August 4, 2019
By Robin Postell
More than 30 people have died in three separate mass shootings in Gilroy, El Paso and Dayton, Ohio in the last week.
An Op-Ed published by The Los Angeles Times Sunday examined data about who commits these crimes and what sort of prevention might actually be effective.
For two years, the writers of the Op-Ed, studied the life histories of mass shooters in the United States for a project funded by the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice.
From that information, they built a database dating back to 1966 of every mass shooter who shot and killed four or more people in a public place, and every shooting incident at schools, workplaces, and places of worship since 1999.
They wrote:
We’ve interviewed incarcerated perpetrators and their families, shooting survivors and first responders. We’ve read media and social media, manifestos, suicide notes, trial transcripts and medical records.
The Los Angeles Times
The results of their analyses can be explored more here.
The first shooting counted in this week period was at the 41st annual Gilroy Garlic Festival in Gilroy, California, killing three and injuring 13 more. Gunman Santino William Legan, 19, reportedly was killed during exchanged gunfire with police, and shot himself, according to The New York Times.
The latest two mass shootings were at crowded public places in Texas and Ohio in less than 24 hours and claimed at least 29 lives and left dozens injured.
Saturday morning at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas a gunman opened fire in the busy back-to-school shopping crowd, killing 20 and injuring more than two dozen. That gunman was identified as Patrick Crusius, 21, a resident of Allen, Texas, outside Dallas.
Authorities deemed the shooting as a possible hate crime after discovering a racist, anti-immigrant manifesto posted by the offender.
The 2,300-word, four-page document, seen by VICE News, is called “An Inconvenient Truth” and is filled with typos and spelling mistakes.
The scree begins:
“In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion.”
Patrick Crusius, “An Inconvenient Truth”/Vice
Only hours later a gunman suited in body armor and carrying plenty of ammunition for a heinous shooting spree, opened fire in a popular social hot spot in Dayton, Ohio. Nine were killed, nearly 30 more injured. The gunman was Connor Betts, 24, and was killed by police less than a minute after he started shooting a .223-caliber rifle into the streets around 1 a.m. Sunday.
Betts reportedly killed his 22-year-old sister, Megan, the youngest of the deceased victims, who were all killed in the same area. The others were adults ranging in age from 25 to 57.
The Friday, July 29 California shooting was number 20. The Saturday shooting in El Paso and the Sunday shooting in Dayton were the 21st and 22nd mass killings of 2019 in the U.S., according to the AP/USA Today/Northeastern University mass murder database that tracks homicides where four or more people killed — not including the offender.
Including the two latest attacks, 125 people had been killed in the 2019 shootings.
