A Secret Service report on mass casualty attacks found that illegal firearms were involved in nearly half of the shootings from last year that it analyzed.
The report, released this month, was conducted by the Secret Service’s National Threat Assessment Center and investigated the “tactics, backgrounds, and pre-attack behaviors of the perpetrators” involved in 34 mass attacks from 2019 in an effort to “identify and affirm recommended best practices in threat assessment and prevention.”
Of the 34 attacks analyzed, 24 involved the use of one or more firearms. Of those two dozen shootings, 10, or 42%, of the attacks included one or more perpetrators in illegal possession of a firearm. In two of the attacks, the perpetrator was a minor in possession of a handgun, which is illegal under federal law.
“In the remaining incidents, the attackers had prior felony convictions, had stolen the firearm, had not obtained a valid weapons license, had a previous involuntary commitment to a mental health facility, or had another factor present that prohibited them from purchasing or possessing a firearm based on federal and/or state laws,” researchers said in the report.
Motives for the attacks that were analyzed varied, with 32% related to retaliation by the suspects for perceived wrongs in their lives. Of the incidents, 24% were related to mental illness, including delusions and paranoia. Twenty-one percent of the attacks were tied to extreme ideological views or racial bias against various religious and ethnic groups.
In terms of gender, the perpetrators were overwhelmingly male, with 92%. The researchers said that there was one female perpetrator and two female perpetrators who “identified as male at the time of the attacks.”
Fifty-one percent of the perpetrators were white and non-Hispanic, 27% were black, and 14% were Hispanic. The average age of the attackers was 35.
