Getting to the Root of Mass Shootings: Why a “Single-Fix” Mindset Misses the Mark

Mass shootings are one of the most painful and polarizing topics in American life. Communities grieve, politics harden, and the conversation often collapses into a tug-of-war over gun laws versus mental health. If we’re serious about saving lives, we have to get past slogans and build a prevention strategy that matches the complexity of the problem. That starts with a hard look at what the data actually show about who commits these attacks, why they do it, and what works to stop them—before the shooting starts. 

What the Numbers Actually Say

The FBI’s latest “Active Shooter” report identified 24 such incidents in 2024—half as many as in 2023—spread across 19 states and across locations like open spaces, businesses, schools, government buildings, and houses of worship. While this decline is welcome, the year-to-year volatility is a reminder that focusing on a single lever (whether laws or diagnoses) won’t reliably prevent the next tragedy. 

At the broader level of gun mortality, the CDC’s most recent complete year (2023) recorded 46,728 firearm deaths—about 132 per day—with a majority due to suicide and a substantial share due to homicide. Mass public shootings account for a tiny fraction of these deaths, but their terror, randomness, and media salience give them outsized impact on public fear and policy debate. If we want fewer funerals, we must address targeted mass violence and the larger ecosystem of gun deaths where many of the same risk factors (suicidality, domestic violence, access, and crisis) show up.  

Who Are the Perpetrators? Patterns That Matter

Three patterns emerge consistently across federal and academic research:

1. A pathway—not a snap. The Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center (NTAC) and the FBI find that attackers rarely “just snap.” Most travel a discernible pathway to violence that includes planning, preparation, and what researchers call “leakage”—communicating intent to others. In multiple analyses, most attackers exhibited concerning behaviors that others noticed; many explicitly signaled their plans. That means prevention is possible when communities have clear ways to identify, assess, and act on warning signs.   

2. Acute crisis and suicidality. The NIJ-supported Violence Project—covering mass shootings since 1966—finds that suicidality is common among shooters: roughly 30% were suicidal beforehand and another 39% during the shooting. Among K-12 and college shooters, the rates are even higher. This dovetails with law-enforcement research showing multiple, compounding stressors in the year prior to attacks. Intervening in a person’s crisis—especially when they’re talking about self-harm—can also avert other-directed violence.

3. Gender and grievance. The vast majority of mass shooters are male. That’s not a moral condemnation of men; it’s a crucial prevention clue about how grievance, identity, and the externalizing of blame can metastasize toward violence. Understanding those dynamics—particularly how anger at a person, group, workplace, or institution becomes a “mission”—is critical for threat assessment teams.  

A Candid Word About Mental Illness

It’s tempting to say “the killers are mentally ill” and stop there. The evidence says otherwise. A minority of active shooters have documented serious mental illness, and psychiatric diagnoses alone are weak predictors of interpersonal violence. When violence risk rises among people with mental illness, it’s often tied to co-occurring substance misuse, prior violence, or acute life crises—risk factors that also apply to people without a psychiatric diagnosis. In short: mental illness is part of some cases, but it is not the main driver of mass shootings, and treating it as such both stigmatizes millions of nonviolent Americans and misdirects prevention resources.  

That doesn’t mean mental health services are irrelevant; in fact, they’re central to prevention because so many attackers are in crisis and suicidal, not because “mental illness = mass shooter.” Building accessible crisis care (including 988), expanding school and workplace counseling, and integrating clinicians into threat assessment teams are tangible steps that map to how attacks unfold in the real world. 

The Overlooked Link: Domestic Violence

A large share of mass shootings involve domestic or family violence—either as the immediate context or as part of the perpetrator’s history. Analyses of recent years have found that over half of mass shootings had a domestic-violence component, and case studies by the U.S. Secret Service have highlighted how intimate partner violence can escalate into public mass attacks. Ignoring this connection means overlooking one of the clearest early-warning systems we have. Enforcing existing prohibitions for domestic abusers, disarming subjects of restraining orders, and treating intimate-partner threats as serious danger signals aren’t culture-war ideas; they’re life-saving basics.  

Means Matter—But So Does Timing

Access to firearms is not the only factor in mass shootings—but it is the means by which ideation becomes mass casualty. Here’s what rigorous reviews suggest:

• Evidence is strongest that child-access prevention/safe-storage laws reduce youth firearm injuries and deaths.

• There’s moderate evidence that waiting periods reduce suicide.

• Evidence linking specific gun laws to reductions in mass shootings is limited/inconclusive—partly because mass shootings are rare and defined inconsistently across datasets.

That combination matters: we should adopt the policies that clearly reduce deaths now (safe storage, child-access prevention, and measures that cut suicides) while building stronger, real-time behavioral prevention for targeted attacks. Treating mass shootings as a subset of a larger lethal-means problem lets us save lives even as we keep improving the targeted-violence playbook.  

The Contagion Problem: How We Talk About Shootings Can Fuel More

Research dating back years has described a contagion or copycat effect, where intense, sensational coverage of perpetrators appears to inspire some at-risk individuals. That’s why many agencies and newsrooms now embrace “No Notoriety” practices: name the shooter once if required, then focus attention on victims, first responders, and community recovery instead of giving a blueprint (and a pedestal) to would-be imitators. This is not about hiding facts; it’s about refusing to provide fame as an incentive.  

