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Purpose – Video game violence has historically been offered by policy-makers and some scholars as one contributing factor to mass homicides, particularly with shooters who are young, male, and white. However, the evidence for or against such beliefs has not been closely examined.

Approach – The current chapter examines the research exploring violent video game playing and its links with violent and aggressive behavior. Further, research regarding mass school shooters is also examined. The chapter also engages in a sociological analysis of structural factors within both the general society and scientific community by which media is often identified as a potential cause of social problems.

Findings – Current evidence cannot support proposed links between video game violence and aggressive or violent behavior, whether mild or mass homicides. Efforts to blame mass homicides on video games appear to be due to unfamiliarity with games among older adults, prejudicial views of young offenders, and a well-identified cycle of moral panic surrounding media as a scapegoat for social ills. Poor peer-reviewing within the scientific community allowed scholars to participate in this moral panic.

Social implications – Time focused on video games as a cause of mass school shootings is time wasted. Discussions of mental health issues and mental health care are likely to bear more fruit in relation to mass school shootings.

The phenomenon of murder-suicide (aka. homicide-suicide) makes a sizeable impact on current public perceptions and policies regarding mental illness and risk for violence. However, within the past 25 years, our understanding of murder-suicide has remained relatively stable, and so has our relative inability to reliably predict and prevent it. The purpose of this paper is to propose pathways for furthering a cogent understanding of murder-suicide that may inform specific predictive and preventative practices.

Research literature regarding empirical and theoretical positions in the fields of murder-suicide, homicide, and suicide are reviewed and discussed.

While murder-suicide has many similarities to both homicide and suicide, no current theories of either alone have been successful in fully incorporating the phenomenon of murder-suicide. Theories specific to murder-suicide as a unique form of violence are in need of further research.

Developing and empirically testing theories of murder-suicide may lead to a vast and needed improvement of our understanding, prediction, and prevention of these tragedies.

W.E.B. DuBois, in his 1903 collection of writings entitled The Souls of Black Folk, describes what he calls “The Veil,” which succinctly sums up the deadly and adverse experiences of African Americans in the US. With DuBois contemplations of a Veil under which US Blacks alone live and die as context, this paper takes a look at the modern condition of African Americans in the US, whether they continue to exist within DuBois Veil in modern times (twentieth and twenty-first centuries), and if so, to what extent. As a routine examination and inspection of the condition of Blacks in the US, focus is placed on black lives lost, beginning with an appraisal of their size in the US population overtime, and in comparison with other racial and ethnic groups in the US. US census data, health data collected from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and crime data collected from the Federal Bureau of Investigation are examined to construct a composite of the condition of contemporary Blacks in the US as compared to other groups in the US, focusing attention specifically on the rates at which their lives are lost compared to others through infant mortality, low fertility rates, abortion, and high rates of homicide. This analysis concludes with a look at death from homicide before, during, and after the post-1990s drop in the crime rate.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the incidence and main characteristics of mass shooting events in Australia and the USA in the period 1981-2013.

The study adopted a conservative definition of mass shootings derived from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, covering four or more fatalities not including the offender. Australian cases were accessed from the Australian Institute of Criminology’s National Homicide Monitoring Programme (NHMP) database and several secondary sources. The US data were collected from the Mother Jones database, a report prepared for Mayors Against Illegal Guns and a New York Police Department report. The time series data were related to changes in firearms regulations in the two jurisdictions.

For Australia, the study identified 13 mass shooting events and 104 fatalities from gunshot wounds. For the USA, there were 73 events and 576 victims. Of note is the fact that all cases in Australia pre-dated the implementation of the restrictive 1996 National Firearms Agreement. In the USA, a small decline was evident during the 1994-2004 Federal Assault Weapon Ban. Incidents and fatalities increased after 2004.

Of necessity, the paper adopts a conservative FBI-based definition of mass shootings that limits the number of cases captured. The absence of an official government US database also most likely limits the number of cases identified.

The findings lend support to policy considerations regarding regulating access to firearms.

The paper is unique in comparing mass shootings in these two jurisdictions over three decades in association with changes in firearms regulation.

While behaviour sequence analysis (BSA) is popular, it is not without limitations, namely, the level of detail required and time taken to run analyses; therefore, this paper aims to outline a novel method, using 30 serial homicide cases as a worked example.

Temporal analysis methods are becoming increasingly popular in applied forensic and criminological research. In recent years, BSA has become a widely used approach.

