Your evil government, the lizard people’s evil government
A report issued Wednesday by the Secret Service finds that one-quarter of mass shootings in the U.S. between 2016 and 2020 were motivated by ” a belief system involving conspiracies or hateful ideologies involving anti-government, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic views.” Lina Alathari, the chief of the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center, told reporters the conspiracies included beliefs such as 9/11 never happened, or that the United Nations was coming to take their guns, or that aliens or lizard people were preparing to take over the world.
“Mental illness is not a barometer for dangerousness and it is not a correlation for mass attacks. The vast majority of individuals with mental illnesses in this country will never be violent. In fact, often, they are the victims of violence,” Alathari said. At least six were radicalized online.
“One attacker had started subscribing to an online message board about 18 months prior to his attack,” she said. “He later told law enforcement that that’s when he became radicalized and started hating Jewish people.”
Half were motivated by personal grievances (the typical perpetrator) including romantic or family relationships, work, or legal issues. Over half of attackers experienced depression, psychotic symptoms, or suicidal thoughts prior to the attacks.
The report, the latest in a string of such NTAC studies, examined 173 attacks over the period during which three or more people were injured or killed, excluding the attacker, in a public or semi-public place. In sum, 513 people were killed and an additional 1,234 people were injured. Lone attackers initiated nearly all the killings.
More than three-quarters of all attacks involved firearms, and over 80% of attacks that used guns resulted in at least one death, the report found. Most of the attackers used handguns, but one-third used “long guns,” a category that includes automatic and semi-automatic weapons. Attackers who used weapons other than guns fatally wounded victims in fewer than 50% of attacks.
In over one-quarter of all mass shootings, the attackers possessed firearms illegally.
Asked whether the trends called for gun reform, Alathari said, “Our research informs policy, and we really hope communities take preventative action to make sure that they are mitigating any possible risk of a tragedy like this happening again.”
With so many mass shootings over the period, it is unclear whether the attacks in the report represent the sum total of attacks that fit the criteria stated above or whether NTAC selected these 173 events from them. If they were selected, then how?
As Anand Giridharadas writes in “Winners Take All,” the world’s billionaire elite will work to solve global problems (such as poverty) that their own activities help perpetuate using the vast wealth generated through market capitalism. Just so long as proposed solutions do not require them to reconsider market capitalism or to reduce wealth inequality: to pay more in taxes or to make less by paying their workers more and more fairly.
It is the same with guns, isn’t it? We will entertain solutions to the plague of gun violence only so long as they do not cost us our guns.