Mass Shootings America

This book is an informed and informative resource for understanding the reasons for and consequences of mass shootings in America. It includes essays from experts in the fields of criminal justice, sociology, and psychology about key issues surrounding the phenomenon of mass shootings and a collection of opinion pieces that provide insights into debates surrounding gun laws and other issues related to mass shootings.

It was a seemingly pleasant evening on October 1, 2017, and more than 20,000 people gathered at the Route 91 Harvest Festival. Everyone was in high spirits and the concert began to a thrilling fanfare. Unbeknownst to everyone, sounds began to erupt which were thought to be fireworks...until people started falling as dead bodies. The Las Vegas shooting was the deadliest attack in modern American history that claimed 58 lives and injured over 850. This is the story of the assailant Stephen Paddock.

It's time to go beyond all the thoughts and prayers, misguided blame on mental illness, and dug-in disputes over the Second Amendment. Through meticulous reporting and panoramic storytelling, journalist Mark Follman chronicles the decades-long search for identifiable profiles of mass shooters and brings listeners inside a groundbreaking method for preventing devastating attacks. Eight years in the making, Trigger Points illuminates a way forward at a time when the failure to prevent mass shootings has never been more costly—and the prospects for stopping them never more promising.

On September 6, 1949, 28-year-old Howard Barton Unruh shot 13 people, in less than 12 minutes, on his block in East Camden, New Jersey. The shocking, true story of the first recorded mass-shooting in America has never been told, until now. Through the eyes of the young boy who visited Howard regularly to listen to his war stories, and the mother trying to piece together the disturbing inner-workings of her son’s mind, Ellen Green uncovers the chilling true story of Howard Unruh - the quiet oddball who meticulously plotted his revenge on the neighbors who shunned him.

The Violence Project is about an examination of the phenomenon of mass shootings in America and an urgent call to implement evidence-based strategies to stop these tragedies. Using first-person accounts from the perpetrators themselves, along with data from the writers’ groundbreaking research on mass shooters, The Violence Project charts new pathways to prevention and innovative ways to stop the social contagion of violence.

In the past decade, no individual act of violence has killed more people in the United States than the mass shooting. This well-researched, forcefully argued book answers some of the most pressing questions facing our society: Why do people go on killing sprees? Are gun-free zones magnets for deadly rampages? What can we do to curb the carnage of this disturbing form of firearm violence?

In 1979, Brenda Spencer, a seemingly average teenage girl living in a nice suburban neighborhood, made and executed plans that would place her in infamy and set a violent and terrifying national precedent. She recieved a rifle for Christmas and a month later set her sights and opens fire on the elementary school across the street. The event is forever glorified by the song "I Don't Like Mondays" by The Boomtown Rats and marks the bloody beginning of the American phenomenon of school shootings.

In 1949, things like this just didn’t happen: A quiet New Jersey resident took a morning walk with a 9 mm Luger pistol. In twelve minutes he murdered thirteen neighbors...and then went back to bed. Howard Unruh went from obscurity to infamy overnight. Even after his obsessive diaries were discovered - a catalogue of simmering rage, petty grievances, and sexual repression - the anomalous crime seemed incomprehensible. Succeeding decades would confirm that Unruh’s “Walk of Death” was just the beginning. The prototype for the modern mass murderer, he would usher in a new age of violence in America.

Dr. Bud Harris examines causes and solutions for these ongoing mass murders and posits that the rational answer is not to "confiscate weapons", as the gun lobby falsely asserts, but rather to take an unflinching look at the deep rage propelling these shooters - and then to act. He urges citizens to face our collective demons and no longer allow our political polarization to dictate a deep-seated sense that we as individuals, and as a society, no longer control our own destinies.