa where the ordeal had ended, a palm tree out front recognizable from the news photos.

This was just a college town. I tried to reconcile that as I thought of the endless media stories on incels, all the airtime his sinister video and “manifesto” had gotten, the heated debates about Hollywood and misogyny. I asked Dr. Lee what she thought was most important to know about what led to the attack.

“It’s suicidality and isolation without a doubt,” she said. “That is the constant in upwards of 95 percent of the cases we’ve worked at the Behavioral Sciences Unit. The persons are not well connected socially, and they’re often alone and have thoughts of killing themselves.”

It was also clear that Isla Vista was not a good place for Elliot to be. In effect, he was living in the center of concentrated insecurity, putting right in his face what he came to feel he could never have. “If his grievance is he can’t connect with people, and people are around him all the time and he’s constantly isolated, he’s living in that environment 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” Lee observed.

Not long before the tragedy, Chin began to realize this herself, and she wanted to get him out.

In August 2013, nine months before the massacre, Elliot was recovering back home from his ankle surgery and Chin was focused on boosting his confidence for the fall semester. He agreed to meet with a trusted therapist who’d treated him when he was younger. He looked happy when a childhood friend visited. He’d been pining for a flashier car than his old used Honda, so even though money was tight, Chin decided to buy him a used black BMW coupe. It needed some repairs, but would give him an appearance he craved. She didn’t know he’d grown fixated on wealth as the key to getting a girlfriend; she’d laughed it off when he urged her to remarry someone rich, and he never said a word about the many Powerball tickets he’d been buying.

“Now I am one of them, and it certainly boosts my self-esteem every time I go out,” he wrote that October, focused on Santa Barbara students who drove luxury cars. “I’m hoping that since I now have a cooler car than most kids at my college, I’d have a chance of attracting a girlfriend.”

By the following semester he was secretly quitting his classes, clashing with his roommates, and writing his rageful “life story.” He shared a carefully selected sample with Chin, his depiction of an idyllic childhood in England, and, impressed, she encouraged his stated aspirations to write a novel.

One night in February 2014, Elliot called Georgia while wandering the streets drunk and railed about girls ignoring him. His sister talked him down and had the awareness as a high school senior to know that the social scene in Isla Vista was toxic for him. She’d long worried about her brother being there, she later told me.

Chin consulted with Elliot’s therapist, with social worker Gavin Linderman, and with the counseling director in Santa Barbara, then called Elliot and urged him to leave Isla Vista temporarily. She offered him a choice: She would arrange for him to go to a high-quality residential treatment center where he could relax and get daily therapy, or he could come stay at home with her and see his therapist and social worker for an intensive period of help. She followed up with an email reiterating her love and confidence that he would overcome his struggles.

“Dear Mother,” Elliot soon wrote back, “I would love the chance to try and get something positive out of my time here. I now realize that time is running short and I have to do something with my life. If you agree to continue with my rent, I promise I will do everything I can and turn my life around. I will study hard, complete the courses that I’m halfway through, and spend the next four to five months here more productively.” He said he’d made new acquaintances and was keeping busy with his social counselors, and he promised to see his therapist and his social worker when back home. “Please let me prove to you that I can make it here.”

Chin spoke further with the professionals helping Elliot, who suggested that she’d done her best to give him options and advised her to support his goals for finishing school. There was no legal basis to make him leave or get more intensive help, the counseling director recalled. “He’s an adult. He can just say ‘no.’”

“I relied on them to guide my thinking,” Chin said, emphasizing that she wasn’t casting blame—and that none of them could’ve seen the whole picture. No one involved had the training to grasp the rising danger, or a way to share Elliot’s concerning behaviors in the methodical manner a threat assessment team would have. They didn’t know or imagine that he’d been stalking a sorority house and buying guns; their focus was on normalizing his experiences and helping him gain greater independence.

Tragically, that just allowed him to isolate further, the counseling director now believes. Her young staff was actively meeting up with Elliot, but he still had a lot of time, she said, “to sit in his own thoughts.”

On the morning of April 18, 2014, Elliot recorded himself driving an hour down the coast to Oxnard, his car stereo blaring the Motels’ “Suddenly Last Summer,” a 1980s pop hit romanticizing youthful innocence and the loss of virginity. He arrived at a familiar destination: Shooters Paradise. It was one of half a dozen trips he made to gun ranges in the final four months, where he had paid upward of $100 for a lane, targets, eye and ear protective gear, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

Back in Isla Vista that evening, he recorded two videos on his phone. They contained no explicit threats, but further revealed how the humiliation at the party the prior summer kept eating at him—and showed him engaging in stalking and surveillance.

He cruised the streets starting around 10:30 p.m., narrating his grievances as his phone mounted on the dashboard recorded the scenery. “Every time I drive through this place I am overcome with rage,” he said, soon turning onto Del Playa Drive. Partygoers walked in the street or rode bikes or skateboards in the balmy night air. He slowed the car as he approached a pair of houses, one festooned with string lights and the next fronted by a platform at the top of the fence line. “Look,” he said, “that’s the house I got beat up at when I walked in on the party.”

He rehearsed his anger as he continued along the block. “Ah, here we go, look at this,” he sneered as he passed a trio of college girls heading for the party house. “Groups of hot young sluts who would just reject me.”

He recorded a second video as the area grew more crowded, lamenting the “sick and evil” town and shouting “You’re an asshole” at a guy walking in the street with two girls. The footage of him slow-rolling past partygoers suggested a chilling prospect he’d written about: “Isla Vista on weekend nights was always filled with my enemies walking right in the middle of the road. They would be easy targets.”

Five weeks later, he would ram several victims along Del Playa, then end it all just a block from the house where he’d fallen from the platform.

Elliot kept the Del Playa footage concealed, but by the end of April, his picture of calm and stability started to slip. Chin was used to him responding to her texts and calls, and after he went silent for several days she grew worried. She searched online and found a video he’d posted: Dressed in his favorite blue Hugo Boss shirt and Armani sunglasses, he stood by a canyon road in Montecito extolling the scenery, complaining about girls ignoring him, and talking up his looks and personality. The six minutes included flashes of resentment and despair, and objectively would have struck at least some viewers as troubling or strange. But Elliot also expressed sincere longing, and nothing openly menacing like what was to come.

Chin would later conclude this juncture had been a major blind spot for her. Elliot posting a recording of himself was new, and though she noted his frustration, it struck her as part of his efforts to overcome his social deficits. “He was trying so hard, and I thought this was him evolving and putting himself out there more,” she recalled.

Still, Chin felt unsettled and feared Elliot wasn’t responding to her texts and calls because he’d gotten lost or had an accident on one of his sunset hikes. She again reached out. The Santa Barbara counseling director remembered the video as “very ominous” in tone, she told me. “It was definitely a window into his psyche at that moment,” she said. Chin also called social worker Linderman, who raised concern about self-harm and said he would call the crisis hotline in Santa Barbara right away to ask for help.

