James Densley is the department chair of criminology and criminal justice at Metropolitan State University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He’s also the co-founder of the Violence Prevention Project, which started life as a study of the life histories of mass shootings in the United States, funded by the National Institute of Justice. The group built a database of mass shootings that had killed four or more people in a public space. Additional research included interviewing the living, incarcerated perpetrators of mass shootings, their family members and people who knew them. The group also interviewed victims, families, survivors and first responders. Out of this came a book, “The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic.”
WESA's Oliver Morrison interviewed Densley on Thursday.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity and concision.
Oliver Morrison: Our reporting has begun to form some tentative conclusions that Thomas Crooks, the man who, investigators say, attempted to assassinate Trump, seemed a lot like a mass shooter. What do you think about the similarities or differences between political assassins and mass shooters?
James Densley: I think what's interesting is that the modern threat-assessment paradigm, which is the way we respond to mass shootings today, was born out of research that looked at political assassination attempts. And so there is actually this synergy between these two phenomena, and it's rooted in the history of our understanding of these types of attacks.
So what's interesting is, in a generation past, we often were more focused on political assassinations. That was the more timely and topical issue. And if you think about even the gun violence legislation that was passed in the 1960s — the movement was galvanized around the assassination of JFK, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King. The whole debate around gun rights and security and everything has its roots in these political assassinations. So it's only today where we've had less of those political assassinations, but far more of these mass shootings that have occurred in other contexts where we are now saying this particular case seems to fit the profile of a mass shooter. But you could argue it's actually that a mass shooter fits the profile of a political assassin, and that it's the other way around.
I’ve never heard that before. That’s interesting — that the people who have tried to assassinate people are not necessarily people who are active politically.
If you look at the Secret Service research on political assassination attempts that was written in the 1990s, that was essentially that conclusion — that these were young, alienated and isolated men. They tend to be in their 20s, very similar to this current case. And a lot of this is in their own heads, as opposed to being part of a broader conspiracy to bring down the government. You've got John Wilkes Booth, for instance, with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. But that's 150 years ago. The cases in modern history are a lot less politically motivated and seem to be more rooted in personal grievances and personal issues. And that is very similar to what we see in the life histories of mass shooters.
Do you have any thoughts about how Thomas Crooks does or doesn’t fit the profile?
I have been following it. We actually built a quick database of U.S. presidential assassination attempts to look at the profile of the individuals who did it. And what we saw is that they tended to be men. They tended to be in their 20s, and many of them were dealing with their own sort of personal issues that were beyond any political or ideological motivations for the crime. And to that extent, you could say they do look similar to what we think of as being the modern mass shooter. But I think I'll come back to that idea that there was also a time [when] we didn't talk about mass shooters, but what we did talk about were these political assassination attempts. And so you could say that actually, it's the mass shooters [who] are fitting that profile rather than the other way around.
The reporting that is out there right now tends to come from people who don’t know him very well. But there is also a growing sense that this may be because he was a loner to some extent, and isolated. So do you think we just haven’t yet learned enough about him, or does it mean that more information hasn’t come out about him from people close to him?
Not necessarily. I think to some degree, if that evidence was readily available, we would have probably already heard about it. And I think what is striking is that in the case of several mass shooters, they would leave behind legacy tokens like manifestos or YouTube videos or [another] trail of breadcrumbs that people could [use to] start to interrogate their lives and piece together their motives. And almost the absence of that here would make you pause and say the motivations were perhaps not political, and their motivations were also not fame-seeking in any way because they have not followed that same playbook that others who've perpetrated these types of crimes have done.
And so then you take another step back and you say, well, then this must be rooted more in their own, personal issues. And, and that's where this comes from. And in our research, we think about a mass shooting as being a final act because it really only ends in one of three ways, which is that 1) the individual takes their own life. Many mass shooters, die by suicide or 2) it's taken from them by law enforcement, given the nature of the crime. Or 3) they're destined to spend the rest of their lives in prison. And similarly, with an event like this, shooting into a crowd of people at a political rally and shooting at a former president is really going to end in one way. And that is that the Secret Service and law enforcement are going to take your life.
And so you think about the mindset of somebody who perpetrates a crime like that, knowing that this is going to be that final act. And it probably speaks to somebody who has got to a point in their life where they no longer care if they live or die. And that speaks volumes to what might be going on in their life, to motivate them to want to do something like this.
I have seen some research that suggests that domestic partners or people living in the same house are the most likely to notice behavior that could point to the crime. Is that what you have found?
Our research also finds that people know that something is wrong, but they are unable to comprehend that that something could result in this level of violence. And that's one of the key findings from our research in the lives of mass shooters, which is, we often label these individuals as “monsters” or “inherently evil” or “mad men.” And what those labels do is effectively explain away their behaviors and prevent us from being able to look at the people in our own lives who are struggling and to be able to see that they might be on a path to violence.
And so what we often heard time and again when we've done these types of interviews, particularly with family members and friends and colleagues of these eventual mass shooters, is they all tell us that there was something not right about that person, but they had genuinely no idea and couldn't comprehend that it would result in this type of violence. And so it's a blind spot, I think, for all of us, that we just can't envision our loved ones going that far. And so for that reason, we never really understand the warning signs for what they are until it's too late.
