“To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.”
– Charles Darwin
I was 15 years old and in my freshman year at Adolfo Camarillo High School in California when I first heard of the shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado on April 20, 1999. My memory of the details is fuzzy, but I recall being in Mr. Buddhu’s English class when he interrupted and told us about the massacre. We all chatted excitedly because we were in school too, just like the victims in the shooting. But the rest of the day I picked up pieces of news from the infant internet, the car radio, and by walking slowly past the teacher’s lounge to catch a glimpse of the TV. This was 15 years before I had a smartphone, and my first instinct wasn’t to rush to the computer lab to check the news. The full extent of the carnage was only clear when I got home and turned on the news: Thirteen innocent people murdered, 24 injured, and the two shooters dead by suicide.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold weren’t the first mass shooters in the United States, but they had the biggest cultural impact and inspired others in this country and others. Many plotters of school shootings were obsessed with the Columbine attack according to one Secret Service study on students who planned school shootings.[1] Several even planned to commit attacks on April 20th to commemorate the anniversary of Columbine, which Harris and Klebold originally picked because it was Adolf Hitler’s birthday.[2] Others wanted to exceed their death count.[3] Harris and Klebold weren’t immigrants and their crimes had nothing to do with the border, but it brought mass shootings to the public’s attention in a way they hadn’t been before.
Mass shootings are the random killing of three or more people unrelated to other crimes like robbery or hijacking. They don’t usually start with arguments and the shooters typically target strangers or random people, even if there may be a few individual victims known to them in advance. Sometimes terrorists, like Syed Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik from Chapter 1, carry out their attacks with guns. Those are included here, but I will discuss them more in the next chapter about terrorism.
There is a growing perception that immigrants are coming to the US to commit mass shootings. Texas Governor Greg Abbot is responsible for cultivating that fear when he used the murder of four illegal immigrants by Francisco Oropesa Perez-Torres, another illegal immigrant, to highlight the immigration statuses of everyone involved to advertise his state-level immigration enforcement plan.[4] Perez-Torres wouldn’t have murdered his neighbors if he had been permanently deported earlier, although he was deported several times and returned. But if there were better immigration enforcement, his victims would have been deported too. It’s unclear what that pyrrhic victory proves, but it’s often the case in crimes committed by immigrants because the victims are often immigrants too.
Mass shootings are unconscionable crimes regardless of where the perpetrator was born. The desire to kill multiple strangers, often women and children, who are just going to school, worshipping, or shopping, is almost unfathomable when it comes to terrorism – but at least the terrorist has an ideology, religion, or idea he’s killing for. That motivation doesn’t make his crime any less harmful, but the existence of a goal or higher purpose makes it theoretically comprehensible. But mass shooters seem just to kill for the heck of it or to be remembered through the ages.
Here are two things to remember about mass shootings. The first is that they are uncommon, despite their prominence in the media and American society. About one-tenth of one percent of homicides since 1966 were committed in mass shootings.[5] The second is that immigrants commit very few of them. There may not be much you can do to avoid being a victim of a mass shooting, but at least you know that you likely won’t be a victim of one and neither will anybody you know.
Mass Shooters Are Angry and Crazy Losers Who Are Mostly Native-Born American Men
Herostratus wasn’t meant to be remembered. If this were a cosmically just world, nobody would know his name and you wouldn’t be reading about him now. Herostratus was a loser who lived in the Ancient Greek city of Ephesus, on the western coast of what is now Turkey. Ephesus was known for its libraries, theaters, and philosophers like Heraclitus, who said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” It was also rich with well-known craftsmen, artisans, and merchants who traded through a busy port that connected Asia Minor to Greece, Egypt, and beyond. Most importantly, Ephesus was a religious center for the Cult of Artemis, the Greek goddess of the hunt and childbirth. Herostratus contributed nothing to the greatness of his city.
Herostratus had accomplished nothing with his life and knew he would be forgotten soon after death. Instead of trying to make a legacy through productive work, intellectual endeavors, or raising a good and loving family, he decided to burn down one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. In 356 BC, he set fire to the Temple of Artemis in his hometown because he wanted to be remembered for something, even if it was a horrible crime. Better to be remembered as a criminal than not at all, so he reasoned. He stepped into the river once and his memory wasn’t washed away.