What was said on that call remains unclear, but when sheriff’s deputies arrived at Elliot’s apartment that evening of April 30, they found him to be “shy, timid, and polite.” He told them that he was lonely and that the video, which they hadn’t seen, was just a way of “expressing himself,” investigators later wrote. After they spoke with him for a few minutes at the door, his arsenal hidden just inside, a deputy suggested he call Chin. He coolly explained that she was a “worry wart” as he dialed her on his cellphone.

“Mom, why did you call the police on me? There’s nothing wrong, I’m just busy. Here, talk to them.” He handed his phone to the deputy, who asked Chin if the video made her concerned about Elliot harming himself or others. She said no. The deputy affirmed for her in the brief exchange that Elliot appeared fine.

The facts known at the time didn’t provide a basis to use California’s law allowing for temporary custody for a mental health evaluation, recalled Lieutenant Joe Schmidt (who was not a part of the welfare check that night). He noted these calls are common: students new to the area who prompt concerns that turn out to be nothing serious. “It was very consistent with the majority of those calls,” he said. (Protocols changed after the tragedy, and now include more records checks, including for gun purchases.)

Notably, Chin had done exactly what threat assessment hopes for above all else: She made the difficult choice to report a loved one to authorities for help. Today, in Santa Barbara and many other places, the response to such reporting would and should be quite different.

The next day Chin also called a counseling office at Santa Barbara City College to alert them to the incident but failed to connect with anyone. She felt relieved after the welfare check, though. And she knew she’d be able to see Elliot again herself in less than three weeks, when she and Georgia would head to Montecito for their favorite sushi dinner together.

in front of you, sharing what only a mother who has been through this can know.”

It was mid-August 2022, and inside the low-lit main ballroom of the Disneyland Hotel’s conference center, Chin Rodger was telling her story to an audience for the first time. In attendance at the annual training conference of the Association of Threat Assessment Professionals were more than 1,000 psychologists, counselors, cops, FBI agents, and other practitioners. (The organization has convened in this rather surreal location since shortly after its founding in the early 1990s by threat assessment experts from the Los Angeles Police Department.) I’d attended this conference for several years myself, watching presentations of numerous harrowing case studies, and rarely had seen the typically stoic crowd so gripped with emotion.

“My life as I knew it ended that day,” Chin said. “Life can change in an instant.” She wept as she spoke from the podium, her voice quiet but deliberate.

“I want to share now what I saw in my son—his behavior, circumstances, and actions that culminated in this horrific tragedy—so that when you’re out there talking to parents, or to a young man on this same pathway, you’ll have more insights on your mission to prevent targeted violence.”

“Sorry,” she said, steadying herself. “I didn’t know this was going to be so hard.”

She recounted finding Elliot’s video, the welfare check, the final dinner, and many other details preceding the devastation. She said she believed firmly that the outcome would have been different if a threat assessment team had been involved “to dig deeper, ask more questions, connect all the dots.” She paused for another deep breath. “Then my son and the six individuals whose lives he took would be here today, and the families whose lives were destroyed would never have to live this nightmare.”

She said that being brought to her knees by tragedy made her want to advocate for threat assessment. “It will give me the courage to stand back up, to go forward with hope. I want to thank you all for what you are doing. I know you are saving lives,” she said, her concluding words met with a standing ovation.

After returning home, she began hearing from more leaders in the field. A senior federal agent emailed her: “As a career threat investigator, I appreciated everything that you shared with us, and everything you did to try to prevent this tragedy. As a parent, however, I was blown away by your openness and your willingness to talk so honestly about what must have been the most difficult event of your life. I doubt that there was a dry eye in the audience by the time you finished, mine included.”

Since then, Chin has spoken at additional trainings, including for school systems and corporate programs. (She declines payment, and has funded scholarships for law enforcement agents to attend.) Her talk now includes a call for broader threat assessment programs in communities.

“I feel very fortunate now in my journey to know the people who are doing this important work,” she told me. It’s a path she chose, but she also feels that a “river of grief” carried her inevitably to it.

At a recent training not far from Sandy Hook Elementary School, a young FBI analyst approached to thank her. She explained that she’d been in a class with Elliot at Santa Barbara City College and had talked with him a couple of times: “He was very shy, and so polite and kind.” She’d wished that she’d reached out to him more. She told Chin that she’d planned to go into the military, but that after the attack she grew interested in the FBI and threat assessment. Now she was helping school systems learn how to prevent tragedies.

Chin was floored. “That was a very powerful moment for me.”

On that trip, she also went with Scarlett Lewis to the Sandy Hook memorial and Jesse’s grave. “I could feel that she has forgiven, and really has grown and evolved so much,” Chin said. “I drew strength from that.”

We were sitting in a cafe on a warm LA afternoon as Chin described her own evolving struggle. “I miss Elliot very, very much,” she said. She spoke of how small things could still hit hard, like seeing his favorite oat clusters cereal at the grocery store. “The feeling of that memory overwhelms me and I have to leave. Even now that can happen.” Yet, for years she felt that she had no right even to acknowledge her own grief, out of deference to the victims’ families. “They lost their children to what he did. They had no say in that. Elliot made the decision to do what he did.”

There are ways in which she still can’t confront his violence. “I have not put myself there yet, to visualize the horrible things he did,” she said, tearing up. “It’s still just so hard.” She was quiet for a moment. “Even saying the words ‘mass shooter’ is still really hard for me. But I’m working through it.”

Though he also used knives and a car, Elliot wrote that his “main weapons” for vengeance would be guns. Like most mass shooters, he purchased them easily and legally.

His case became key to the rise of so-called red flag laws, which allow a civil court to order the temporary removal of access to firearms based on evidence that a person poses danger to themself or others. Such laws existed in just two states before 2014 and were rarely used; four months after the Isla Vista tragedy, California instituted what it calls a “gun violence restraining order.” Red flag laws soon began to spread, especially after the Parkland high school massacre in 2018, and today exist to varying degrees in 22 states and the District of Columbia. Studies in California and beyond have shown them to be effective for preventing both suicide and mass shootings.

Fierce opposition from the gun industry and its allies, however, has slowed this progress. And a lack of resources and awareness can also stand in the way. There was no attempt to use New York’s red flag law with the 18-year-old who committed a racist massacre at a grocery store in Buffalo in May 2022, despite a prior threat from him that prompted a state-ordered mental health evaluation. Maine’s far weaker version of the law played no role in the case of the brain-damaged Army reservist who caused carnage in October 2023, despite family and friends having long alerted police and military supervisors to his alarming behavior.

“We have to find ways to push our legal and social systems to provide the authority and tools to better intervene,” Dr. Jack Rozel, who specializes in emergency psychiatric care at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, told me. He suggests that wider awareness and training are essential for crisis hotline staff, counselors, and beyond. “There’s a growing realization that the risk factors for suicide and targeted violence are deeply entwined. So how do we get all mental health professionals better at thinking and asking about violence risk?”