Waypoint sequencing provides a streamlined version of the traditional BSA approach, allowing for fewer behaviours to be included and providing a clearer overview of the main behaviours of interest.

Waypoint sequencing is shown in the current paper through serial killer research to show how to conduct the analyses and how it is effective in current investigations by expediting the process and allowing quicker analysis to facilitate current investigations.

The current research provides a novel approach to sequence analysis that is more useful in applied settings as it requires fewer behaviours or events than traditional BSA.

Previous criminological research has examined the causes and correlates of violent juvenile offending, but failed to explore the developmental taxonomies of crime throughout history. Theoretically, developmental trajectories of offending (i.e. life‐course persistent and adolescence‐limited offenders) should be identifiable irrespective of time and place. This study aims to examine the pre‐offense characteristics of nineteenth‐century American parricide offenders.

Using archival records of two major newspapers (New York Times, Chicago Tribune), the study examines 220 offenders who committed attempted and completed parricides during the latter half of the nineteenth century (1852‐1999).

Results reveal that a small group of adult parricide offenders displayed antisocial tendencies at an early age that persisted into adulthood. These findings are consistent with the developmental literature, thus providing support for identification of pre‐offense characteristics of parricide offenders across historical periods.

The findings reported in this paper are of value to psychologists, historians, and criminologists, for they illuminate the similarities in predictors related to violent behaviors in a small subsection of adult offenders across two centuries.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether threat assessment, an intelligence-led policing (ILP) tool, can prevent mass public shootings.

In order to gauge the potential effectiveness of this ILP tool, the authors conduct a retrospective analysis of 278 mass public shootings that occurred in the USA between 1966 and 2016. This retrospective analysis allows us to determine how successful threat assessment protocols could be in preventing mass public shootings by examining how successful this tool would have been in identifying the offenders in our data.

The results show that threat assessment has the potential to be an effective tool in the ILP arsenal to identify and prevent impending mass public shootings. However, our results also point to several obstacles for the effective implementation of this ILP tool. The underreporting of threats and using the content of threats and characteristics of threateners are problematic in correctly assigning risk. The authors make suggestions for how to overcome these obstacles.

This study makes several contributions to the intelligence-led policing and mass murder field. This is the first study to test the potential effectiveness of an intelligence-led policing tool to prevent mass public shootings. Additionally, this is one of the first studies to examine the leaks, types, context and follow-though of threats made by mass public shooters in the United States. Consequently, it provides unique information on the foreshowing behaviors of mass public shooters.

Various mass shooters have explained their violent actions as a response to failing at dominant forms of masculinity, including rejection from women and negative social comparisons to other men. The affect control theory of self (ACT-Self) posits that interactions that violate one's sense of self cause inauthenticity. This disequilibrium motivates behaviors that restore self-meanings, which may partially explain the link between challenges to the self and compensatory violence.

In Study 1, we use ACT-Self to examine the relationship between inauthenticity, violent fantasies, and physical aggression in the autobiography of one mass shooter. We quantify self-sentiments and inauthenticity using ACT-Self measures and methods, and perform a thematic analysis of the shooter's interpretations of and responses to disconfirming events. In Study 2, we examine the relationship between these same concepts in a survey of 18-to-32-year-old men (N = 847).

Study 1 shows that the shooter's inability to achieve popularity, wealth, sex, and relationships with beautiful women (compared to other men) produced inauthenticity that he resolved through violent fantasies, increasingly aggressive behavior, and ultimately, mass violence. Study 2 finds that inauthenticity arising from reflected appraisals from women predicts self-reported violent fantasies and physical aggression in a convenience sample of men in emerging adulthood.

This work leverages a formal social psychological theory to examine the link between self-processes and violence. Our findings suggest that men's inauthenticity, particularly produced by reflected appraisals from women, is positively associated with violent fantasies and acts. Further work is needed to assess whether this relationship is causal and for whom.

This essay aims to describe how the author began his career as a suicidologist and his style that made him so productive.

The author used autobiographical details to illustrate the elements of his career.

Childhood experiences include sleeping in air raid shelter from 1942 to 1945 in London (UK), while his style includes obsessiveness in reading everything on suicide, applying ideas from other fields (such as economics) to the study of suicide and obtaining academic freedom early in his career.

The essay offers guidelines for others who are in the early stages of a career as a researcher.