While there’s much to be learned about the reasons for the San Bernardino shooting on Wednesday, one thing has become quite apparent: This was planned. The tactical gear, the bombs, the weaponry. The couple who did this clearly spent real time plotting this out. There’s a common thread in most mass shootings that get this level of national news coverage — from Sandy Hook, Aurora, to even Friday’s Planned Parenthood shooting. Every instance suggests someone who spent some time plotting out their massacre in advance.
But while this is the public image of a mass shooting, it may not be an entirely accurate one. As Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post wrote yesterday, mass shootings happen on a more than daily basis in our gun-soaked country. They have to be pretty spectacular anymore to get national news coverage, something that some of the more famous shooters clearly understood and planned for. But if you dig into the more day-to-day mass shootings (I can’t believe I had to write that), compiled by the ironically named Guns Are Cool board at Reddit, what becomes clear is that the typical mass shooter is not a terrorist or even a “lone wolf” motivated by the promise of fame through infamy, a la Seung-Hui Cho or Elliot Rodger.