What we’ve learned about the timing of this attack is a little contradictory. The rally was announced only days before it happened. And Crooks apparently visited his gun range the day before and bought ammunition the day of the shooting — which speaks to not a lot of planning. But he reportedly also told his boss that he was planning to come in to work the next day and had been admitted to a four-year university for the fall. What do you make of all this?
One of the things we talk about in our research in the lives of mass shooters, in the pathway to violence, is that the final step is opportunity. And it could well have been the case that this particular event presented itself as an opportunity that expedited that pathway to violence so that the political rally was an opportunity to perpetrate a mass shooting. And almost by coincidence, it became a political assassination. So in the absence of detailed documentation that this individual was plotting to assassinate a presidential candidate, it might just be the case that their real intention was to perpetrate a mass shooting and the political rally and the presence of Donald Trump [were] byproducts of that. And that that just happened to be an accessible local venue to perpetrate the crime.
One of his classmates did say that Crooks said he hated all of the presidential candidates in 2016. The FBI said he searched for Donald Trump and Joe Biden and some other figures on his phone. And I’ve read in the research that these mass shootings are often a way to externalize internal pain onto a group that they can then blame. Could these presidential candidates be the group that he decided were responsible for his pain?
We've often said the hate comes late with these mass shooters, which is to say that whether they target a certain demographic group or a certain location, whether it's a church or a synagogue or a political establishment — and in this case, of course, it's targeting a former president and presidential candidate. You still have to kind of take that step back and say: What got them to that point in the first place? And usually, it's just that they are searching for something to make some meaning in their life and make it all make sense. And so the issues, again, [it’s] these personal issues, personal grievances, personal crises. And then it's a case of, ‘How do I attach that to a broader narrative to make sense of it?’ And that's when you then see people targeting, whether it's an ethnic minority group or religious minority group, or in this case, it might be a political figure.
A couple of Crooks’ classmates reported that Crooks tried out for the rifle team and wasn’t allowed on it because he was such a bad shot. Although his school district said they don’t have any record of [him doing so]. But what stood out to me about these stories is that it’s one of the few examples of his classmates remembering a particular moment with him, and they said he seemed embarrassed. Most people’s memories of him have been more vague. So I was wondering: Have there been shooters in the past who have taken a small moment like this that didn’t mean much to anyone else — and held onto it?
I don't know about that. I think it's one of those examples of whenever something like this happens, there's a tendency to look back on any and all events that could be quite benign and then to create meaning and narrative around them. And so, although it would seem that there is this connection between wanting to be on the rifle team and then using a rifle to perpetrate this crime, it could also just be total coincidence. And it might be that we're constructing the narrative around that ourselves. And the same is true of those who have been interviewed, who knew the perpetrator, that they are themselves looking back through history and thinking whether or not these things were warning signs or not.
Right now there hasn’t been much reporting that he was in crisis. The FBI reported that he searched on his phone about depression, but it’s not clear if he was searching for himself or not. One classmate said he was bullied, but many more of his classmates have said that’s not true. But beyond that, there doesn’t seem to be any record of mental health issues or any other trauma that he’s experienced. So is it possible [that] something is just off about a shooter’s brain chemistry? Or is there always some kind of trauma that then sets them off on the road on which they end up?
I think with something like that, that would be really, really difficult to know. I would say, based on what we know about the life histories of mass shooters, that it would be incredibly rare that something like this came out of nowhere. And usually, it comes out of a person's crisis in life where they themselves are questioning their place in the world. And it often is an existential crisis, and it's often a suicidal crisis. That seems to be the more common throughline in the life histories of these individuals. So absent that, then you start to wonder, what would it be to compel somebody to perpetrate a crime like this? And if we don't have any evidence that it was truly politically or ideologically motivated as an attempt to shift the election cycle, for instance, or to incite, you know, a greater political movement. Then I still think that somewhere along the lines, it has to come from that personal motivation.
We haven’t heard much from his college classmates from the past two years, so it’s possible something changed during that period.
There's clearly gaps in our knowledge at the moment, at least of what we know about this guy. And at the moment, a lot of things are not really adding up. But again, if this was truly a political motive, I think we would have probably heard that in more detail by now, that he would have left some sort of indication that that was the case.
I think the most interesting piece for me is just this, this historical component, which is for a generation or more, the American public was genuinely focused on these types of political assassinations, and now we're focused much more on mass shootings that occur in public spaces. But the two things are actually connected.
The whole idea of modern threat assessment, the idea that we can look for warning signs and then divert people off the pathway to violence was borne out of research from the Secret Service that was focused on political assassination attempts. And it's effectively just been applied in a new context, which is to try and mitigate school shootings and workplace shootings and mass shootings in public spaces. So essentially, all of the questions that we're asking currently around, does this political assassin fit the profile of a mass shooter, really just need to be turned around to say: Does the mass shooter fit the profile of the political assassin? Because that's where we got our initial knowledge around this phenomenon in the first place.
