In the fall of 2014, Esquire magazine published what may have been the first article ever attempting to penetrate the trauma and the humanity of a mass shooter—or in this case a potential shooter. It was a groundbreaking effort, for many reasons. No one outside of a handful of lawyers or mental health experts had yet been given a hint about what was inside James Holmes’s spiral notebook or his medical or psychiatric records. Because of this, an emotional or psychological profile had never been publicly revealed about Holmes, due to the built-in conflict inside the American legal system. Yet a profile of someone who’d moved up to the edge of doing what Holmes had done was on full display in the Esquire story, which focused on an unnamed young man called “Trunk.” With remarkable precision, his background fit into what we’d been hearing for more than two years about troubled young men with the capacity to evolve into mass shooters.
About a decade earlier, Trunk had been arrested in the middle of the night, while dressed all in black and armed with a .22-caliber pistol, a machete, a military-grade rifle slung across his back, and two thousand rounds of ammunition. He had two accomplices, who were similarly clad and armed. On the night they allegedly went out to unleash mayhem, they were stopped and arrested at three a.m. because of how late they were on the streets and of how they were dressed. And then because the police quickly discovered that they were carrying an arsenal. Trunk eventually pled guilty to carjacking and was sentenced to ten years in prison.
Behind bars, he began to learn what he never had learned in the outside world: basic social skills, such as how to cope around other people, how to talk to them, and how to get along when your health or your life depended on it. Following his release from prison, he went to college, applied himself to his studies, and no longer had feelings about wanting to harm society.
For Esquire, he tried to articulate his long process of becoming a near-killer, which may have started when he was ten and his mother died or when he had to repeat seventh grade or when he began having a series of troubling thoughts: What was he doing wrong? Why didn’t anyone like him? Why were his peers against him? How could he feel something different?
He could have told himself that he was a loser, he said to Esquire, but he didn’t want to think of himself in that way. “So I started thinking they were losers,” he said. “I started thinking that they didn’t like me because they were afraid of me—because I had power and they didn’t. Because I was special. And that’s when it all really got started. When I began thinking I was special.”
Like Holmes and other mass shooters, Trunk had kept a journal documenting his long tumble into darkness. Years after his arrest, he made a point of saying that he didn’t want to become infamous by creating a massacre—the motive that many people have ascribed to the young killers. He wanted to be known and accepted for who he was before going through with it. He wanted to not feel the isolation that he imagined he was living in.
When he was a senior in high school some of his classmates had in fact reached out to him, but he was too shy or blinded by too much pain to see this or accept their friendship or help.
Eventually, he gravitated toward someone like himself—another young man who shared his feelings (à la Klebold and Harris)—and they played a lot of video games together, games about “people who are special rising over everyone else to save the world.”
His father kept fourteen guns in the house (à la Adam Lanza)—military-grade weapons kept in a locked closet, plus lots of ammunition. Trunk acknowledged that if he’d had to go out in the world and buy his own firearms illegally, he’d had been too frightened to bring that off. But the guns were only a few feet away and became irresistible. Take someone with very low self-esteem, he said, and put a gun in his hands, and he feels “like a movie hero . . .”
What did he want more than anything else? To be able to relieve the stress and pressure building inside of him in some constructive way, rather than through mass violence. “I wanted release,” he explained to Esquire. “It’s not a desire for death. It’s a desire for escape . . . Maybe if this happened, I’d feel calm. I’d feel the way they do. I’d feel peace.”
The night before the planned attack, he lay in bed and thought to himself that someone had to do this, to make a statement and “shoulder the burden,” so it might as well be him. At the same time, he admitted that if just one person had noticed how much torment he was in and had made the effort to come to him and say that he didn’t have to do this and “you don’t have to have this strange strength, we accept you,” Trunk would have “broken down and given up.”
The significant thing about Trunk, as with so many others like him who had gone on to become mass shooters, was that his emotional turmoil long preceded his desire for guns and his need to arm himself against a world that he perceived was hostile. He felt ineffectual and he wanted power, personal power, and to have an effect on the society he was living in and to make an impact that the larger culture could not ignore. He wanted to feel better and did not know how to do so.
Trunk essentially laid out for readers at least some of what the media and the general public, who paid for the legal system and were charged with participating in it through serving on juries, had thus far been prevented from learning about the Aurora shooter, more than two years after the massacre.
Following Holmes’s second psychiatric exam, the judge set a new trial date of December 8, 2014. To the surprise of no one, the defense soon objected to this new development.
“I can guarantee the court we will not be prepared in that short of time frame . . .” public defender Tamara Brady told Judge Samour. “There is no way we will have all of this done.”
