Research Indicates Connections Between Suicide and Mass Shootings

Today, 19 states have enacted red flag laws and they’ve had mixed results in violence prevention. But the connections between suicidality and mass shootings have just gotten stronger. “Many of these mass shootings are angry suicides,”  James Densley, professor of criminal justice at Minnesota’s Metropolitan State University, told me four years ago. And now there’s even more evidence to suggest that’s true.

It isn’t news that a lot of mass shooters suffer from suicidal ideation, said James Lankford, a professor of criminology at the University of Alabama. But it wasn’t until he published a 2021 study comparing mass shooters to other demographic groups that he truly realized just how much more mass shooters had in common with people who die by suicide than they did with other kinds of homicide offenders.

“Homicides are rarely premeditated but public mass shootings almost always are,” Lankford said. So are suicides. While mass shootings were 3.8 times more likely to be premeditated than standard homicides, they were only 1.2 times more likely to premeditated compared to suicide. Mass shooters were more likely than other homicide offenders to act alone. They were more likely to be killed by law enforcement. And while standard homicide offenders aren’t particularly likely to experience suicidal tendencies, in Lankford’s study anyway, mass shooters were a bit more likely to have a history of suicidal ideation than even people who actually died by suicide.

Lankford is not the first person to find connections between suicide and mass shootings. In a database of more than 150 mass shootings that took place between 1966 and 2018, Densley found that about half the attackers in his sample had demonstrated signs of feeling suicidal before they hurt others. A different set of researchers who analyzed 41 school shooters for the Secret Service and Department of Education found that 78 percent had a history of thinking about or attempting suicide.

In other words, acts of mass violence are functioning as a method of suicide. “These are individuals who are planning in advance to commit a crime for which there’s almost no chance they’ll avoid life imprisonment or death as a direct result of the crime,” Lankford said. “It’s very reasonable to say that they’re not very invested in their current lives, or their future lives.”

That fact has implications for policy and prevention.