The attacks sound numbingly familiar: five shot to death at an airport in Florida, 26 slain at a Texas church, five killed by a gunman rampaging through Northern California. These violent outbursts last year, and others like them, had key things in common. Long before the violence, the people identified as attackers had elicited concerns, red flags that littered their paths to wreaking havoc on unsuspecting strangers. This is a common thread in most of the mass attacks in public spaces last year, the majority of which were preceded by behavior that worried other people, says a new study from the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center, reports the Washington Post.
“Regardless of whether these attacks were acts of workplace violence, domestic violence, school-based violence or terrorism, similar themes were observed in the backgrounds of the perpetrators,” the report stated. Every person blamed for a mass attack was a man. All of them “had at least one significant stressor within the last five years, and over half had indications of financial instability in that time frame,” the report found. That included issues with family relationships, being fired or suspended from work and facing unstable living situations. More than half had histories of mental health issues, criminal charges and substance abuse. Nearly half were fueled by some kind of personal grievance. Half of the attackers had patterns of making threats, while a third made specific threats to their eventual targets. “Direct threats should be investigated, because a threat unchecked could escalate into an act of violence,” said Matthew Doherty, who formerly led the National Threat Assessment Center. Doherty, now at Hillard Heintze, a law enforcement and security advisory firm, said, “There’s no such thing as an impulsive act.”