Despite these protestations, the judge finally spoke up. “Yes, there’s a lot of work to be done,” he said. “But you have a lot of people, and you’ve had a lot of time.”
On October 15, Dr. William Reid, the new psychiatric examiner who’d interviewed Holmes for twenty-two hours, handed in his report on time, and the case remained on schedule. A few days later, the defense asked for the trial to be delayed yet again. The prosecution agreed with this, and the trial date was now reset, for the fourth time, for January 20, 2015, exactly two and a half years, or thirty months, or more than nine hundred days, after the massacre. That was the date jury selection was to begin, with nine thousand people in Arapahoe County receiving summons to appear at the courthouse if called, and there were estimates that finding twelve people to sit in judgment of Holmes could take up to five months (some said even that was optimistic).
If the case did ever go to trial, the defense wanted the judge to instruct victims to control their emotions when testifying about the crime’s impact on them. This was necessary to ensure that their testimony didn’t “overwhelm the jurors with emotion,” leading to an unfair sentence for Holmes.
The recommended defense instruction would say: “Your consideration of victim impact evidence must be limited to a rational inquiry into the culpability of Mr. Holmes, not an emotional response to the evidence. In rendering your sentencing verdict in this case, you must not be influenced by any sort of sympathy or sentiment for the victim’s family.”
In mid-November, with the trial only two months away, the defense asked Judge Samour to remove himself from the case. He quickly said no. In December, the defense asked for another delay in the start of the trial because of medical emergencies within their team. Again, the judge said no. “To delay this trial,” he wrote in his order, “unnecessarily or improperly solely on the basis that this is a death penalty case would only promote the cynical view—sadly held by many—that the justice system is broken.”
A month before jury selection was to begin, Holmes’s parents, in their first-ever public statement, said that their son was not a monster, the trial should be called off, and he should be put in a mental institution for the rest of his life. Their remarks had no effect, and Melisa Cowden, whose ex-husband Gordon Cowden had been killed in the shooting, characterized the statement as comical.
As the legal proceedings ground on, politicians were focused on issues besides youthful violence. In the run-up to the 2014 midterm elections, those running for office in both parties talked about their fears over immigration and stopping the spread of Ebola in the United States, which had killed one American. As they campaigned, the Harvard School of Public Health, using a database created by Mother Jones, published findings showing that mass shootings in the country had tripled since 2011. They defined the shootings as attacks that “took place in public, in which the shooter and the victims generally were unrelated and unknown to each other, and in which the shooter murdered four or more people.”
Former Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who’d been seriously wounded in just such an attack that had killed six people, toured the country before the midterms, hoping to build support for more gun control. No one from either side of the aisle joined her. In October, as she was trying to call attention to mass violence, eighteen-year-old Matthew Ross, a student at Black Rock High School in Yucca Valley, California, was arrested for threatening to shoot and stab staff members because he didn’t feel they were giving him enough respect. Inside Ross’s home, the police found swords, crossbows, hatchets, hunting knives, firearms, and hundreds of rounds of rifle and shotgun ammunition.
Moms Demand Action started pressuring the Kroger supermarket chain to prohibit “open carry” after gun extremists used Kroger stores to demonstrate their “rights.” Free speech, as many have reminded us over the years, is rarely free. Some gun activists got hold of personal photos of those supporting Moms Demand Action, Photoshopped them, and then posted them along with obscene comments.
That fall the FBI issued its own report and made official what everyone already knew: Mass shootings had become much more frequent in the past seven years. From 2000 through 2006, according to the feds’ own study, there were 6.4 mass shooting incidences a year. From 2007 to 2013, there were 16.4 such events annually. In total, the mass shootings had killed 486 and wounded 557. Forty of the fifty states had seen mass shootings, as well as the District of Columbia, and no part of the country was immune from them. They occurred in small towns, big cities, and rural areas. The shooter usually acted alone, and of 160 such massacres, only six were done by women. Forty percent of the killers committed suicide at the scene, and 69 percent of the shootings were over in less than five minutes, before law enforcement could respond.
In 2014, board members in some Missouri school districts began sending faculty members to concealed-weapons training. That fall a 7,500-student Massachusetts school district, thirty miles north of Boston, implemented the country’s first shooter-detection system, which could recognize and track a gunman roaming through the building. The “Guardian Indoor Gunshot Detection” technology was similar to that used by the military to keep soldiers safe across the globe. Sensors placed in the classrooms, entrances, and hallways detected the firing of a gunshot in less than a second. A mobile app sent a text message with the shooter’s location to the superintendent, principal, police chief, and school resource officer. Officials could then track the gunman’s movements, showing exactly where the assailant was in the building. High-tech military hardware was now on hand in the American school system.
