Police are still investigating the motives behind the two shootings that killed at least 18 people in California in recent days. One characteristic sets them apart from the vast majority of similar episodes in the United States over the past 50 years, however — in both cases, the alleged shooters were elderly.
Huu Can Tran, suspected of killing 11 people at a nightclub in Monterey Park, near Los Angeles, was 72 years old. Zhao Chunli, accused of murdering seven people by opening fire on two farms in Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco, was 67 years old.
This makes them have a very rare profile in relation to other perpetrators of shooting massacres in the USA. The statement is by researchers Jillian Peterson and James Densley, coordinators of The Violence Project, which maps mass shootings — that is, when four or more people are shot — in the country.
In an article for The Conversation portal, they claim that only six of a total of 172 perpetrators of crimes of the type that occurred between 1966 and 2020 were over 60 years old. The list includes the person responsible for the largest mass shooting in US history. Then 64, Stephen Paddock killed 60 people and injured hundreds more at a country music festival in Las Vegas in 2017.
Given the uniqueness of the profile, researchers have relatively little knowledge about their behavior patterns. What is known is that, unlike younger people, these aggressors tend not to communicate their intentions in advance, and in general their actions are not guided by any ideology or have a specific message.
Their acts are also not usually motivated by hatred or a quest for fame like their younger counterparts, but by legal, financial or relationship problems, such as debt or family conflicts, and they often have criminal records.
Finally, they constantly target their workplaces —as was the case with Tran, who in the early 2000s gave dance lessons almost nightly at the nightclub he broke into—or environments frequented by communities they know intimately.
The researchers point out, however, that the perpetrators of the massacres in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay have a marked difference in relation to the other shooters over 60 years old. Both were of Asian origin, while most representatives of this age group are white.
At the same time, two factors link the behavior of the two to that of other perpetrators of shooting massacres in the USA. They were men, as were nearly 98% of the shooters in The Violence Project’s database. And the massacres are seen by them as their last acts – they are either killed at the scene of the crime; commit suicide, as in the case of Tran; or wait to be arrested, as Chunli did. “Mass shooting attacks represent a final act of hopelessness and anger,” the researchers conclude in the paper.
The cases add to the history of gun massacres in the US. According to the NGO Gun Violence Archive, which monitors gun violence in the country, 40 were registered since the beginning of the year until this Wednesday (25), an average of 1.66 per day.
From 2018 to 2021, the number of sniper attacks in the US has doubled, according to an FBI report released in May. In the first year of the survey, there were 30 actions provoked by one or more individuals with the intention of killing in populated areas. In 2021, that number rose to 61.
Also according to the Gun Violence Archive, there were 354 fatal shootings last year. More than 44,000 people died from firearms in the country in 2022, more than half of them from suicide. The US has more guns than people: one in three adults owns at least one such artifact, and nearly one in two adults lives in a household with a gun.
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