This study explores the threat of ideological active shooter attacks in the United States. In particular, to understand if these events constitute a new brand of "lone wolf terrorism" or if they are simply "deranged shooters" that happen to be ideological. The results show that ideological and non-ideological active shooters share very similar profiles. Despite the similarities, ideological extremism seems to influence the way these offenders prepare, execute, and conclude their attacks. Most ideological active shooters are "loners" whose attacks tend to be motivated by ideology. Given their sophistication and lethality, ideological active shooters represent a serious threat to national security.

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This study compares the demographic, background, motivation, and pre‐event and event‐level behaviors across four types of mass public shooters: disgruntled employee, school, ideologically motivated, and rampage offenders. Using a database containing detailed information on 318 mass public shootings that occurred in the United States between 1966 and 2017, we find systematic differences in the characteristics, motivations, target selection, planning, and incident‐level behaviors among these offenders. The results show that ideologically motivated shooters to be the most patient, and methodical, and as a result the most lethal. Conversely, disgruntled employees, who are driven by revenge, tend to have little time to plan and consequently are the least lethal shooters. These, among other differences, underscore the need for prevention strategies and policies to be tailored to specific types of offenders. Furthermore, the results also highlight commonalities across offender type, suggesting that the social and psychological pathways to violence are universal across offenders.

This study provides a comparative analysis of news media coverage across four types of mass public shootings: rampage, disgruntled employee, school, and lone-wolf terrorist. This research analyzes the agenda-setting function of the media and identifies differences in coverage and the salience of coverage, proportionality of coverage, changes in coverage over time, and factors influencing levels of coverage. Findings indicate school shootings and lone-wolf terrorist shootings receive disproportionate amounts of news media coverage. This suggests media coverage may be contributing to setting the public and policy agenda concerning the phenomenon. These findings have important implications for public perceptions of risk, conceptualizations of potential perpetrators, and the implementation of security measures.

For the last 40 years, the general profile of mass public shooters has enjoyed enduring consensus by experts, and as a result, it has remained static over this time. However, a recent string of mass public shootings perpetrated by “atypical” offenders bring into question the stability of the characteristics, motivations, and methods employed by these offenders. The goal of this study is to examine the stability and change of these characteristics and behaviors over the last 32 years (1984–2015). Using an open‐source database, this study compares mass public shootings in 2000–2015 time period to the attacks committed in 1984–1999. The results illustrate not only sharp increase in number of mass public shootings in the last 16 years but also a significant growth in the racial heterogeneity and background characteristics of these offenders, clearly marking a departure from the general accepted profile of mass public shooters and mass murderers. The results also point to key characteristics, and behaviors that have remained static during the analysis time. Additionally, this study explores the implications these changes and stability on crime prevention strategies, as well as strategies to mitigate the lethality of these attacks.

This study utilizes crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis to assess 306 mass shootings. We compare non-extremist and extremist mass shooters according to characteristics that capture mental health histories of offenders, their grievances, and strains. We discover that offenders who sympathized with extremism were driven by grievance against a social group and were suffering from either mental health issues or from general strain. Extremist sympathizers differ from non-extremists in the nature of their grievances and the strains they experience. These results imply there may exist different causal mechanistic activity underpinning extremist and non-extremist violence, specifically with regards to mass shootings.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine whether threat assessment, an intelligence-led policing (ILP) tool, can prevent mass public shootings. Design/methodology/approach In order to gauge the potential effectiveness of this ILP tool, the authors conduct a retrospective analysis of 278 mass public shootings that occurred in the USA between 1966 and 2016. This retrospective analysis allows us to determine how successful threat assessment protocols could be in preventing mass public shootings by examining how successful this tool would have been in identifying the offenders in our data. Findings The results show that threat assessment has the potential to be an effective tool in the ILP arsenal to identify and prevent impending mass public shootings. However, our results also point to several obstacles for the effective implementation of this ILP tool. The underreporting of threats and using the content of threats and characteristics of threateners are problematic in correctly assigning risk. The authors make suggestions for how to overcome these obstacles. Originality/value This study makes several contributions to the intelligence-led policing and mass murder field. This is the first study to test the potential effectiveness of an intelligence-led policing tool to prevent mass public shootings. Additionally, this is one of the first studies to examine the leaks, types, context and follow-though of threats made by mass public shooters in the United States. Consequently, it provides unique information on the foreshowing behaviors of mass public shooters.