The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office has made frequent use of California’s red flag law, according to Lieutenant Schmidt and Dr. Lee. In one case, they were alerted to a person who had texted friends he was suicidal, and the team moved quickly to intervene. “He had 16 guns, two of which were buried in the backyard,” Lee told me. “He was sewing armored plating into the driver’s side and passenger side of his vehicle. So this is somebody who wanted to do some damage.” They put him on a psychiatric hold and got him help.

Red flag policy is also useful for dealing with the copycat problem, which affects the local community to this day, Lee said. “It’s not uncommon for us to get a case of an individual who is saying that he wants to be like Elliot Rodger or idolizes him and also happens to be a student going to UC Santa Barbara. Individuals that are not associated with the school come to the region, to see where it all happened.”

Even the trend of spurious copycats has changed law: When the Toronto knife attacker was sentenced to prison last fall, the judge ruled that incel-driven violence now qualified as terrorism.

There may be no way to end the incel mythology around Elliot, but stopping the media repetition could diminish it. That could also serve survivors like still-grieving father Richard Martinez, who helped push for California’s red flag law. “It bothers me so much for him to be a ‘hero’ to some people,” Martinez told me.

A study of more than 500 self-identifying incels published in February found that most did not believe violence is justified. The researchers recommended a “multipronged approach” to intervention, including “psychosocial support.” One in three incels, they found, thought daily about taking their own lives.

Like all suicidal mass shooters, Elliot Rodger lacked hope. The fundamental importance of that echoes in how his mother cultivates her own resilience. Volunteer work is part of it. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Chin went on two trips with World Central Kitchen to Poland, helping to feed refugees fleeing the war. It was a powerful and humbling experience for her, but she says violence prevention has remained her strongest calling.

More training conferences are ahead on her calendar, and she says the reception for her talks has begun to help make certain things feel more possible, if not necessarily easier. “In the past, if I met someone new and they asked me if I have any kids, I would say, ‘Yes, I have a daughter.’ Then I would quickly start talking all about Georgia, what she was doing, her interests and her travel—that was my safe place.” But now, when a new acquaintance asks her about family, she finds herself answering differently.

“I also have a son,” she says. “I lost him in a tragedy.”

If you or someone you care about may be at risk of harming yourself or others, call or text 988, or go to 988lifeline.org.

Jennifer Crumbley was found guilty of four counts of involuntary manslaughter in connection with an attack carried out by her 15-year-old son Ethan, who murdered four students and wounded seven other people in November 2021 at Oxford High School in Michigan. She and her husband James, who will be tried separately in March on the same charges, gave the pistol used in the attack to Ethan four days before he struck, failed to secure the weapon at home, and appeared to ignore an array of warning signs that their son was turning suicidal and homicidal.

The jury concluded that Jennifer Crumbley was grossly negligent, having willfully or recklessly disregarded a parental responsibility to prevent her son’s devastating actions.

“I’ve asked myself if I would have done anything differently, and I wouldn’t have,” she testified in her own defense—an extraordinary assertion, given the evidence of Ethan’s troubling behavior and deepening crisis leading up to the violence. For months prior to the killings, he had shown signs of paranoia, anxiety, and suicidal despair and had made veiled threats. That culminated with violent drawings he made, found by a teacher the morning of the attack, whose captions included: “My life is useless,” “Blood everywhere,” and “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.”

When Ethan and his parents subsequently met with a school counselor and dean that morning, just hours before the massacre, the parents did not disclose that Ethan now had access to a weapon. Nor did they agree to take him out of school and get him immediate mental health care, as the school officials had then urged.

The kinds of warning signs Ethan showed are well known to the field of behavioral threat assessment; experts told me when I looked into the case extensively in spring 2022 that the horrific tragedy could have been prevented.

The day before the attack, a teacher had also discovered Ethan looking up ammunition on his phone during class, prompting a school official to call Jennifer. She didn’t respond but instead texted jokingly with Ethan, who assured her what he was doing was “completely harmless.” Their subsequent exchange was bleak in the context of the violence that soon followed:

“Did you at least show them a pic of your new gun?” Jennifer asked.

“NO,” he replied, “I only told them I went to the range with you on Saturday.” He added that he’d been trying to identify a bullet cartridge in his room back home.

“LOL, I’m not mad at you,” she res­ponded. “You have to learn not to get caught.”

When authorities announced charges against the Crumbley parents shortly after their son’s attack, they fled briefly from law enforcement and were apprehended with the help of US Marshals.

Ethan, now 17, pleaded guilty in October 2022 to murder and other charges and is serving life in prison without the possibility of parole. The toll from his actions included the deaths of fellow Oxford High students Tate Myre, Hana St. Juliana, Madisyn Baldwin, and Justin Shilling.

The trial put on further display grim parental behavior and the deterioration of the Crumbley family as a whole, and yet the judge stated explicitly that the case against the shooter’s mother could not be about her “morality.” Jennifer Crumbley sought during her trial to blame her husband for failing to secure the pistol their son used to injure and kill. There also has been no shortage of debate about how far to go in terms of criminalizing parents for school shootings, however repulsive their actions may seem from a moral or ethical standpoint.

Jennifer Crumbley’s conviction comes as America’s mass shooting epidemic tests new legal terrain in several cases. In November, the father of the Highland Park mass shooter pleaded guilty to misdemeanor reckless conduct for his role in helping his troubled son submit an application to buy firearms. In December, the mother of a 6-year-old boy who shot his first grade teacher at a Virginia elementary school pleaded guilty to felony child neglect and was sentenced to two years in prison.

To some extent, the prosecutions of the Crumbley parents have eclipsed unanswered questions about the role and possible culpability of the Oxford school district. An independent investigation, long delayed, eventually found that the district failed to follow its own threat assessment policy. (As I reported previously, one egregious error was the failure by school officials to inquire proactively about access to guns once they grew alarmed about the perpetrator’s behavior and state of mind.)

Prevention policies generally remain underemphasized and underfunded when it comes to reducing school shootings, even as threat assessment becomes more widely used in public schools. Until this year, Michigan had no safe storage laws to hold gun owners accountable for allowing their weapons to fall into the hands of minors and causing harm.

When prosecutor Karen McDonald first spoke publicly after the Oxford High disaster, she made clear that pouring resources into physical security, active-shooter response, and other reactive measures—still the norm throughout much of America—is insufficient. As she put it then: “We really can’t train ourselves out of this tragedy.”

