The Language of Mass Shooter Manifestos

Bringing together scholarship from corpus linguistics, forensic linguistics, and criminology, this book offers a nuanced exploration of moral agency in the pre-crime narratives of offenders.

The volume seeks to complement existing literature in forensic linguistics, which often explore criminal narratives elicited after the crime with the benefit of hindsight, by examining texts written in the midst of events. Analyses draw on a corpus of over 200,000 words of manifestos and diaries written by four ‘lone attackers’ who perpetrated mass shootings, and put together accounts of their lives and the preparation for their crimes. Incorporating stylistic approaches to non-fiction texts with those from corpus linguistics, Powell explores the ways in which these texts influence perpetrators and future offenders and, more broadly, the role of narrative as it relates to harmful actions. A closing section includes a taxonomy of moral agency which may serve as the foundation for future research on understanding agency, responsibility, and offending from a linguistic perspective.

This book will be of interest to scholars in forensic linguistics, corpus linguistics, stylistics, and criminology.