The Temple of Artemis was supposedly the first Greek temple built of marble. It was almost 400 feet long and 150 feet wide and surrounded by ornate columns. Temples had inhabited that location in Ephesus for centuries, but this was the most famous version built in 550 BC by King Croesus of Lydia, famous for his wealth. Legend has it that Alexander the Great was born that night and the temple burned because the goddess Artemis was attending the birth of Alexander in Macedonia instead of protecting it. After Herostratus was arrested and executed for his crime, the city government made it illegal to utter his name or write it down as an attempt to thwart his plans and to dissuade other losers from imitating his infamous crime. It didn’t work, and it doesn’t work today. Like his name, the temptation of Herostratus lives on and inspires mass shooters today.
Charles Whitman has the best claim to being the first modern American Herostratus. On August 1, 1966, the day after he murdered his wife and mother, Whitman climbed the University of Texas tower in Austin, Texas, barricaded the door, and shot dozens of people on campus and in the town with a hunting rifle. For 96 minutes, Whitman caused chaos as he murdered 15 innocent strangers and wounded 31 others. Whitman left a letter behind explaining his murders. His reasons read like the cliches of an angsty teenager as he did “not consider this world worth living in,” and tried to save his mother and wife from the embarrassment of dealing with his impending mass shooting by brutally murdering them.[6] Unlike Herostratus, he didn’t appear to want infamy, although he understood that would happen. Still, it’s hard to believe the guy who climbed a tower in the middle of a city and shot 46 people didn’t want to be known. Regardless, the best evidence shows that the first modern American Herostratus was a crazy killer.
Whitman wrote about his violent urges, self-diagnosed insanity, his efforts to see a psychiatrist, and self-medication with Excedrin to alleviate his “tremendous headaches.” After Austin police officers Ramiro Martinez and Houston McCoy killed Whitman, a medical examiner autopsied him and found a pecan-sized brain tumor that could explain his madness and headaches. Herostratus wasn’t autopsied but if a Texas medical examiner may have also found a fruit-shaped tumor had looked at his brain. Or maybe he was just nuts.
Eric Harris may be the most well-known modern American Herostratus. Less than nine hours before he and Klebold attacked Columbine, Harris recorded a message on a microcassette that said, “People will die because of me. It will be a day that will be remembered forever.”[7] Elsewhere, he wrote, “If we have figured out the art of time bombs before hand, we will set hundreds of them around houses, roads, bridges, buildings and gas stations . . . it’ll be like the LA riots, the Oklahoma bombing, WWII, Vietnam, duke and doom all mixed together. Maybe we will even start a little rebellion of revolution to fuck things up as much as we can. I want to leave a lasting impression on the world.”[8] It would be challenging to make Harris sound more like Herostratus. His own words paint him as a loser seeking infamy through destruction.
Still, Herostratus, Whitman, and Harris and Klebold have not inspired many. There have been 298 mass shooters in the United States beginning with Whitman and they committed hundreds of attacks.[9] That number of shooters may seem like a lot, but it’s not many considering how large the United States is. It’s about half the size of my high school graduating class. There have been slightly over 1.1 million homicide victims in the US from 1966 through the end of 2024, and only 1,733 of them were murdered in mass shootings – just over 0.1 percent of the total. A statistician may correctly label that number a rounding error, but it’s certainly not small for the people killed or their families.
Still, the statistics should make you feel a little better. The annual chance of being murdered in a mass shooting in almost six decades is about one in 9.1 million per year (side note: the lower the number here, the higher your chance. A 1 in 1 million chance is a lot smaller than a 1 in 100 chance, for example). The chance is higher after 2020 but still accounts for about one-fifth of one percent of homicides. That’s about the same rate as hemophilia in males worldwide.
That’s no consolation to the victims or American children who endure grueling live shooter drills at school, but you should be less afraid of mass shootings. Your chance of being murdered in another type of homicide is about 667 times greater. You should be less fearful of mass shootings overall, but their randomness increases the terror rather than lessens it.