Army reservist Robert Card, the 40-year-old suicidal perpetrator who killed 18 people and injured 13 others at a bowling alley and a bar on October 25, displayed numerous warning signs far in advance. His erratic behavior going back months included complaints he was hearing voices, angry and paranoid claims about being smeared as a pedophile, punching a colleague, and threatening to shoot up the Army base where he worked. Some of his family members and supervisors sounded the alarm. After a two-week stay and a psychiatric evaluation in July at an Army hospital, Army officials directed that Card should not possess a weapon or handle ammunition, according to CNN. (It’s not yet clear whether Card was involuntarily committed.)

By mid-September, the Sagadahoc County Sheriff’s Office, which had communicated with family members and Army authorities since May, attempted a wellness check at Card’s residence. According to a statement released Monday by the Sheriff’s Office, after a deputy was unable to locate Card on September 15, the agency notified other law enforcement in the state: “The alert included a warning that Mr. Card was known to be armed and dangerous and included details of his behavior. The alert urged that officers use extreme caution.”

According to the sheriff’s statement, Card’s unit commander and brother then said they were acting to keep firearms away from Card and working to help get him additional treatment. The sheriff’s office canceled the alert to law enforcement on October 18, a week before the massacre. Card purchased firearms legally up until shortly before his attack. 

More details of a systemic failure to intervene effectively with Card are certain to emerge in the days and weeks ahead. Those will further implicate Maine’s weak gun regulations, as well as the apparent failure to use the state’s so-called “yellow flag” law, a particularly narrow version of a tool for petitioning a judge to remove firearms from a dangerous person. Under Maine’s version, removal can only occur after an evaluation by a medical practitioner.

The tragedy in Lewiston has also been compounded by the typical blame on mental illness as the fundamental cause of the attack. While Card clearly was an aggrieved and disturbed person, we don’t yet know what, if any, clinical diagnosis he may have had or to what degree such a condition might have influenced his planning for the massacre.

We do know that blaming mental illness as the primary cause of mass shootings is not only misguided in most cases but also stigmatizing and counterproductive when it comes to reducing the problem. Despite popular myth, mass shooters are not inexplicably crazy people who just “suddenly snap.” They plan, they justify their intentions, and they prepare to kill and to die. That process involves observable patterns of behavior and can be disrupted. 

While no mass shooter, in a basic sense, is a mentally healthy person, most mass shooters have not been diagnosed with clinical mental illness. About a quarter of all cases include psychiatric or neurological afflictions in the perpetrators, with exacerbating effects from those in some cases. But only about 5 percent of mass shootings involve psychosis or other severe mental illness as a key factor, according to separate studies by Columbia University psychiatrists, experts at the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, and my own extensive case research for my book Trigger Points.

On Monday, I spoke at length with Mary Harris of Slate’s What Next podcast about the complicated equation of mental health and mass shootings—and about how an attack so fraught with warning signs might have been prevented through the work of behavioral threat assessment. You can listen to our conversation here.

The promotional tactics that gun manufacturers and sellers use with social media, video games, and other entertainment are the focus of a new report from Sandy Hook Promise, the gun-violence prevention group led by parents of children killed in the elementary school massacre 11 years ago in Newtown, Connecticut. The report, “Untargeting Kids,” highlights how the gun industry shifted away from a longstanding culture of safety and responsibility to cultivate a market of young consumers—a demographic inundated with social media and uniquely vulnerable, according to researchers, to provocative and seductive messaging.

“Our nation has experienced a tremendous spike in firearm deaths just as gun marketing made a transition from selling firearms for hunting and sporting to marketing highly lethal, military-style weapons to civilians, including children,” the report says. “That marketing is supposedly aimed at adults, but the platforms those influencers appear on, including TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, are largely populated by kids.”

Social media companies have banned the direct sales of guns on their platforms, but that doesn’t stop the firearms industry from promoting or amplifying gun content from high-profile figures. One example cited in the report is a January 2020 Instagram post from gun manufacturer Daniel Defense that features a photo of music star Post Malone showing off one of its AR-15-style rifles, the MK18, while standing in front of a bar stocked with liquor.

“MK18 got me feeling like a rock star,” says the Daniel Defense comment, appended with music and fire emojis and a handful of hashtags, including “#gunporn.” The post has drawn nearly 30,000 likes from Instagram users.

The 18-year-old mass shooter who attacked Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022 used a Daniel Defense AR-15-style rifle. The company now faces a lawsuit from the family of one of the fourth graders killed in the massacre, which alleges that Daniel Defense targets “young male consumers” through its marketing on various social media platforms. The company, which did not respond to a request for comment, has called the lawsuit “frivolous” and “legally unfounded.”

Online videos accessible to youth are another source of concern. According to one study highlighted in the Sandy Hook Promise report, YouTube serves up algorithmic content glorifying assault weapons and offering instructions on everything from how to assemble rapid-fire mechanisms and “ghost guns” to shooting through bulletproof glass and acquiring firearms illegally.

The gun industry has favored aggressive marketing for more than a decade, as companies realized that vast profits could be made from the increasingly popular AR-15-style rifles. One early Daniel Defense ad suggested civilian buyers could be just like US special forces, overlaying a battlefield scene with the slogan, “Use What They Use.” As I wrote recently in a review of American Gun, a deeply reported new book tracing the history of the AR-15, documents revealed in a lawsuit by Sandy Hook families showed how gunmakers intentionally used brash themes of masculinity and militarism to help sell these weapons. Among such efforts was also the infamous “Man Card” campaign that Remington had used to promote the Bushmaster rifle later wielded by the Sandy Hook mass shooter. Last year, nearly a decade after that massacre, Remington agreed to a landmark $73 million civil settlement with victims’ families. 

The AR-15 is a weapon of war, originally built for highly efficient killing on the battlefield. (The US military produced it as the M16 during Vietnam.) Its design innovations included firing a relatively small bullet at exceptionally high velocity. As American Gun also details, the inventor of the AR-15 discovered that the .223-caliber projectile became unstable upon impact and “tore through the body like a tornado, spiraling and tipping as it obliterated organs, blood vessels, and bones.”

Violent video games have been blamed for causing mass shootings ever since Columbine in 1999. While there’s no evidence supporting that theory, various young perpetrators over the years have fixated on graphically violent games or movies when spiraling into isolation, anger, and despair, a correlation that has raised questions and concerns among threat assessment experts. Nonetheless, gun companies have long been eager to have their AR-15s depicted in first-person shooters as a form of advertising, a tactic one sales executive called “seed planting” for a new generation of consumers. The Washington Post reported in a recent series on the AR-15 that representatives of two gun manufacturers met at a Nevada shooting range in 2010 with technicians working on “Call of Duty” to record the firing of AR-15s for the blockbuster gaming series. “No detail, even the click of inserting a magazine, was too small to capture, participants said,” according to the Post.

The report from Sandy Hook Promise also highlights how ingrained this current gun culture has become with hyper-realistic video games, in which tricked-out guns are “prized commodities” and “players need to rack up sufficient ‘kills’ to ‘unlock’ particular weapons or add attachments to enhance or customize their firearms.”

