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2018
Article:
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/mass-shootings-in-america-interviews
Quotes:
In America today, mass shootings remain the most terrible metric that distinguishes the country from the rest of the world. And thanks to a 22-year Federal ban on researching their causes, getting inside the minds of those responsible is largely the work of private investigators.
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But it occurred to me that the one person we never speak to about mass shootings is the mass shooter himself (and it is, almost always, a him) – perhaps because they too often kill themselves or are dispatched by police. But if we could, we might ask them this: what would have stopped you doing what you did? You tell us. Would it have been some kind of counselling? Would it have been legislation that could have stopped you getting hold of the weapon that caused so much destruction? And what was it that drove you over the edge?
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Although the American Medical Association has described gun violence as an epidemic, since 1996 the National Rifle Association, America’s most powerful gun-rights organisation, has striven hard to obliterate this assessment. That’s the year it successfully managed to lobby the Republican-dominated Congress to tack on an amendment (the so-called Dickey Amendment, named after its author, Representative Jay Dickey) to a spending bill that limited funding for any gun-related research by America’s health-protection agency, the Centers For Disease Control And Prevention (CDC).
Troublingly, Mark Rosenberg, the man who was leading the CDC’s studies into gun violence at the time, said he thought the work the organisation was doing could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
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I typed: “Looking back, is there anything you think could have been done to stop you doing what you did? Was counselling available? Would you have taken it if it was and do you think it would have helped?”
“I did seek counselling prior to my crime,” he replied. “But the counsellor never took heed [of] what I was talking about, my problems, issues at home, everyday teenage obstacles really.”
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There are in excess of 300 million guns here – more than enough to arm every man, woman and child – so there’s a peculiar logic in thinking that you might feel safer with that many armed people around. (The facts, on the other hand, don’t back that up. Around 30 studies show more guns means more crime. There is far less research demonstrating that guns help.) More disconcerting, perhaps, is hearing that logic from a would-be mass shooter.
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“There are many cases besides mine where mass shootings happened and they found the perpetrator was taking antidepressants or certain drugs. I wasn’t on any drugs. But I wasn’t trying to kill anybody; I was trying to instil fear into the public.”
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In 2013, the FBI published a study of the 160 “active shooter incidents” that occurred in America between 2000 and 2013. Its findings made interesting reading. All but two incidents involved a single shooter. In at least nine incidents, the shooter first shot and killed a family member or members at home before moving to a more public location to continue the killing spree. Only six of the shooters were female. And in 40 per cent of cases, the shooters took their own lives. Also, the gunmen in 12 of the 14 high-school shootings that occurred were students at the schools.
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Metzl said the AR-15 has fundamentally changed what mass shootings look like. The body counts are higher, the acts themselves often far more spectacular. The “copycat phenomenon” has meant mass shooters attempt to outdo each other. The kinds of shootings we saw even in the Nineties barely make the news any more. “Even the recent shooting at a Waffle House in Tennessee [in which four people were killed], we know that within two weeks this will fall out of the news cycle,” he said. “People are desensitised.”
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The most interesting thing we can learn from what these shooters tell us, though, is not broad generalisations about mental illness or guns, Metzl said, but is much more about the particulars of the individual cases. “What were the stressors? Why did they do it? The answers to these questions are invaluable. Because many mass shootings result in murder-suicide, we usually don’t get the chance to ask them.”
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An elderly man who lived next door to the Hardesty family told one newspaper that he’d seen Hardesty’s father beating him in the backyard a year before the murders. “His mother had to come out and hit him in the head with a brick to make him stop,” he said.
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"The week before I shot those people, I was talking to Christian prayer lines, trying to get help. I put myself in a mental hospital three times. I knew I was having problems with my mind, but then I’d get all cleaned up and go drinking again.”
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"In the US, we have nearly 40,000 gun deaths a year. It’s astronomically higher than all other comparable countries."
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I asked what he would have done had he not been able to find the gun. Would he have used a knife instead?
“No,” he said. “If I hadn’t had the gun, it wouldn’t have happened. I wouldn’t have jumped in the truck that night and left.”
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The incident for which he’ll eventually die in prison happened in the town of Elgin, northwest of Chicago. Casteel, then 42, had been kicked out of a bar by two bouncers for harassing women, but before he drove home, he vowed revenge. He shaved his head into a mohawk, put on a combat jacket and returned with a .357 magnum in a shoulder holster, a nine-millimetre pistol in a belt and a sawn-off 12-gauge loaded with buckshot.
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Casteel claimed he went to a behavioural-health clinic in the late Nineties seeking help, but that the doctor became intimidated by him and ended up calling the police.
There’s no way to verify this, no records to check because no crime was committed. But Casteel still sees this as a catalyst that saw him ultimately spiral out of control.
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His first arrest came at the age of 12 and he was in and out of juvenile institutions for most of his teenage years. There, associating with older criminals, enabled him to “learn the game”. Even today in Menard, he is incarcerated with men he has known since he was 13.
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He was 13 years old when he first shot a gun. He’d steal to get money to eat and would sleep under porches, on rooftops, in garages and when he started finding guns in the houses he had robbed, he began using them to carry out armed robberies too.
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So what about guns, I asked. Would he have committed the crimes for which he’s now serving a life sentence if he hadn’t been able to access them?
“I hear a lot about gun control and truly it’s laughable,” he said. “You will never ever rid the United States Of America of guns. Guns are all over the street. Did I have to get a background check to get an eight-ball of cocaine? No. All I had to have was a little money. There’s so many guns in this country it’s just pathetic. It’s asinine.”
