From a Taller Tower Quotes

“the American people remain grimly pessimistic about the possibility that our elected officials will do anything to enact these measures.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“if there is a malignancy, perhaps it’s in all of us. Perhaps it’s metastasized in a nation that, as sociologists Manning and Campbell tell us in chapter 1, has come to embrace “a culture of victimhood.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“This biased presentation can lead to a number of outcomes, including fear of crime, behavioral changes, and even copycat attacks from other, like-minded perpetrators.2”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“Though rampage shootings are rare in occurrence, the disproportionate amount of coverage they receive in the media leads the public to believe that they occur at a much more regular frequency than they do.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“there is a debate to be had over the question of whether the media’s laser-like focus on mass public shootings distorts what is, admittedly, a comparatively rare type of atrocity and makes it appear more common than it is; or worse, that their coverage might inspire future killers.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“They cling to their God, and I cling to mine. They cling to their guns, and I cling to mine. And in the meantime, the body count rises.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“The conflation of gun rights and religious identity existed well before there was an NRA, before there was even a nation, and it is likely to remain a powerful political force for the foreseeable future.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“the late Charlton Heston, Hollywood’s right-leaning Moses.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“What are confessions of faith to some are policy positions to others, identical to those espoused and promulgated by the National Rifle Association”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“Whenever you concentrate power in the hands of a few, that corrupts,”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“and bring an end to the atrocity without the loss of any more lives. But that remains an open question, an article of faith.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“a fascination with violence, a sense of grievance, open hostility, conflicts in interpersonal interactions—are also seen in a sea of other Americans”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“active shooters displayed five separate, identifiable warning signs before launching their attacks,”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“a quarter of them had made a suicide attempt.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“Among shooters under the age of eighteen, the number was even higher—88 percent.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“obsession with mass shooters of the past, a common trait among many shooters, he had also expressed a desire to outdo them in terms of the carnage he hoped to wreak—to, in effect, kill the last killer.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“threatening behavior—especially against women—may be one of the brightest red flags.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“What they did have in common, however, were behavioral traits.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“killers choose targets that are familiar to them and where they feel some grievance against them was committed.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“the experts will tell you, is that there is no single profile of a mass public shooter.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“But we’re still struggling with the hardest lesson: the challenge of trying to determine who among us is likely to become the next mass killer.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“That daily victory over darkness, that refusal to claim the mantle of victim was also trumpeted on the web.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“What they share is a sense of themselves as victims and a narcissistic image of themselves as armed avengers, destined for some perverse fame. Victims.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“Perhaps. There is no question that the swamps these killers swim in darkly reflect troubling aspects of our political culture:”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“It’s a combination found in abundance in the societies that can afford it, in the affluent—our adversaries would call it decadent—West, where there’s a perhaps unrealistic expectation of personal success and an incentive to view one’s self as a victim when that success proves elusive.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“It’s that peculiar, toxic cocktail of grievance and grandiosity, of victimhood-as-status, that sociologists Campbell and Manning write about.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“It’s a fool’s errand to ascribe reason or logic to the actions of a mass killer,”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“They’re narcissistic and grandiose even when they’re pitiful and small.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“It’s turned mass murder into a kind of white noise that is so widespread in our culture we don’t even know we hear it anymore.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter

“None of this is meant to suggest in any way that there is not an immense, urgent need to examine the flaws in our mental health system and the holes in our patchwork of state and federal laws that have allowed so many of these killers to slither through.”
― Seamus McGraw, From a Taller Tower: The Rise of the American Mass Shooter