In recent years, according to our research at Mother Jones, the AR-15 has become the top weapon of choice for mass shooters—a disturbing trend that has further accelerated in the past 18 months. But apart from efforts by gun lobbying groups to clean up the image of AR-15s by branding them as “modern sporting rifles,” the growing carnage from mass shootings does not appear to have affected the messaging practices of the industry.

“That this type of marketing has contributed to creating today’s radical violent extremists is inescapable,” former gun company executive Ryan Busse argued in The Atlantic, referring to the 18-year-old avowed white supremacist who used a Bushmaster rifle in May 2022 to murder 10 Black people and injure three others at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. (Far-right extremism has been a rising factor in mass shootings, according to my research going back to 2018.) Busse also detailed how a Florida firearms retailer used social media to glorify vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, who was tried and acquitted after he used an AR-15 to kill two people and wound another during street protests following the 2020 police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. “BE A MAN AMONG MEN” blared the meme, which featured an image of the 17-year-old Rittenhouse armed with the rifle he used in the killings.

Busse, who blew the whistle on industry practices in his 2021 book Gun Fight, also described what happened when gun sellers tried to go against orthodoxy: “The gun industry could have shunned this type of promotional activity. Instead, it chose to penalize those who did. When Ed Stack, the then-longtime CEO of the major retail chain Dick’s Sporting Goods, stopped selling AR-15s after the Parkland school murders, the NSSF [National Shooting Sports Foundation] moved swiftly to expel Dick’s from its membership. By contrast, in 2021 the foundation honored [Daniel Defense CEO] Marty Daniel with a seat on its industry board of governors.”

“This is not a partisan issue,” the report from Sandy Hook Promise concludes. “Gun owners and non-gun owners alike can agree that kids should not be the targets of firearm marketing, especially content designed for adults that should only be viewed by adults…. Parents should be able to control the information their children receive about firearms.”

The report is among the group’s wider ongoing efforts to boost gun-violence prevention in America. Its “Know the Signs” programs help train school leaders and communities to focus on crisis intervention and the behavioral warning signs of planned violence. The group’s recently launched PSA about school shootings, “Just Joking,” which features jarring performances from star comedians, underscored in its own right the serious cultural challenges that remain for reducing the nation’s gun violence.

The montage of clips from standup performances opens with comedian Billy Eichner walking onstage and grabbing the mic.

“Soooo, first day of school, last day of your lives,” he deadpans.

An awkward chuckle goes up from the crowd.

Next comes an exuberant riff from Wanda Sykes: “Some shit’s gonna go down, and I don’t think you’re gonna like it!” Laughter and applause.

“Here’s the thing,” says a grinning David Cross, “I am going to kill”—he pauses, an audience member hoots—“ALL of you.” Later he adds that today is “the day my massacre begins.”

None of the punchlines in the video, it turns out, were invented for laughs. They are all real threats that were made by school shooters who destroyed lives and devastated communities, from Parkland to Uvalde and beyond.

Titled “Just Joking,” the two-minute compilation released on Wednesday is the creation of Sandy Hook Promise, a gun-violence prevention group founded by parents and other survivors in the aftermath of the elementary school massacre 11 years ago in Newtown, Connecticut. It is the latest in a long-running campaign of PSAs developed by the group to raise awareness about threatening communications and other behavioral warning signs that precede school shootings. The second half of the video, set to an ominous swell of sound, reveals the tragedies connected to each punchline—highlighting that, just as with these unsuspecting nightclub audiences, people who had been aware of the shooters’ threats also thought they were joking.

“Take threats of violence seriously,” the video concludes.

For years, Sandy Hook Promise has helped build violence prevention efforts around the country through its “Know the Signs” programs, conducting trainings for school systems and communities that focus on warning signs and crisis intervention. The new PSA takes aim at a crucial obstacle known as the “bystander” problem. The history of school shootings is rife with ominous communications from perpetrators that were misconstrued or disregarded by peers, as I document in Trigger Points, my book about preventing mass shootings through behavioral threat assessment. Going back to the 1990s, there have been various shocking cases in which multiple students and other peers had indications of imminent violence but didn’t speak up or seek help.

Previous PSAs from Sandy Hook Promise have gone viral and won Emmys, spotlighting a range of red flags that signal opportunity for intervention. The group’s 2016 video titled “Evan,” which drew more than 155 million views in the first three weeks after it launched, smartly depicted how most people will overlook a troubled, isolated kid—in this case one who researches guns online, mimics shooting his teacher behind her back, and behaves in other worrisome ways. The idea for “Just Joking” came from the realization that the messaging needed to expand, says Nicole Hockley, cofounder and CEO of the group, whose son Dylan was among the first-graders killed in the Sandy Hook tragedy. “We felt it was time to shift from just talking about how to recognize a warning sign and also focus on, ‘What do you do once you recognize it?’”

Through its trainings and outreach, Sandy Hook Promise has gathered extensive feedback from youth about why they tend not to share their concerns. That can range from not understanding a behavior they witnessed or not knowing where to turn for help, to feeling fearful about possible repercussions for themselves or others if they choose to act. “Just Joking” drives home the imperative to speak out as it reveals the quotes from one school shooter after another.

Comedians revel in causing discomfort, of course, but it’s uniquely unsettling to watch them declare, “I’m going to shoot up an elementary school right now” and “I want to kill people.” The performers—who also include Margaret Cho, Jay Pharoah, Roy Wood Jr., Caitlin Reilly, Iliza Shlesinger, and Rachel Bloom—jumped at the chance when asked to do the video, Hockley told me. Some of them are parents, she noted, and all felt compelled by the mission to help reduce the nation’s epidemic of gun violence.

The comedians agreed to incorporate the shooter threats cold into their standup acts, said Hockley, with the filmmakers gathering the footage over months. The producers wanted to capture an authentic response from audiences, who subsequently learned the context from the performers about the weird-sounding lines they’d uttered onstage.

To date, 21 million people nationwide have participated in Sandy Hook Promise’s prevention programs, according to the group. In an era when school threats have risen sharply, Hockley feels the latest PSA could have a powerful impact. “For me, it’s especially that moment when Wanda Sykes says, ‘I want to go down as the best school shooter in history'”—a threat made by the Parkland perpetrator.

“That’s the moment it really hits home—that this is not funny,” Hockley says. “This is something that no one should ever say.”

That catastrophic dereliction of duty demands scrutiny and accountability on multiple levels. The excruciatingly slow response violated a fundamental doctrine that was adopted widely after the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, which holds that police on the scene must move immediately to confront an active shooter—a situation in which every lost second counts. The lack of such action in Uvalde undoubtedly worsened the death toll. In the aftermath, Texas law enforcement officials spread inaccurate information and stonewalled the media and public about what had happened. Last summer, when the first major state investigation of the tragedy went public, Texas lawmakers tried to bury the finding that multiple police officers were unwilling to confront the shooter because they feared the firepower of his AR-15—which he’d bought legally immediately upon turning 18, shortly before he attacked.