American mass shooter Jared Lee Loughner dropped out of high school, somehow got accepted at college before dropping out, couldn’t hold down a job at Quiznos, and had trouble with the law. That was the peak of his life’s accomplishments. By many accounts, Loughner’s personality changed during his life unraveling, possibly as he came down with the schizophrenia that he was later diagnosed with. On January 8, 2011, he attended a constituent meeting held by Arizona Democratic Representative Gabby Giffords, and shot her in the head, murdered six people, and injured 13 others. Giffords miraculously survived and Loughner was arrested and said, “I plead the fifth” as he was taken into custody.[10] He eventually ended up pleading guilty to avoid the death penalty and was sentenced to life in prison.
Robert ‘Bobby’ Crimo III was another native-born American high school dropout from a broken middle-class home. Both of his parents had several run-ins with the police, including child endangerment when Crimo was a child. Crimo thought he’d be a musician but failed at that and creepily made music videos featuring mass shootings. He was a loser born to losers, his life was going nowhere, and he knew it. On July 4, 2022, he murdered seven people at an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois, and injured 48 others. He’s going to die in prison, and nobody will remember him except those whom he hurt.
About 14 percent of mass shooters are immigrants, or 43 of them since 1966. The other 255 mass shooters were native-born Americans. Fourteen percent is about the immigrant share of the population. The annual chance of being murdered in a mass shooting committed by an immigrant is about one in 68.4 million per year. Your annual chance of dying from a bee or hornet sting is about 1 in 4.5 million per year and about 1 in 11.4 million per year from a lightning strike.[11] If you can think that the bees aren’t coming to kill you, you can also rationally believe that immigrant mass shooters aren’t seeking to either.
Foreign-born mass shooters are almost all angry and crazy male losers, just like American mass shooters. There are just many fewer of them. Huu Can Tran checked every one of those boxes – angry, crazy, male, and a loser. Born in Vietnam, Tran was violent from a young age. As a teenager, he chopped off a person’s hand during a fight and his family sent him to Taiwan to avoid jail. In Taiwan, he dropped out of college, joined a gang, and kidnapped people for ransom – eventually moving to Hong Kong and getting disowned by his family for being a lowlife criminal.[12] He should have been in prison instead of living in the Pearl of the Orient. Tran eventually immigrated to the US and worked low-skilled jobs like carpet cleaning and delivery driver. He was arrested for unlawfully carrying a firearm in 1990.
Then Tran seemed to get his life together. He started a business in 2001 and got married. He took up dancing as a hobby and eventually began teaching at the Star Ballroom Dance Studio. He started to look like a late bloomer. But then his life unraveled. He dissolved his company in 2004 and got divorced a year later. His behavior got weirder and weirder, controlling his students and demanding that they practice dancing daily and only with him. He sold his house in 2013, stopped dancing, and lived out of his van and, when times were better, a trailer park. On January 21, 2023, he came back to the Star Ballroom Dance Studio with a pistol during a Lunar New Years Eve party and murdered 11 people, injuring nine others.
The police arrived within three minutes of getting the 9-1-1 call, but Tran was gone by then – arriving at the Lai Lai ballroom 17 minutes later. Brandon Tsay, the son of the ballroom owners, wrestled Tran’s gun away and chased him outside – saving many lives. The police pulled over Tran the next day. Before they could arrest him, Tran committed suicide with a single gunshot wound to the head. It was the most considerate major action of his life. His murder victims were almost all foreign-born.
There are four women shooters by my count, but three of them planned and committed the shooting with a man and it’s fair to say he oversaw the crime. The only exception is Audrey Hale who murdered six people at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee on March 27, 2023. Perhaps it’s unfair to count her as a woman because she identified as a transgender man, but she was born a woman and the rules about sex and gender keep changing. Readers can adjust this paragraph by replacing the word “woman” with “man” if they so prefer, but one reason for referring to her as a woman is that there aren’t that many female mass shooters and some people think she is a woman. But it is certainly indisputable that she shot up a school and murdered six people, which is behavior far more common among men than women. In fact, the best reason to believe that she wasn’t transgender is that she undertook one of the most typically male actions: mass murder.
