A Multivariate Comparison of Family, Felony, and Public Mass Murders in the United States

Abstract

The mass murderer is known by a variety of names in both public and academic spheres, from the family annihilator to the active shooter, from the workplace avenger to the rampage school shooter. Although most researchers acknowledge that the phenomenon is heterogeneous, mass killing has defied classification, and currently no consensus typology exists. Most previous efforts at developing a classification scheme have focused on sorting these multicides into three broad groups, namely, family, felony, and public mass killings, exclusively relying on qualitative methods and case-study analysis to do so. The present study employs a multivariate approach to examine differences among types in victim, offender, and incident characteristics on the population of all mass murders in the United States from 2006 to 2016.

Disaggregating Mass Public Shootings: A Comparative Analysis of Disgruntled Employee, School, Ideologically motivated, and Rampage Shooters

“…Consistent with the growing literature, we define a mass public shooting as an incident of targeted violence where an offender has killed or unequivocally attempted to kill four or more victims on a public stage (e.g., workplace, schools, parks, and businesses) in one or multiple closely related locations within a 24-h period (2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(9)(10)(11)(12). Both familicides and felony-related mass shootings are excluded from this operationalization (12).…”

“…Consistent with most studies on the subject (1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19), we employed an open-source data collection strategy to identify and collect information on both failed and successful mass public shootings that occurred in the United States from 1966 to 2017. Open-source data are information that is open to the public (20).…”

Is familicide a distinct subtype of mass murder? Evidence from a Swiss national cohort

“…We defined familicide as any act of killing three of more people within one family, bringing the definition in line with that of “mass murder” (Ilic & Frei, ), thus including the killing of spouse and children, but not excluding the killing of children by the mother or the killing of parents and siblings by the children as has been suggested by Fridel (). We did exclude killing of a spouse alone, a single child, and, indeed, any single person killings.…”

“…Ever since Dietz's (1986) classic paper where he distinguished between "family annihilators," "pseudocommandos," and "set-and-run-killers," there have been attempts to classify mass murders into different groups. Fridel (2017), having examined 258 people in the United States who had killed four or more people in a single episode between 2006 and 2016, proposed three categories, namely, "familicides," characterised by the relationship between perpetrator and victims; "felony mass murders," characterised by the motive of the perpetrator, mainly material gain and elimination of witnesses; and "public mass murders," characterised by the location of the crime.…”

“…Fridel (), having examined 258 people in the United States who had killed four or more people in a single episode between 2006 and 2016, proposed three categories, namely, “familicides,” characterised by the relationship between perpetrator and victims; “felony mass murders,” characterised by the motive of the perpetrator, mainly material gain and elimination of witnesses; and “public mass murders,” characterised by the location of the crime. Among the latter were different types of perpetrators such as school shooters, workplace annihilators, individuals with psychosis, and hate criminals.…”