Stark lessons from the disgraceful response that day will continue to emerge. Another crucial side of the Uvalde tragedy, however, remains far too obscured: the distinct possibility that an array of warning signs from the perpetrator could have led authorities to prevent the massacre. 

As I wrote previously, publicly known case evidence makes clear that Salvador Ramos, once a student himself at Robb Elementary, needed help long before he spiraled deeper into a crisis and began planning the mass shooting. A troubled person’s often lengthy pathway to attack—and potential opportunities for trained experts to intervene—can be understood clearly through the research and case work of behavioral threat assessment. In Trigger Points, my book about preventing mass shootings, I explore eight broad areas of warning signs that threat assessment teams rely on to evaluate and manage individuals who are mired in rage, despair, and other problems, and whose suicidal intent can also turn homicidal. The method has been used to remarkable effect with constructive interventions by teams throughout the country, as I chronicle in the book. 

The warning signs, often observable to people around a would-be perpetrator, range from threatening communications and emulation of previous attackers (the so-called “copycat” problem), to personal deterioration, triggering events, and, finally, methodical preparation for the attack. Ramos’ actions and circumstances checked all those boxes. His identifiable behaviors included several that are prevalent among mass shooters, including a focus on violent misogyny, the seeking of media attention and notoriety, and a fixation on military-style weapons and tactical gear. (I documented those and other details from his case here.)

The various red flags that precede virtually every mass shooting of this kind are easier to see in hindsight. Yet, greater public awareness of them could go a long way toward encouraging people to speak up and reach out for help when they feel concern or fear about a troubled individual who might be turning dangerous.

In the case of Uvalde, there is more such evidence that is not currently known to the public. According to a source familiar with an ongoing law enforcement investigation, Ramos had extensive contact online with at least one young person who may well have seen indications of his deadly plans. This person “knew him quite well,” the source told me.

Whether the person realized the danger or felt compelled to sound an alarm is unclear. With school shootings, there is a long history of so-called “bystanders” who, for a variety of reasons, did not seek help from an authority figure. In some cases, whole groups of high school kids had indications of an approaching school shooting and didn’t act.

One lingering question is whether the Uvalde school district had adequate prevention protocols in place, as required by a Texas law enacted in 2019. The committee from the Texas House of Representatives detailed in its July 2022 investigation that the district had adopted a “viable” policy for “responding to an active shooter emergency.” As I reported previously:

That included threat assessment protocols, according to the Uvalde policy: “Every campus employs an interdisciplinary team of trained professionals that convene to identify, evaluate, classify and address threats or potential threats to school security. Following assessment, this team determines appropriate response and intervention. This includes notification and involvement of parents, a suicide risk assessment, and the development of a written safety plan.”

Ramos had no criminal record and was no longer enrolled in Uvalde High School as of about seven months before his attack. It is unclear whether he was previously the subject of a threat assessment investigation, and, if so, how his case was handled. A spokesperson I reached with the Uvalde school district declined to comment.

A government official in Texas with knowledge of the matter later told me that no threat assessment program existed in the school district or local community prior to the mass shooting. (The school district did not respond to a follow-up request for comment.)

State-required threat assessment in school systems is a growing but relatively new and untested policy; in communities like Uvalde and Newport News, Virginia—where a 6-year-old child shot his first-grade teacher in January—a lack of resources can be an added barrier to standing up threat assessment programs.

Investigations into the law enforcement meltdown in Uvalde are continuing, including one by the US Department of Justice. According to a source familiar with the DOJ effort, investigators have also looked into some circumstances and developments with the perpetrator leading up to the massacre. But that is not the primary focus, and it remains to be seen whether a public report will include those elements to any degree. The source declined to comment about when the investigation may be completed; thus far, the DOJ has not specified a date.

Among the questions still hanging most heavily over the tragedy: How could such a troubled young person so quickly and easily acquire a highly lethal arsenal?

Republican leaders in Texas and elsewhere have long been hostile to gun-violence prevention policies such as red flag laws and raising the legal age for gun buyers from 18 to 21. In siding with the gun industry, they defy broad bipartisan support among the American public for such measures. The implications of their position couldn’t be more glaring than with the Uvalde massacre, as the Texas House committee’s own report showed. Beginning the day Ramos turned 18, according to the report, he armed himself heavily for the attack he would carry out eight days later:

An online retailer shipped 1,740 rounds of 5.56mm 75-grain boat tail hollow point to his doorstep, at a cost of $1,761.50. He ordered a Daniel Defense DDM4 V7 (an AR-15-style rifle) for shipment to a gun store in Uvalde, at a cost of $2,054.28. On May 17, 2022, he bought a Smith and Wesson M&P15 (also an AR-15-style rifle) at the same store in Uvalde, at a cost of $1,081.42. He returned the next day for 375 rounds of M193, a 5.56mm 55-grain round with a full metal jacket, which has a soft core surrounded by a harder metal. He returned again to pick up his other rifle when it arrived on May 20, 2022, and he had store staff install the holographic sight on it after the transfer was completed.

As I’ve documented recently, in the past year alone there have been at least eight gun massacres in public places in America committed by heavily armed shooters who used AR-15s and tactical gear, an escalating trend. The perpetrators have mostly been suicidal young adults, including three who were 18 years old. The latest one fatally shot three people and injured six others on May 15 in Farmington, New Mexico, where he screamed for police to kill him as they took him out in a gun battle. His was another textbook case of warning signs tragically missed or unheeded.

A reckoning still awaits for how law enforcement responded to the school massacre in Uvalde. The same should be true for the failure to prevent it from ever happening at all.

AR-15s, tactical gear, and extremism

Over the past year, at least eight gun massacres in the United States have been carried out in public locations by perpetrators wielding AR-15s, a popular civilian version of a semiautomatic rifle designed for maximum killing in war. A majority of these shooters have also used body armor or other tactical gear, a pattern that emerged a decade ago and escalated in 2022. Their chosen guns and gear reflect a specific form of emulation behavior seen among many perpetrators (also known as “copycat” behavior) that I’ve documented in my reporting and in my recent book on preventing mass shootings, Trigger Points. The rise of this trend also coincided with brazen marketing tactics used by the gun industry.

Among the 86 mass shootings since 2012 documented in our Mother Jones database, 37 of the cases involved military-style assault rifles.

Early reporting on the 33-year-old gunman at the shopping mall, Mauricio Garcia, who was shot dead by a responding police officer, indicates he was fixated on Nazism and other far-right extremist views. Violent far-right ideology as a motivating factor in mass shootings has also been a rising trend in recent years.