One of the other female mass shooters was Francine Graham who, with her boyfriend David Anderson, murdered three people in Jersey City, New Jersey in 2019. Tashfeen Malik and her husband Syed Farook murdered 14 people in San Bernardino, California in 2015 as part of an Islamist terrorist attack. Amanda Miller and her husband Jarad Miller shot up a Walmart in Las Vegas on June 8, 2014, murdering three people. All these shooters committed suicide or were killed by the police. Unlike most of the male mass shooters, the mass shootings with a woman involved are either terrorist attacks or likely terrorist attacks because they had a political, social, or religious motivation beyond just murder. Hale may have been motivated by anti-Christian and anti-white animus, Graham hated Jews, Malik hated America and non-Muslims, and Miller loved revolution. They are now all dead because they didn’t love life.
Of the female mass shooters, only Tashfeen Malik was foreign-born. None of their male accomplices were immigrants. Out of those seven shooters, only one was an immigrant – which is about the proportion of all mass shooters who have been foreign-born. Immigrants of either sex are not coming to commit mass shootings.
The Deadliest Mass Shooters
The share of native-born American mass shooters is about equal to their population share, but they are slightly deadlier than immigrant mass shooters especially at the high body count end. The twenty deadliest mass shooters since 1966 murdered 438 people and injured 1,280. Eighteen of them are native-born Americans and they are responsible for nine out of ten of those killed about 98 percent of the injured.
Stephen Paddock is the worst. He was the son of Benjamin Paddock, a car thief, check forger, racketeer, bank robber and conman who was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list for eight years. He also escaped from federal prison, tried to run down an FBI agent with his car, and had numerous aliases because he was constantly on the run from the law. Benjamin had four children, one of whom was arrested for child pornography, and Stephen, who committed the worst mass shooting in American history. Whether through nature, nurture, or a combination, the Paddocks were a rotten family.
But the rottenest thing a Paddock did hasn’t been described yet. Stephen rented a hotel room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas on September 29, 2017. Two days later, he fired more than 1,000 rounds into a crowd below, killing 60 people and injuring 867 before killing himself. The only note he left behind contained calculations of distances from his hotel room to points in the crowd below that were intended to maximize the number of deaths.[13] He left no evidence of any other motive except mass murder.
The only two immigrants on the top 20 deadliest shooters list are Seung-Hui Cho, who murdered 32 at Virginia Tech in 2007, and Jiverly Antares Wong, who murdered 13 in Binghampton, New York in 2009. Both were angry, unsociable, unlikable, and crazy, and they took out their frustration on innocent people. Immigrants assimilate to near-American levels of becoming mass shooters, but they do underperform when it comes to body count. This is in stark contrast to their success in business, the arts, sciences, and other endeavors respected by Americans. Foreign countries really aren’t sending their best murderers.
Two other mass shootings are noteworthy because they were committed by the U.S.-born children of immigrants. Investigating the biographies of mass shooters is a painstaking process and the results can sometimes be uncertain. I’ve spent much time doing so for this chapter, but I also relied on the work of other researchers. But as difficult as it is to find out some information on mass shooters, it’s even harder to get information about their families to see if the shooters were the children of immigrants. In at least two cases, that’s true.
Nidal Hasan was the first. He was born in 1970 in Virginia to two Palestinian Muslim immigrant parents who died young after starting several successful small family businesses in Virginia. Hasan enlisted in the military. He became increasingly religious, socially isolated, and disturbed by the violence he heard about. Eventually, he was inspired by Islamist terrorists overseas to kill 13 people and wound 32 more in a mass shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.[14] He committed the attack less than a month before he was deployed to Afghanistan. The military sentenced Hasan to death and he’s currently awaiting execution. The most ironic part of Hasan’s career is that he was a Medical Corps psychiatrist who spent much time listening to soldiers describe the violence that they had witnessed and committed in America’s multiple 21st century wars.
