Computer software reveals the average face of a mass murderer
What does the average gunman in America look like?
By merging together the head shots of 39 shooters from mass shootings from the past 34 years, the legal site FederalCharges.com revealed the average gunman (they are usually men) isn't too distinguishable.
The site tracked down the photos and then "averaged" the images with Psychomorph, a facial-averaging software to come up with a terrifying composite image. The average gunman -- with white skin, dark hair and dark eyes -- could be anyone at your school, office or grocery store.
If you take photos of killers from school shootings specifically, a different photograph of a man emerges. This guy is a younger white man, who looks more like a high school or college student in his late teens or early 20s. To get this average face, the site took 17 images of gunmen from shootings such as the Columbine High School massacre in 1999.
Sadly, another common mass shooting location is the workplace, often with a disgruntled employee or a recently fired employee holding the gun. Taking the average image of 16 workplace shooters, a similar image of a nondescript man appears. This man also looks white with a somewhat darker complexion and features than the generic mass shooter.
As these three average faces show, white men are most often the perpetrator behind mass violence. Breaking down the racial and ethnic data shows that more than 50 percent of shooters are white. That's more than three times the likelihood of a black shooter. Despite misperceptions of terrorists from the Middle East killing Americans, only 4 percent of mass shooters are Middle Eastern.
The site used photos of U.S. shooters based on Mother Jones data from 1982 to 2016. To wrangle this data was a struggle because even defining a "mass shooting" is difficult since the U.S. government doesn't have an concrete definition and there's not a streamlined way to collect data about shooting incidents from different parts of the country.
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