Texas carnage

From the attack on Robb Elementary School in Uvalde nearly a year ago to the one at the mall north of Dallas on Saturday, the highest number of fatalities from these eight massacres has been in Texas, where the total victims have included at least 29 killed, among them the 19 children and two teachers murdered in Uvalde. Dozens of other people were wounded in these attacks; the one in Allen included at least three child victims, though details about the victims were slow to emerge.

Texas authorities have been under a cloud of suspicion ever since Uvalde, and not only for the catastrophic failure of law enforcement to respond to that school massacre. State and local officials have stonewalled and been conspicuously slow about sharing information with the public in response to mass shootings, and Republican lawmakers apparently tried to cover up police officers’ fears about the gunman’s AR-15 inside Robb Elementary. The aftermath of a gun massacre at a residence in Cleveland, Texas, at the end of April included outrage at Gov. Greg Abbott, whose initial response included denigrating the victims as “illegal immigrants.”

The profound trauma from mass shootings goes far beyond the deaths and physical injuries, as reporting on Saturday’s rampage from the Texas Tribune highlighted:

Elder Flores, a 34-year-old construction worker from Mesquite, brought his six young children and his brother to the outlet mall to shop for Mother’s Day. When the gunfire started, his oldest daughter—Danna Flores, 10—grabbed her siblings and ran. “We were running for our lives,” she said. “It was really scary.”

Toxic politics

During an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott suggested yet again that there is no gun-policy solution to mass shooters using AR-15s and instead claimed that mental illness is the “root cause” of these massacres. Extensive case evidence shows that claim is false, yet Abbott has repeated it often on his watch. At least seven public gun massacres have occurred in the state since 2015 with Abbott in the governor’s mansion, including in Dallas, Sutherland Springs, Santa Fe, El Paso, Odessa, Uvalde, and Allen. Six of those seven mass shootings involved assault rifles. So too did the one in which the gunman slaughtered his neighbors inside their home in Cleveland on April 28 (an attack not in the Mother Jones database, which includes only those committed in public locations). The dead include numerous police officers, mothers, and children. 

Wrongly blaming mental illness as the fundamental cause of mass shootings is a tactic long used by the political right to distract from the guns involved. No mass shooter is a mentally healthy person—and mental-health interventions can be an important tool for helping prevent these tragedies, as I explore at length in my book. That’s especially true with suicidality, which marks a majority of cases. Clinically diagnosable mental illness, however, rarely is a primary driving factor in mass shootings. Far more common are other troubling behavioral issues and circumstances, including gun factors that Abbott clearly doesn’t want to discuss, given his political base.

Yet Abbott’s approach could not be more at odds with broad public opinion, as illustrated by Fox News’ own fresh polling on gun laws. As Fox just found, an overwhelming majority of Americans—80 percent or more—favor policies that include background checks for all gun buyers, raising the legal age for all buyers to 21, and using red flag laws to keep guns away from those who appear to pose danger to themselves or others.

Stark as they are, those polling results came just after mid-April, even before the latest Texas episodes of American carnage.

The Louisville attack is the latest in a troubling trend: It is the seventh mass shooting in the past 11 months alone to be carried out with an AR-15.

According to our Mother Jones database, there have been 36 mass shootings since 2012 using AR-15s, dating to the massacres just over a decade ago at a movie theater in Colorado and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Those three dozen massacres resulted in the deaths of 58 victims, more than 106 people injured, and communities traumatized from New York and Texas to Tennessee, Kentucky, and beyond. The steepest toll from a shooter wielding an AR-15 in these attacks was at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers died and at least 17 other people were injured—and where police failed to act in part because they feared the shooter’s AR-15.

The gunman in Louisville, identified by local authorities as Connor Sturgeon, 25, was an employee of Old National Bank, where he struck; he killed five people and injured at least eight others, including two responding police officers, before dying in a shootout with police.

As I reported after the Nashville mass shooting in late March:

Semiautomatic pistols used to be the top weapon of choice for mass shooters. But ever since the massacres at a Colorado movie theater and a Connecticut elementary school just over a decade ago, many perpetrators of these crimes have armed themselves with AR-15s and caused growing carnage. The phenomenon accelerated further with five high-profile attacks in 2022, beginning with those in Buffalo and Uvalde. (In the several years prior: the massacres in Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Parkland, Pittsburgh, Gilroy, El Paso, Dayton, Boulder, Indianapolis—the list quickly grows long.) Mass shooters increasingly also use body armor, tactical vests, and other tactical gear, the Nashville perpetrator included. 

This disturbing trend connects in part to how mass shooters emulate previous attackers as they plan and prepare, one of multiple common warning behaviors I examine in Trigger Points, my book about preventing mass shootings through the method of threat assessment. The weapons and gear these perpetrators select has coincided with aggressive marketing tactics long used by the gun industry.

Sturgeon’s age and actions figure into other behavioral patterns seen with mass shooters. According to the Louisville police chief, he live-streamed footage of his attack on Instagram, which authorities quickly sought to have removed by the social media platform. His live-streaming further reflects emulation behavior and has also been an escalating phenomenon, marking the Buffalo attack and others. 

On Monday, CNN and and local TV news outlets reported on the shooter’s gun, with descriptions including “an AR-15-style rifle” and an “assault weapon.” Local authorities, however, only specified publicly that the weapon was “a rifle.” It is unclear why the Louisville Metro PD withheld details about the firearm or why the agency referred to the gunman in multiple tweets on Monday as an “active aggressor” (a term that I have not seen used previously in the context of mass shootings). On Tuesday morning, Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg also confirmed that the shooter used an AR-15, which the shooter purchased legally at a gun dealership in Louisville on April 4, six days prior to the attack. Most mass shooters use legally obtained firearms. 

The gun industry estimates that at least 20 million AR-15s are in circulation throughout the country, according to a recent series on the firearm from the Washington Post. Nearly 14 million of those rifles were manufactured by US gun companies over the past decade, generating sales revenues of roughly $11 billion.

AR-15s can do horrific damage: The velocity and impact of the .223-caliber rounds can blast apart organs and demolish bones, as the Post illustrated with videos that are harrowing to watch—even just as animated visualizations. The bodies of some children killed in Uvalde were so obliterated that authorities had to resort to DNA testing to identify those victims.

Kentucky has some of the loosest gun policies in the United States. The state does not have a “red flag” law, a provision allowing authorities to remove guns from people who indicate through various warning behaviors that they may be planning targeted violence. According to CNN, a troubled Sturgeon wrote a note to his parents and a friend indicating that he intended to open fire at the bank. (Further details of those reported communications are not yet clear, including whether they were discovered before or after the attack. On Tuesday, local authorities disclosed that Sturgeon told at least one person that he was suicidal.)

For more on the soaring popularity of AR-15s among American gun buyers—and their increasingly stark role in the nation’s mass shootings epidemic—listen to this in-depth conversation I participated in recently on KQED’s “Forum.”

This article has been updated with details about the perpetrator’s gun.