Omar Mateen was the second. He was born in New York to two Afghan immigrants who, on all counts, loved the United States.[15] Mateen’s father even likely informed the FBI about radical Muslims he met in his community.[16] Undoubtedly, his parents were grateful for the United States providing a home and opportunity for them after their home country was destroyed by a communist coup, a Soviet invasion, a brutal Cold War insurgency, a post-Cold War insurgency and Taliban theocracy, a US invasion, 20 years of insurgency, and the resurgence of Taliban theocracy. It really makes you appreciate American democracy, warts and all. Regardless, his parents’ patriotism didn’t stop Omar from becoming infatuated with ISIS and murdering 49 people at the Pulse nightclub, a popular gay club, in Florida on June 12, 2016.[17] There are other second-generation mass shooters, but we don’t know the numbers. Regardless, immigrants aren’t coming to the United States to have children who will eventually grow up and commit mass murder.
Immigrants and Their Friends Who Are Targeted by Mass Shooters
Immigrants come to America to make a new life for themselves and their children. The stereotype is immigrant parents working hard in difficult jobs, scrimping every penny so their children can go to school and succeed. Your ancestors did it, mine did it, and maybe you’re doing it now. More often than not, it works. However, immigration isn’t just about the immigrants. About 85 percent of people living in the United States were born here and immigration affects them too, overwhelmingly for the positive. Immigrants bring us more economic growth, great food, scientific achievements, and enthusiasm for the American Dream that comes from having lived in foreign countries with less opportunity. But some Americans resent immigrants, others hate them, and a tiny fraction of Americans are homicidally enraged by them. A still smaller fraction actually does something about it by marking immigrants and their American friends for death.
Some mass shootings are terrorist attacks. In popular perception, “terrorism” is just a code word for a very heinous crime. That’s an understandable reaction because crime is terrifying. Street gangs fighting over turf, cartel violence, homicides, muggings, home invasions, and mass shootings really are frightening. People who survive them are usually shaken and more cautious as a result. Sometimes, people refer to governments or their militaries committing terrorist atrocities. Saddam Hussein’s gassing of Kurds, the Rwandan genocide, Joseph Stalin’s purges, and the bombing of Axis and Allied cities in World War II, and other atrocities committed by governments were often intended to instill terror and intimidate civilians. However, normal crimes and the actions of governments are not real terrorism. It’s not a fancy word that means heinous crime or a brutal military attack on civilians by a government.
I’m going to do the easy thing and handwave away an academic debate over the meaning of terrorism in favor of the legal and commonly accepted DC definition: Terrorism is a specific type of crime defined by the motivation of the criminals. Terrorists threaten or use violence to achieve political, economic, religious, or social goals as private non-governmental violent actors. A mugger wants your wallet, drug cartels want to make profits, and Stalin’s government wanted to stay in power. Terrorists want to change the world based on their beliefs. Warped as it is, terrorists think they’re making the world into a better place.
Osama Bin Laden was the son of a wealthy Saudi entrepreneur who wanted for nothing in this world. He wasn’t motivated by financial gain or luxury. He wanted a caliphate, not caviar. Bin Laden and his confederates were motivated by the religious, political, and social desire to spread Islamist governments throughout the world and reestablish their own primitive form of religiously interpreted governance. His motivation was ideological and political. He and Al Qaeda were too weak to accomplish their goals by conquest, they didn’t have armored and infantry divisions, so they engaged in terrorism.
American politicians make this mistake all the time. Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, introduced legislation for the US government to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.[18] Drug cartels commit brutal crimes frequently. Many criminals who join drug cartels are psychopathic killers and that’s their main motivation. Los Zetas is a Mexican criminal syndicate formed initially from deserters from Mexican special forces. Zetas have killed hundreds if not thousands of Mexicans in their struggle with law enforcement and other cartels with ghastly shock and awe tactics that feature beheadings, torture, and indiscriminate murder, but they’re not doing it to spread an ideology, or a religion, or some social goal. They’re in it for the profits of selling an illegal drug in high demand.[19]
Senator Graham and others who want to label drug cartels as terrorists are just confused. Early in his second term, President Trump used a legal definitional loophole to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations to use the US military to bomb drugs into oblivion. The same military that lost every war of my adult life may now fight a war against supply and demand.
