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Abstract
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Mass shootings are horrific acts that seem to defy the rules that govern everyday life. A stranger shoots strangers. Fatalizing violence occurs seemingly out of the blue in the context of safe spaces such as schools, movie theaters, or workplaces. Death comes in ways that it seems as unpredictable as it is unavoidable.
Given this terrain, it makes complete sense that we, as a society and also as smaller subset societies of scholars, attempt to place some sort of grid over mass shootings to render them more sensible, predictable, and ultimately preventable. Mental illness was widely considered such a schema until it became clear that, as MacLeish and I showed,1 the category of "mental illness" revealed more about cultural and racialized myths and stereotypes than it did about the causal factors that led to mass violence. Age, race, society, and family have also been posited as potential frames.2 And now, as the authors laudably suggest, we may add seasonality to the list.
I have no implicit problem with linkages that connect mass shootings and seasonal effects. After all, chart trends appear notable, and on some level perhaps it makes sense that shooters might be sensitive to the weather just like everyone else.
At the same time, a number of factors should give us pause before we pursue this line of inquiry in a more sustained way. Perhaps most importantly, the very definition of a "mass shooting" is in no way stable or value-free, and a great deal of controversy3 surrounds different definitions of the term. Even the Federal Bureau of Investigation does not have a stable definition of a mass shooting,4 and controversy has also surrounded the shifting definitions used by the anything-but-systematic database complied by the crowd-sourced Web site shootingtracker.com.5 This is not to suggest that effort and thought don't go into these databases, but that their framing, inclusions, and exclusions depend on a host of variables made all the more complex because of Congressional bans on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-funded research6 that might produce uniformity. Put succinctly, we need a stable definition of a mass shooting that results from research, not from media reports or crowd sourcing, before we can begin to biologize the substrates that may underlie the phenomenon...
Language: en |