It was a grim but not terribly surprising coincidence. Last Monday morning, just a few hours after the Washington Post published a new series on the popular semiautomatic rifles known as AR-15s, a suicidal 28-year-old used one to murder three children and three adults at a Nashville elementary school. It was the sixth mass shooting in the past 10 months committed with this type of highly lethal firearm, according to our Mother Jones database.

Semiautomatic pistols used to be the top weapon of choice for mass shooters. But ever since the massacres at a Colorado movie theater and a Connecticut elementary school just over a decade ago, many perpetrators of these crimes have armed themselves with AR-15-style rifles and caused growing carnage. The phenomenon accelerated further with five high-profile attacks in 2022, beginning with those in Buffalo and Uvalde. (In the several years prior, such weapons were used in the massacres in Las Vegas, Sutherland Springs, Parkland, Pittsburgh, Gilroy, El Paso, Dayton, Boulder, and Indianapolis—the list quickly grows long.) Mass shooters increasingly also use body armor, tactical vests, and other tactical gear, the Nashville perpetrator included. As I reported in December:

The past decade brought a sharp increase in shooters using military-style semiautomatic rifles. Among the 83 mass shootings since 2012 documented in the Mother Jones database (whose perpetrators also include several high school adolescents and various middle-age men), 34 of the cases involved such assault rifles.

As those weapons have soared in popularity in the United States, there also remains scant regulation of the military-grade body armor that mass shooters increasingly use. Such gear helped protect the perpetrator who committed the racist mass murder at the supermarket in Buffalo; his body armor stopped a bullet fired by a security guard, whom he then fatally shot. Body armor also made it more difficult to stop the attacker at Club Q in Colorado Springs, according to the military veteran who heroically took him down.

This disturbing trend connects in part to how mass shooters emulate previous attackers as they plan and prepare, one of multiple common warning behaviors I examine in Trigger Points, my book about preventing mass shootings through the method of threat assessment. The weapons and gear these perpetrators select has coincided with aggressive marketing tactics long used by the gun industry:

Threat assessment research shows that many mass shooters fixate on military-style weapons and gear and identify with a “commando” mentality. The problem has grown against a backdrop of gun manufacturers aggressively marketing semiautomatic rifles as emblematic of military and masculine prowess, including through product placement in movies and video games popular with young males. The type of “Bushmaster” rifle wielded by the Sandy Hook shooter had been billed as a means for buyers to get their “man card” in advertising from its maker, Remington, which agreed early this year to a landmark $73 million civil settlement with victims’ families. The family of a 10-year-old victim in Uvalde filed suit in November against Daniel Defense, the maker of the rifle used at Robb Elementary, alleging the company used militaristic marketing appeals to target “young male consumers.”

The new reporting from the Post adds some striking detail about how the firearms industry collaborated with video game companies to captivate young potential buyers. In 2010, representatives of two gun manufacturers met at a Nevada shooting range with technicians working on the blockbuster first-person shooter, “Call of Duty,” to record the firing of AR-15s and other weapons. “No detail, even the click of inserting a magazine, was too small to capture, participants said,” according to the Post.

The fast rising popularity of AR-15s—a civilian version of a rifle that was designed for maximum killing in war—drove booming overall gun sales. A Mother Jones investigation seven years ago into the secretive world of America’s 10 biggest gun manufacturers estimated an $8 billion annual business. As we reported then, Remington Outdoor, the maker of the AR-15 used in the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, saw its profits increase nearly thirtyfold over the following year—with the biggest jump in sales coming from assault rifles. 

Today, the gun industry estimates that at least 20 million AR-15s are in circulation throughout the country, according to the Post. Nearly 14 million of those were manufactured by US gun companies over the past decade alone, generating sales revenues of roughly $11 billion.

The Post series also spotlights the horrific damage that these weapons can do to human bodies big and small, like those of the three nine-year-olds gunned down in Nashville. The velocity and impact of the .223-caliber rounds can blast apart organs and demolish bones, as the Post illustrates with videos that are harrowing to watch even just as animated visualizations. The bodies of some children killed at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, where 19 students and two teachers perished, were so obliterated that authorities had to resort to DNA testing to identify those victims.

Moreover, AR-15s have stark implications for law enforcement responding to mass shootings, as the Texas Tribune revealed recently with an important investigation into the catastrophe in Uvalde. A significant reason why police failed for an excruciatingly long time to confront the shooter, who was hunkered down inside a classroom with dying victims, was because they feared the firepower of his AR-15 and felt outgunned. According to the Tribune, multiple officers who spoke with investigators in the aftermath of the botched response said that they were unwilling to confront the rifle on the other side of the classroom door.

“You knew that it was definitely an AR,” said one Uvalde PD officer. “There was no way of going in…We had no choice but to wait and try to get something that had better coverage where we could actually stand up to him.”

Even by the standards of America’s woefully entrenched political battle over gun regulations, the response to these recurring massacres from various Republican lawmakers remains astounding. Texas Republicans apparently sought to bury the police fears about the shooter’s weapon in Uvalde, according to the Tribune: “A comprehensive and scathing report of law enforcement’s response to the shooting, released by a Texas House committee chaired by Republican Rep. Dustin Burrows in July, made no mention of the comments by law enforcement officers that illustrated trepidation about the AR-15.”

A month after Uvalde, state Sen. Bob Hall argued that the perpetrator’s firepower was irrelevant because “he had enough time” to kill the 19 children and two teachers “with his hands or a baseball bat, and so it’s not the gun.”

At the national level, Republican lawmakers have been unanimous since the Nashville tragedy that they have no intention of strengthening regulations for AR-15s or other guns. A particularly shameful expression of their position came from Rep. Tim Burchett of Tennessee, whose district is home to the newly relocated headquarters of Smith & Wesson (which manufactured the semiautomatic pistol used by the Nashville shooter.)

“We’re not gonna fix it,” Burchett told reporters on Capitol Hill. “Criminals are gonna be criminals.” He suggested that the only solutions might be a “Christian revival” or homeschooling children, as his own family does. “I don’t see any real role that we could do other than mess things up,” he said.

He also recognized, awkwardly, the universality of the mass shootings scourge: “It doesn’t matter what state it’s happened in, we’re all Americans. It doesn’t matter the color of their skin, they all bleed red, and they’re bleeding a lot.”

Burchett’s comments were in their own right remarkably frank. He simply was reinforcing the commonly espoused theme that “nothing ever changes” with this problem, that there’s “nothing we can really do” about the epidemic of gun violence. It’s a national narrative that affirms outrage and despair, goes hand in hand with misguided blame on mental illness—and gives cover to politicians and others who profit from denying the fundamental role of ubiquitous, easily obtainable, highly lethal firearms.

The next mass shooting to occur somewhere in the country is almost certainly not a matter of if, but only when. And yet, the idea that we can essentially do nothing to stop it from happening stands as an insidious and damaging myth—one that America still, somehow, has yet to really confront.