Drug cartels would wither away and vanish if drugs were legalized. Some of them would try to shift into other criminal sectors like racketeering or protection and violence wouldn’t vanish overnight – it may even intensify as remaining cartels fight over a shrinking market or try to expand into new ones, but their most profitable reason to exist would vanish. Meanwhile, it’s legal to be Muslim and live as piously as you want but that hasn’t dissuaded Islamist terrorists who want to force the rest of us to convert and live that way too.
The small number of Americans who are homicidally enraged by immigration, pick up rifles, and attack them in mass shootings are ideologically motivated shooters, or terrorists. Patrick Crusius is just such a man. He thought immigrants, especially Hispanic immigrants, were ruining the United States, hurting the environment, and replacing white Americans.[20] Crusius was inspired by the Christchurch, New Zealand mosque shooting earlier that year where Brenton Harrison Tarrant murdered 51 people and injured 89.[21] Crusius apparently channeled his own blood and soil nationalist ideology and his schizophrenia into a murder rampage that took 23 lives and injured 22 others at an El Paso, Texas Walmart in 2017.[22] He chose El Paso because of the large immigrant and Hispanic-American population there. But nativist mass shooters haven’t just targeted immigrants or their children, they’ve also murdered native-born Americans who try to help immigrants.
The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) was founded in 1881 in New York City to help Jewish refugees fleeing Russian pogroms.[23] That wave of emigrants was one of the greatest in modern Jewish history, which was made possible by new persecution after the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 and the recent rise in prosperity in the Russian Empire and among Jews there. The combination of new greater oppression and more prosperity allowed over 2 million Russian Jews to flee from 1881 to 1914. HIAS’s founders responded with gusto. In the generations since, HIAS has broadened its mission to help resettle refugees from around the world and of any religion who resettle in the United States. HIAS has consistently supported legal immigration throughout its history and helped lobby to maintain and expand legal immigration. This has earned HIAS wrath in addition to the baseline level of anti-Semitism that follows Jewish organizations.
Prescott Hall was an American nativist and eugenicist who cofounded the Immigration Restriction League in 1894 to do exactly what it sounds like. His goals were frustrated multiple times as Congress narrowly defeated immigration restrictions or they were vetoed by the President. Hall blamed businesses and Catholics for the political defeat, however temporary, of his ideas – but he didn’t spare his opprobrium toward HIAS and other pro-immigration Jews either. After one political defeat, Hall erupted by yelling “To hell with Jews, Jesuits, and steamships!”[24] By “Jesuits,” he meant pro-immigration Catholics, by “steamships,” he meant the business lobby, and by “Jews,” he meant HIAS. With much variation over time, the story of American nativism from the beginning to today is closely correlated to evolving American anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic sentiment.
Robert Bowers also blamed Jews and HIAS for bringing immigrants to the United States. He posted, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in,” on the morning of Saturday October 27, 2018.[25] Shortly thereafter he entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with a rifle where he murdered 11 people and injured 6 before being arrested. He was recently sentenced to death.[26]
Nativist mass shooters are few and far between, but there may be more of them as immigration continues to be a contentious political debate that attracts crazies. As brutal and despicable as they are, they’ll probably remain a tiny proportion of mass shooters. It’s hard to say, but Crusius and Bowers may have become mass killers without being able to blame immigrants or Jews for real or imagined problems. They may have found some other motivation or just succumbed to the lure of Herostratus’ infamy. But they were motivated to kill because they disliked immigrants and the Americans who decided to help them.
Mass Shooters Aren’t Coming to Kill You
Mass shootings are rare, but people pay attention when they happen because the victims are so sympathetic, the crime is inexplicable, and the killers strike so randomly. Insanity, frustration, murderous rage, the Herostratus syndrome, and sometimes terroristic motivations all influence mass shooters. Fortunately, few people have such feelings in sufficient intensity to act on them despite recent examples like Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, and a list of other losers who attacked others.
