Mass shooters are often ‘socially stunted’ with ‘zero coping skills’

CHICAGO --- As more details emerge about the gunman in Donald Trump’s assassination attempt, Northwestern University mass-shooting expert Lori Post is available to talk to media about her research, which identifies developmental typologies of mass shooters.

“The fact that a grown man who lives with his mom and dad still enjoys playing dress-up like a preschooler is strange and yet a frequent occurrence among mass shooters,” said Post, director of the Buehler Center for Health Policy and Economics at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “There is a subtype of mass shooters that dress up in pseudo‐commando attire brandishing assault weapons.”

Media interested in interviewing Post should contact Kristin Samuelson at ksamuelson@northwestern.edu.

“It is even more alarming that the very shooter who had been bullied for donning battle fatigues early in his adolescence had access to an assault rifle. Socially isolated loners are at higher risk for violence, most often directed at themselves, and should never have access to guns. This egregious act of negligence by the gun owner almost cost the life of former U.S. President Donald Trump. It traumatized the nation. It is unacceptable.”

Post had a study published in 2021 that found the Federal Assault Weapons Ban (FAWB), which included a ban on large-capacity magazines (limiting the number and caliber of bullets) from 1994 to 2004 resulted in a significant decrease in public mass shootings, number of gun deaths and number of gun injuries.

“The findings that a ban on assault weapons resulted in fewer mass shootings is interesting because would-be mass shooters could have substituted other weapons to commit mass shootings, but they didn’t,” Post said.

These findings led Post to consider what about the ban on assault rifles disincentivized shooters to commit a mass shooting. She now is studying the developmental trajectory of mass shooters.

Trump gunman appears to have been ‘a perpetual adolescent’

“Little kids pick up personas, like dressing up as their favorite Disney character, but then they grow up and start to care about what their peers say and stop pretend play,” Post said. “Individuating is normal but so is conforming. Based on what the shooter was wearing, whom he lived with and initial reports of his childhood drama, it sounds like the man who shot President Trump was more of a ‘perpetual adolescent’ than a political assassin.”