FOCUS- Laguna Woods, Uvalde and Buffalo in May, Tulsa in early June, Highland Park on July 4… Mass shootings follow one another in the United States. The association Gun Violence Archive has identified 314 in 185 days.
“When there is a mass shooting you can be pretty sure that in the days and months that follow there will be others.Dominique Simonnet, journalist, writer and specialist in American society, warns of a phenomenon of imitation and identification by which certain people, in particular young and fragile teenagers, imitate a killer whom they believe they resemble. We then speak of “copycat attacks”. The causes of these successive passages to the act are multifactorial.
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The influence of the internet
According to a terrorism threat bulletin published by the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), online forums hosting violent extremist content and conspiracy theories have encouraged attacks in the wake of the shooting. Uvalde, Texas. “There are discussion groups and forums where conspiracy theories, neo-Nazi discourse, supremacist ideologies and racial discrimination coexist.», explains Dominique Simonnet. Deadly virtual communities whose identity is the culture of hatred and rejection of the civilized world and which therefore feed personal resentment, especially among the younger generations.
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A lot of young people
Indeed, since 2018, six of the nine deadliest mass shootings in the United States have been perpetrated by men under the age of 21. A statistic that can be explained by a difficulty in “understand what is considered credible information», Analyzes a senior internal security official. The distinction between good and evil, the real and the virtual leads these young people to construct a parallel universe where they generally find themselves locked in a spiral of violence inspired by what they have read and seen. “Disturbed young people see others take action and therefore imitate them. There is a kind of idealization, of heroization of the one who initiates the first shooting“, theorizes Dominique Simonnet. The desire to die a hero is also a common symptom among many young perpetrators of mass shootings. “They have this desire that we talk about them, that we know them and that their name marks history”he continues.
The problem of access to weapons
The question of access to weapons is also a determining factor in the passage to the act. According to the analysis of the database of the investigative magazine Mother Jones, which lists, since 1982, all the killings that have taken place in a public place in the United States resulting in at least four victims, there have been 539 victims over the last decade, more than during the previous thirty years, during which 437 people were killed in shootings. “Who says mass weapons says mass shootings“, believes Dominique Simonnet.
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Democratic and Republican senators recently moved to take action on access to guns, including criminal and psychological background checks for gun buyers between the ages of 18 and 21. The moderation of online content to which young people are exposed could also become a thorny issue that the US government will have to study. A major challenge since the question of freedom of expression will this time be at the heart of the debate.
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