Within the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group was the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, and within it was Behavioral Analysis Unit 2, ten federal agents led by Andre Simons who were charged with assessing threats. BAU2 didn’t create profiles of potential shooters as much as it asked for help from bystanders who noticed people showing signs of aberrant conduct—such as writing or saying incendiary things or nurturing a serious grudge. Has the person taken an interest in mass shooters or been warned away from an event? Or acquired firearms and spoken about a plan? Anyone with such information was asked to contact the FBI. Simons said that his office received three to four referrals about mass shootings each week. Their mission, Simons said, was to stop active-shooting incidents before they happened, and he called upon the public to help law enforcement do that. As awareness of the mass shootings rose, the FBI was starting to receive that assistance, when civilians noticed someone around them who was clearly troubled and talking about violence.
The little things, the small observations and actions that people took before the bloodshed exploded, mattered. In late 2013, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder credited Simons and BAU2 with preventing 148 mass shootings and violent attacks. Since the creation of BAU2 in 2010, the office has intervened in approximately five hundred potential mass shootings events that didn’t happen.
“What these people need,” Andre Simons told Esquire, “are alternatives to violence. They are often unable or unwilling to articulate to themselves that there are alternatives to violence. They have shut that door. Our job is to open other doors for them so that they don’t go through the last door they think they have left.”
The FBI’s “Active Shooter Study” was itself a breakthrough: a national recognition of the depth and urgency of the mass-shooting problem. For the past two decades there had been little or no federal support for research into what some viewed as a major health issue—gun violence—that had left more than thirty thousand Americans dead every year. Congress had barred federal funds for gun violence research because they associated this with gun control. In 2013, President Obama directed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other federal labs to carry out this research and to put together prevention strategies.
The FBI study would help define the scope of the problem, so that states could better target their prevention programs. And for the first time ever, there was growing momentum around building a reliable national reporting database for firearm injuries and deaths. The CDC was offering more than $7 million in grants to states to expand its National Violent Death Reporting System. The hope was also to capture more data on firearm fatalities.
Right after the FBI made public its study, a curious thing happened in Jefferson County, which held the western suburbs of Denver. It also held Columbine High School. A group of students organized a series of walkouts from their classes, and by the fourth day of protest, one thousand students from Columbine, Dakota Ridge High, and Lakewood High were taking part in them. Beyond Colorado, hundreds of high schoolers from across the nation were also opposing a proposed curriculum calling for promoting “positive aspects” of U.S. history and avoiding or burying “civil disorder, social strife, or disregard of the law,” of the kind carried out by Martin Luther King, Jr. The protests were largely orchestrated through Facebook.
As Savanna Barron, a senior at Lakewood High, told The Denver Post during one of the demonstrations, “People think because we are teenagers, we don’t know things, but we are going home and looking things up. If they don’t teach us civil disobedience, we will teach ourselves.” The students’ rallying slogan was: “It’s our history, don’t make it mystery.”
In early October, California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law, mostly as a response to the Elliott Rodger massacre at Isla Vista, a bill allowing family members or police to seek a court order to temporarily remove lawfully owned weapons from the home of someone deemed at risk of committing violence. The “Gun Violence Restraining Order” bill arose after the horror of the Rodger rampage, in an effort to keep mentally unstable individuals from possessing firearms. While Rodger’s parents had sought help from law enforcement before the shootings, he’d violated no law justifying police action. The new law would permit relatives to get a court order to confiscate weapons from a family member showing signs of violence. The bill lets police search a subject’s residence and remove weapons. After mass shootings in their jurisdictions, Illinois, Virginia, and Connecticut put threat-assessment teams at all state-funded colleges. Change was taking place, as if the country was slowly awakening from a long sleep.
On the second anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre, Everytown for Gun Safety, the nation’s largest gun violence prevention organization, and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America issued a report on the ninety-five school shootings since Adam Lanza’s carnage in Newtown. The following day—December 15, 2014—the two groups held a press conference at the U.S. Capitol. They were joined by both of Connecticut’s U.S. Senators, Democrats Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy; by U.S. Representative Mike Thompson, a California Democrat who chaired the U.S. House’s Gun Violence Prevention Task Force; and by Pamela Wright of Chicago, whose seventeen-year-old son, Tyrone Lawson, was shot and killed in January 2013 following a high school basketball game. Senator Blumenthal spoke of the thousands of Americans killed by firearms since Sandy Hook and said that the best way to honor the memory of all of these victims was through action against gun violence. In mid-December, families of nine of the Sandy Hook victims also sued the makers and the sellers of the Bushmaster AR-15, used by Lanza in the shootings.