Body armor hasn’t been worn in the majority of mass shootings, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has been tracking mass killings back to 2006 along with The …
By Lindsay Whitehurst, Gene Johnson and James Anderson | Associated Press
At least 21 mass shooters over the last four decades have worn some kind of body armor — and the majority of those were within the last 10 years, according to a database maintained by The Violence Project, a nonpartisan research group that tracks gun violence. The Violence Project database doesn’t show a clear correlation with body armor and the number of victims. But such gear can enable attackers to shoot longer and is a symbolic way to adhere to societal expectations of what a mass shooting looks like, said James Densley, a criminal justice professor at Metro State University in Minnesota who co-founded The Violence Project.
Getting body armor isn’t difficult under U.S. laws. It’s illegal under federal law for a convicted felon to buy body armor, but other than that there are few restrictions on purchasing it. Only one state blocks it from being ordered online and shipped to homes: Connecticut, which requires a face-to-face purchase.“I don’t think it’s something that is really thought about too much, but we’ve seen it many times and we’ve seen it here in south Florida,” Colina said.
Body armor hasn’t been worn in the majority of mass shootings, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has been tracking mass killings back to 2006 along with The Associated Press and USA Today. In one such shooting at Philadelphia’s Thomas Jefferson University Hospital last October, a nursing assistant wearing blue scrubs and a ballistics vest killed a co-worker and then wounded two police officers before being killed himself. In another, this month in Round Rock, Texas, a 31-year-old Marine veteran wounded a neighbor before engaging in a shootout with law enforcement, after which he was found dead, wearing body armor.
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