Are Mass Killings on the Rise? Criminologist Says No

(CNN) — Oakland is reeling after a gun rampage at a small religious
college left seven people dead. Six months ago, eight people died in a
shooting in Seal Beach, California. And just over a year ago, an attack
targeting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona left six dead and 13
injured.

Each mass killing provokes a flurry of public shock and a frenzy of
media attention — and often soul searching about whether they represent a
broader descent into gun-fueled violence.

But are such attacks on the rise in the United States?

Not according to professor James Alan Fox, a criminologist at
Northeastern University in Boston who has been studying mass murder for
the past three decades.

Despite the huge media coverage devoted to them, crime statistics
show that there is no upward trend in mass killings — defined as having
four victims or more, not counting terrorism — since the 1970s, he said.

Campus shootings, such as the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, or the
cluster of school shootings of the 1990s, including Columbine, often
attract more attention than multiple killings in other settings.

At Virginia Tech, 23-year-old student Seung-Hui Cho took 32 lives in a
solo shooting spree on the Blacksburg campus before killing himself.

In 1999 at Columbine High School in Colorado, 18-year old Eric Harris
and 17-year old Dylan Klebold killed 12 of their fellow students and a
teacher before taking their own lives in the school library.

But despite these high-profile cases, the chances of falling victim
to a school or campus shooting are still incredibly slim, Fox said.

“Overall in this country, there is an average of 10 to 20 murders
across campuses in any given year,” he said. “Compare that to over 1,000
suicides and about 1,500 deaths from binge drinking and drug
overdoses.”

So while they are sad when they occur, school shootings are “very few
and far between, and very unpredictable,” Fox said. This suggests that
authorities can do greater good by focusing on the prevention of suicide
and substance abuse than trying to guard against a campus killer.

Looking at a more general picture, while mass murders are more common now than in the 1960s, so is murder generally, Fox said.

And although there is no pattern in terms of the way the killings
occur, some trends can be drawn about those committing them, Fox said.

His research indicates that from 1976 to 2008, there were 852 massacres, involving 4,131 victims and 1,176 perpetrators.

The perpetrators tend to be older than those committing murders
generally, Fox said, with more than a quarter of those responsible for
mass killings aged over 40, his research shows, and the average age of
those involved in campus shootings being 36.

Meanwhile, 60% of those committing mass murders are white, compared
with 47% for murder generally, Fox said, and 94% of the perpetrators are
male, compared with 88% for murder generally.

Fox suggests that any sense that mass killings are on an upward
spiral has more to do with the vagaries of human memory than actual
facts.

“Since we tend to remember the ones that happened more recently,
rather than the ones before, we often get the sense that three things
make an epidemic,” he said.

“They are rare events, and everything that is rare is difficult to predict.”

Kelly McBride, senior faculty for ethics at the Poynter Institute,
said that although changes in news media mean mass killings probably get
more coverage now than in decades past, she doesn’t believe public
perception of their frequency has been skewed as a result.

That is because of the changing way the audience consumes
information, said McBride, who also works on Poynter’s Sense-Making
Project, which looks at how the public handles information.

“Even though there’s more news out there about mass shootings, people
are consuming less of it because there’s more news out there about
everything,” McBride said.

“I suspect that if you look at the average consumer’s diet when there
is a mass shooting, it’s probably not much different than it was in the
old system when there were fewer news organizations covering a mass
event.”

One reason for the increased coverage of massacres is that the
breaking news environment has become so competitive, pushing many
outlets to seek the most sensational lines, she said. National and
international news providers also muscle in on stories that might
previously have been left to local media, she said, and tend to dip into
the most dramatic lines.

Concern is often raised that such wall-to-wall coverage, especially on cable news channels, may prompt copycat attacks.

However, according to McBride, no solid scientific research has
demonstrated a contagion effect resulting from media coverage of mass
murders.

The result must be that authorities struggle to second-guess the
unpredictable acts of lone killers, with factors at play ranging from an
individual’s sense of alienation or personal grievance to mental health
care issues or the availability of weapons.

But while every senseless massacre leaves a community in shock and
tragically cuts short too many lives, the vast majority of Americans
will remain untouched apart from the screaming headlines.