So What Does Change the Trajectory? A Targeted, Layered Plan

A realistic strategy blends behavioral prevention (identifying and interrupting pathways to violence) with lethal-means safety (reducing the chance that a crisis turns fatal). The most promising, evidence-aligned elements look like this:

1) Stand up Threat-Assessment & Management (TAM) Teams Everywhere We Live and Work

Schools, colleges, employers, houses of worship, and local governments should maintain multidisciplinary teams (security, HR/administration, legal, mental health, and law enforcement) trained to receive reports, triage risk, and coordinate interventions. The Secret Service and FBI have published practical frameworks; jurisdictions that normalize TAM see more plots averted because leakage is acted upon. 

What this looks like in practice: clear reporting portals; response within set time windows; documented safety plans; connection to services (counseling, housing, substance use treatment); and continuous monitoring when risk remains elevated. 

2) Take Suicidality as a Red-Flag for Other-Directed Violence

Because suicidality is common among mass shooters, proactive suicide prevention doubles as violence prevention. Pair 988 crisis lines with mobile crisis teams, co-responder models (clinician + officer), and follow-up care. The goal is fast de-escalation today and durable stabilization in the weeks and months ahead. 

3) Use Extreme Risk Protection Orders (ERPOs) Strategically

When someone is making threats or spiraling toward harm, ERPOs (sometimes called “red flag laws”) let family or police seek a temporary court order to remove firearms and block purchases. The strongest evidence shows suicide reductions; case series also document ERPOs interrupting mass-shooting threats. ERPOs aren’t a panacea, but as part of a TAM toolkit they buy time to treat the crisis and cool the situation. 

4) Enforce Domestic-Violence Protections Like Lives Depend on It (Because They Do)

Courts and sheriffs need resourcing and accountability to make sure restraining orders and firearm prohibitions are actually enforced, and that victims can safely report violations. This is one of the cleanest ways to cut off a common pathway from private violence to public carnage. 

5) Normalize Safe Storage—at Home and in Public Messaging

For households with firearms, locked, unloaded, and separate storage reduces thefts, impulsive youth shootings, and suicides. It’s also compatible with firearm ownership. Healthcare systems, schools, faith groups, and retailers can distribute lockboxes and run non-judgmental storage campaigns. The data on youth injuries and suicides is persuasive here.  

6) Build “No Notoriety” Into Editorial Standards and Police Briefings

Media organizations and public-information officers can adopt protocols that focus on victims, block manifestos, avoid glamor images, and minimize the perpetrator’s name and photo. Research suggests this reduces the copycat effect without compromising the public’s right to know. 

7) Train Bystanders to Act on Leakage

Students, coworkers, and family frequently see or hear something before an attack. Public campaigns and school/workplace trainings should teach what to report (direct threats, acquiring weapons for a grievance, fascination with prior shooters, suicidal posts), where to report, and what happens next to lower the barrier to speaking up. 

8) Invest in Young Men’s Health and Belonging

Because perpetrators are overwhelmingly male, prevention efforts should include programming that helps young men handle failure, rejection, and anger without turning to violence—mentoring, conflict-resolution skills, trauma-informed counseling, and pro-social belonging through sports, trades, and service. This is not “soft”; it’s targeted risk reduction aligned with what the databases show. 

Will Stricter Gun Laws Alone “Change the Trajectory”?

No single policy—whether a new law or a new clinic—will “solve” mass shootings. Evidence for some gun policies is strong in areas like suicide and youth injuries (e.g., safe-storage/child-access and waiting periods), while mass-shooting-specific effects are harder to measure and remain limited or inconclusive. Meanwhile, behavioral approaches—threat assessment teams, ERPOs for acute threats, and domestic-violence enforcement—map directly onto the known pathways to violence and have a track record of averting plots. The most credible path forward combines both: behavioral prevention to catch the fuse and means safety to shorten the wick.   

What Won’t Work

• Stigmatizing mental illness. It’s inaccurate and counterproductive. Most people with mental illness are not violent; many are at higher risk of victimization. Stigma pushes people away from treatment and makes communities less safe.  

• Focusing only on hardware or only on headspace. Tools matter; so does behavior. Treating this as exclusively a gun problem or exclusively a mental-health problem ignores the interplay that turns grievance into mass casualty. 

• Purely reactive “hardening.” Security upgrades can reduce casualties during an attack, but they don’t change the upstream timeline where plots can be interrupted. Prevention beats response. 

Measuring Real Progress

Success is not just “fewer headlines.” It’s also: more tips acted on; more ERPOs issued when someone threatens a school or workplace; more domestic-violence cases where firearms are relinquished as ordered; more households with locked storage; more students and employees who say they know how to report concerning behavior; and (crucially) fewer suicides. These are measurable, trackable indicators that align to the actual risk profile of mass shooters. 

The Bottom Line

Mass shootings are complex, tragic, and, too often, preventable. The profile that emerges is not of “evil madmen” who appear out of nowhere; it’s of people—overwhelmingly men—moving along a pathway marked by crisis, grievance, leakage, and access to lethal means. If we want to change the trajectory, we have to build systems that recognize and interrupt that path.

That means standing up multidisciplinary threat-assessment teams where we live, work, learn, and worship; taking suicidality and domestic violence as urgent public-safety warnings; using ERPOs to defuse acute threats; normalizing safe storage; and refusing to make celebrities out of killers. Debates over broad gun policy will continue, and evidence does support some measures that save lives—especially on suicide and youth safety—but mass shooting prevention will always hinge on timely, targeted, behavioral intervention.

This is not about choosing between “gun control” and “mental health.” It’s about choosing everything that works—together, and fast enough—so the next warning sign becomes an intervention, not a memorial.