There have been almost 1.2 million homicides in the United States since 1966, but only about one in every 667 was committed during a mass shooting. Immigrants are about 15 percent of the population and those few foreign-born who became mass shooters are responsible for about one in every 5,000 homicides. It’s no consolation to the victims or their families, friends, neighbors, or survivors, but mass shooters aren’t coming to kill you by crossing a border or otherwise.
[1] “Averting Targeted School Violence: A U.S. Secret Service Analysis of Plots Against Schools,” National Threat Assessment Center, US Department of Homeland Security, March 2021, p. 5.
[2] “Averting Targeted School Violence: A U.S. Secret Service Analysis of Plots Against Schools,” National Threat Assessment Center, US Department of Homeland Security, March 2021, p. 5
[3] Ralph W. Larkin, “The Columbine Legacy: Rampage Shootings as Political Acts,” American Behavioral Scientist 52, no. 9 (May 2009): 1309–1326.
[4] Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX), “$50K Reward for Info on the Criminal Who Killed 5 Illegal Immigrants on Friday,” X post, April 30, 2023, 5:15 p.m.
[5] Alex Nowrasteh, “Risk Analysis of Mass Shootings Committed by Immigrants and Native-Born Americans,” Cato Institute Briefing Paper no. 185, April 1, 2025.
[6] Tayiabr, “Charles Whitman’s Suicide Note,” Library of Babel (blog), August 26, 2017.
[7] Dave Cullen, Columbine (Twelve (Hachette Book Group), 2009), p. 337.
[8] Dave Cullen, Columbine (Twelve (Hachette Book Group), 2009), p. 236.
[9] Alex Nowrasteh, “Risk Analysis of Mass Shootings Committed by Immigrants and Native-Born Americans,” Cato Institute Briefing Paper no. 185, April 1, 2025.
[10] “Jared Lee Loughner,” Wikipedia, last modified August 17, 2025.
[11] “‘Lightning Strike Injuries and Deaths Vary by Region,’ under “Quick Facts,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Jiaquan Xu, “QuickStats: Number of Deaths from Hornet, Wasp, and Bee Stings* Among Males and Females — National Vital Statistics System, United States, 2011–2021,” MMWR Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 72 (2023): 756.
[12] Summer Lin, Jeong Park, and Brittny Mejia, “Can a Play Solve the Mystery of the Monterey Park Mass Shooter? Survivors Aren’t Sure,” Los Angeles Times, December 17, 2023.
[13] “Stephen Paddock,” Wikipedia, last modified September 2, 2025.
[14] “Nidal Hasan,” Wikipedia, last modified August 29, 2025.
[15] “Omar Mateen,” Wikipedia, last modified August 30, 2025.
[16] David Begnaud, “Seddique Mateen, father of Pulse nightclub shooter, revealed as longtime FBI informant,” CBS News, March 26, 2018.
[17] “Pulse nightclub shooting,” Wikipedia, last modified September 1, 2025.
[18] Ted Galen Carpenter and Jeffrey A. Singer, “We Shouldn’t Use the Military to Fight Mexico’s Drug Cartels,” Cato Institute, April 3, 2023.
[19] Ginger Thompson, “How the US Triggered a Massacre in Mexico,” ProPublica, June 12, 2017.
[20] Tim Arango, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, and Katie Benner, “Minutes Before El Paso Killing, Hate-Filled Manifesto Appears Online,”The New York Times, August 3, 2019.
[21] “Christchurch mosque shootings,” Wikipedia, last modified August 30, 2025.
[22] “New Zealand Mosque Shooting,” NBC News.
[23] “HIAS,” Wikipedia, last modified August 28, 2025.
[24] Neil Swidey, “Trump’s Anti-immigration Playbook Was Written 100 Years Ago. In Boston,” The Boston Globe, January 2017.
[25] Michael Hill, “Synagogue Shooter Was Obsessed with Jewish Refugee Agency,” AP News, October 30, 2018.
[26] “Pittsburgh synagogue shooting,” Wikipedia, last modified August 31, 2025.
Just to be clear legal or illegal immigration.