About 30% of mass shooters commit suicide, and that figure rises to just over half in mass killings involving family members or intimate partners.Īccording to one study by James Knoll and Ronald Pies in the medical trade publication Psychiatric Times, mass killers are typically angry, aggrieved, emotionally unstable people who seek retribution or revenge for perceived mistreatment, rejection or humiliation. Mass killers often take their own live after shooting their victims. Women were 35 times more likely to commit suicide if they own a handgun. Men who own handguns are almost eight times more likely to die of gun suicides than men who don’t, according to a California study published in 2021 by the New England Journal of Medicine that examined more than 25 million gun owners. Since 2006, firearm suicide rates have been steadily increasing. Nearly two-thirds of all gun deaths in the U.S. In this database, the long guns category includes any gun larger than a handgun, including rifles and shotguns.įar more people kill themselves with a firearm each year than are killed with one, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyzed by Everytown for Gun Safety. According to Fox, handguns are easily concealable and some can be equipped with large-capacity magazines. Semiautomatic handguns are far more common in mass killings than guns that are typically characterized as assault weapons, such as the AR-15.

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