Isegoria

Weapons Man enumerates how spree killers differ from “normal” criminals:

We’re not big fans of scare quotes, but criminal behavior is by definition deviant. and so criminals are only “normal” by reference to other criminals. After looking at thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of criminal gun acquisitions, certain things stand out about, say, your typical murderer versus these going-postal types.

1. For a career criminal, a homicide or homicides is not an entry level crime, but a culmination of a life of increasing legal deviancy.
2. Ergo, most murderers have one of more prior felonies, permanent restraining orders (or equivalent), or other disqualifying entries on their records, and can’t buy guns in shops.
3. Criminals take the path of least resistance to an even greater extent than the normal exemplar of Homo sapiens. Therefore, they go for firearms the same place you might go to for, say, lawn care advice, to their normal informal social networks.
4. Most crime guns are acquired by purchase or barter from friends or family. Criminals’ girlfriends are a particularly fruitful source; except for some pockets of check-kiting and insurance fraud, they tend not to be as criminal as their men.
5. Before being acquired by their ultimate criminal who will lose them when murdered, at a crime scene, or in a police search, the bulk of crime guns circulate for some time in a black market.
6. Our best guesstimate is that about 80% of murder weapons come from this black market, about 15-18% are straw-purchased to order for criminals (although seldom with a specific planned crime in mind), and the balance are stolen to order or acquired by the end-user criminal directly from the thieves.
7. ATF’s median time-to-crime figures for most states support this analysis. We’ll look into this in depth below.

Meanwhile, the spree killer is a different animal entirely.

1. Murderers are, in the main, career criminals. Spree killers have seldom been in serious legal trouble. (Lots of them were weird or creeped people out, but the vast majority of weirdos never kill anybody, so weird is not a useful indicator any more than buying a gun is).
2. Murders are conventionally the nexus between something inconsequential and a violent person with poor impulse control. The spree killer plans his attack for months or years.
3. The goal of a conventional murderer is to kill somebody. The goal of a spree killer is to make a statement, often stated as, “get on TV.” In this, he’s more like a terrorist.
4. Murderers tend to be, let’s not sugar-coat this, stupid. They let rage or an ill-thought-out “perfect crime” lead them into a path which never ends well for them, although they don’t usually wind up as dead as their victims — just locked up. Spree killers may be just as full of rage as your average PO’d crack dealer, but they tend to be above average in intelligence. Many of them are smarter than the cops pursuing them and the reporters writing about them, not that intelligence makes them good people. They are likely to be systematic and plan their crimes for a long time (often, for maximum media impact). It’s commonplace for cops to find plans, spreadsheets, and statements of admiration for previous spree killers, after the fact. Spree killers frequently write self-important manifestoes. For an example of planning, some of them waited out state waiting periods for firearms.
5. Murderers usually act in the heat of the moment, spree killers plan their crimes in detail, often fantasizing in obsessive detail (based on movies, video games, and the media reporting on the others they emulate).
6. Murderers expect, however unrealistically, to get away with their crimes. Spree killers have no such illusions and usually plan to kill themselves when confronted by police or armed resistance.
7. A “regular” murderer is less likely to be socially isolated, so he can do things like have a girlfriend straw-purchase a firearm for him, or acquire one through criminal associates who (however unwisely) trust him. A spree killer is isolated, even in the midst of family, workplace, or school, and never has a girlfriend or anybody who trusts him that much. So he has to keep his nose clean, legally, and acquire his weapon legally; or, as in two of the Times’s cases above, he steals them from someone he knows who owns them — in one case, his father; in the other, his mother, after murdering her with four shots to the head from a .22.

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