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What does the average gunman in America look like995 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.

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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.

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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.

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