Washington-area criminal profilers said it doesn’t appear that the person shooting at military buildings wants to hurt anyone — but that could change.
Experts said publicly belittling the shooter could provoke the person into taking his anger out on people, like in the D.C. sniper case. Or the shooter is preparing for something more dangerous. This case seems a little different, experts said.
“It looks to me that he’s doesn’t want to cause any loss of life,” said criminal profiler Pat Brown, author of “The Profiler.” “You wonder what he’s going to accomplish, picking at things little by little.”
FBI officials said on Wednesday that the gun used to shoot at a Coast Guard recruiting station in Woodbridge earlier this week is the same weapon used in the first four shootings in Northern Virginia. Authorities have not released the type or caliber of the weapon, but investigators previously said it appeared that the shots were fired from a high-powered rifle.
Clearly the person is targeting military icons, but it’s too early to say whether the shooter has a grievance with the Marine Corps, a theory posited by FBI officials last week, criminal profilers said.
Former FBI criminal profiler Gregg McCrary said a more telling clue might be geography. The targets all have been in Northern Virginia, in places that the shooter feels comfortable. The Pentagon and the Nation Museum of the Marine Corps in Triangle are symbolic icons, but the Marine Corps recruiting station in Chantilly isn’t well-known.
“That little place in Chantilly — we’re probably going to find some significance to the area,” he said.
The fact that the shooter is using the same weapon and not varying his types of targets seems to indicate that he’s making a statement and wants the credit.
“It gives him some sense of entitlement,” McCrary said.
Brown said the shooter could be doing it because he thinks it’s fun, or it might be a political angle or he might be getting a kick reading about his crimes in the newspaper. She tends to think it’s a younger person who hasn’t shown a long history of violence.
“He’s not trying to raise the fear level, not getting that thrill of seeing people running out of buildings in fear,” Brown said. But it’s possible that he might get bored with buildings and might want to attempt something bigger and more dangerous. Or he might be growing comfortable and preparing for something more challenging.
“Will he keep going? We don’t know,” Brown said. “Sometimes the person gets freaked out that they’re going to get caught and suddenly stop and we wonder, ‘Who was that guy?’ ”
