What role does 'toxic masculinity' play in mass shootings?
As the toll from mass shootings this year already approaches the total for all of last year, more people are openly asking a question that has lurked mostly in the shadows: Why are the shooters so often white men?
"Mental illness and hatred pull the trigger, not the gun," declared President Donald Trump when he condemned shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, which left a at least 31 people dead and dozens wounded.
I wish it were that simple. The president was right about hatred, but as psychiatrists and social scientists look for factors that might help us to predict mass violence, they find it's not mental illness as often as it's just men, overwhelmingly white men.
Sure, there have been infamous exceptions, such as the 30-year-old woman who shot and killed one boy and wounded five other children in a Winnetka elementary school in 1988 before shooting a man and then killing herself.
Or there was the D.C. sniper case, in which two African American men, ages 41 and 17, terrorized the Washington metropolitan area in 2002, killing 17 people and wounding 10 others in a nationwide killing spree.
Well minds, in my nonmedical opinion, do not commit such horrible acts.
But a deeper dive into statistics finds serious mental illness to be conclusively present in only a small minority of mass shootings, according to various studies using different standards for what constitutes a mental health problem. A 2014 FBI study, for example, found that most mass shooters have a history of showing some symptoms of mental illness, though only about a fourth actually have been diagnosed.
But demographically, a database kept by the AP/USA Today/Northeastern University shows that slightly more than half, 51.1%, of mass shootings are committed by young, white men. Blacks committed 28.4% and Hispanics 10.2%.
The median age of a public mass shooter is 28 -- significantly lower than the median age of a person who commits a mass shooting of his or her family, according to the database.
Since 2006, 12 mass shootings have been committed by gunmen 21 or younger, including the 21-year-old suspected gunman in El Paso.
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