Towards a Functional Account of Mass-Shooting: Prediction and Influence of Violent Behavior

Mass shootings affect both local and national communities and prompt extensive efforts to understand and prevent future events. Current approaches typically focus on profiling and typologizing mass shooters. Although these efforts are useful towards prediction of mass shootings, they do not tell us how to directly influence a shooter’s behavior. Thus, our understanding of mass shootings remains incomplete. Given that behavior analysis is a systematic natural science approach to understanding all behavior, we believe it is poised to address this issue. This article focuses on fame-seeking shooters, which are a subset of all mass shooters. We first describe important behavior patterns and contextual events that have been associated with this subset. We propose that these behaviors are members of a larger response class which includes a mass shooting. We then provide a conceptualization of the selection process involved in the emergence of mass shooting behavior and its precursors. We close by describing several interventions aimed at disrupting the contingencies identified by the conceptual analysis. The goal of this article is to illustrate how behavior analysis may utilize and extend the currently existing and predominantly non behavior-analytic research (e.g., profiling and typologizing based on the form of behavior) to better enable the prediction and influence of mass shootings.