Lessons From a Mass Shooter's Mother

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A decade has passed, but exhuming Elliot Rodger’s life and ghastly final actions remains fraught. It risks inflicting further pain for the victims’ families and other survivors, and new revelations could feed the kind of infamy many perpetrators seek. The case stands out among the hundreds National Affairs Editor Mark Follman has studied in 12 years of reporting on mass shootings.

To this day it fuels copycat attackers who fixate on misogyny, making it an ongoing subject of news coverage and various academic and security research. It also helped catalyze policy change, in particular the spread of “red flag” laws aimed at keeping guns away from unstable people.

Yet from the start, this tragedy has been wrongly mythologized in the media and academia and poorly understood by the public, its lessons for prevention buried. The voluminous case evidence casts light on warning signs, the complicated role of mental illness, and other keys to effective intervention. Elliot’s behaviors leading up to the attack also make clear how the common portrayal of mass shooters is misguided and undermines the potential to stop them: They are not inscrutable monsters who suddenly “snap” and attack impulsively, but instead are troubled people who spiral into crisis—and whose brewing plans for violence can be detected, explained, and potentially prevented.

These are among the reasons Chin Rodger eventually decided to speak out about what she did and didn’t notice, or misunderstood, before Elliot’s rampage. By sharing her experience with prevention experts, and by talking with Follman about a trove of previously unreported case evidence and details of Elliot’s life, she hopes to help foster a clearer understanding of his attack, and, with it, greater potential to prevent violence.

“Inside I was broken into a million pieces,” she recalled about the early aftermath. “It still tears me to pieces—reading about and reliving the events, going over all the conversations I had with him and everyone around him, his writings, his personal things. It’s not just the pain of losing my son but the horrible suffering his actions caused for so many. I will carry this pain for the rest of my life.”

For his magazine cover story, Follman spent a significant part of the next two years investigating the Isla Vista tragedy and figuring out the right way to tell this story. New details about Elliot’s life from Chin and others, and a trove of previously unreported case evidence that he obtained, reveal important lessons. This is knowledge that can help prevent other attacks—but much of it had been buried by the mythologizing about Elliot as the iconic leader of a violent incel “revolution,” along with other unhelpful themes about America’s epidemic of mass shootings.

These new insights and evidence are featured in our new Mother Jones cover story, which is now published online here:

#GunViolencePrevention #IslaVista #InvestigativeJournalism

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