【Sport Archives】

What does the average gunman in America look like?Sport Archives

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.

SEE ALSO: Here's the anti-drone gun of your Rambo fantasies

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.

Mashable Trend Report Decode what’s viral, what’s next, and what it all means. Sign up for Mashable’s weekly Trend Report newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up!

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

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.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

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.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

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.

Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The site used photos of U.S. shooters based on Mother Jonesdata 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.

---

Featured Video For You

---

'Star Wars: Rogue One' exclusive featurette

---

• Life
• Tech
• Social Good
• Digital Culture
• Games
• Science
• Deals
• Entertainment

• The Long Battle for Medicaid
• Best headphones deal: Save $120 on Sony WH
• Screen Tearing or Input Lag? To Vsync or Not to Vsync?
• Threadripper 3990X TRX40 VRM Torture Test feat. Asus ROG Zenith II Extreme Alpha
• Sophia, with Love and Hate
• DOOM Eternal Tested on Low
• Should You Be Wary of All the Free Games?
• Majority of Gen Z would marry an AI, survey says
• Faster, Higher, Stronger, More Harmonious
• Best Memorial Day TV deal: Slash $500 off the LG 77

• 2020 candidates finally talk criminal justice reform at two forums. But will anything change?
• Google has a 'new' way to create calendar events
• Can Facebook's News tab fix the problems News Feed created?
• Trump thinks something terrible happened in Sweden, so here come the IKEA and ABBA jokes
• Adobe exposed nearly 7.5 million Creative Cloud accounts to the public
• Donald Trump should really learn who April Ryan is
• Google snuck an AR ad onto the back of the Pixel 4 box
• How the UK government can hack your personal data
• Huawei P30 Pro vs. iPhone 11 Pro Max camera shootout: iPhone takes the crown
• Hundreds of Facebook employees slam company's political ad rules in open letter

• The Tragedy of the Commons
• Navi vs. Turing: An Architecture Comparison
• Best robot vacuum deal: Save $700 on Roborock Qrevo Master
• Best Dyson deal: Get the Dyson Airstrait Straightener for its lowest price yet
• The Usual Suspects
• Benchmarking Your PC: A Guide to Best Practices
• Navi vs. Turing: An Architecture Comparison
• Using a PlayStation 4 Controller with Your PC
• Follow the Pelf
• And Action! An Examination of Physics in Video Games

• Hang the Landlord
• Best eye massager deal: Save $50 on RENPHO Eye Massager
• AMD B450 or B550 Motherboard for Ryzen 5000 CPUs?
• Best free LG monitor deal: How to get free curved gaming monitors
• Mariah Carey Has a Cold
• Anker MagSafe charging stand deal: Save nearly $50
• Anatomy of a Graphics Card
• TechSpot's Annual Guide to Buying a Used Graphics Card
• Literature Shrugged
• OCZ Technology: Gone But Not Forgotten