While tragedies like the April 3 shooting at the American Civic Association always come as a surprise, there are signs that can identify individuals who, without help, are more likely to commit senseless killings or other violent acts, according to researchers at Binghamton University.

Most students have been rejected or humiliated, and most people have experienced a major negative event, yet few people are driven to commit murder because of them, said Mary Muscari, an associate professor in the Decker School of Nursing and the author of the book “Not My Kid: 21 Steps to Raising a Non-Violent Child.”

“That’s only one piece of the puzzle of what drives an individual to resort to massacring others,” Muscari said.

Muscari said her book, which was released in 2002, was written in response to the Columbine event and is specific to youth violence.

“The book emphasizes the level that we need to consciously make an effort to develop a less violent society,” she said.

Even though there is no single profile of these individuals, there are common shared traits, Muscari said.

Most of these individuals are loners. According to Muscari, most adults commit the acts alone, while younger people may work in pairs. Muscari used the two shooters at Columbine High School as an example.

Yesterday was the 10-year anniversary of the Columbine shootings. The massacre, in which two student gunmen killed 12 of their classmates, wounded 23 others and then killed themselves, was the first major shooting of its kind in the United States.

According to Muscari, individuals who participate in such shootings also tend to be preoccupied with violence, including violent media and weapons.

“Most mass killings are predatory events, which means they are planned and don’t occur on the spur of the moment,” she said.

Muscari said most of these individuals dehumanize people.

“They see their victims as objects,” she said.

“Most have been suicidal,” she added, “either killing themselves at the scene or committing ‘suicide by cop,’ which is when someone acts in a manner that endangers the lives of officers and/or others and gives officers no other option but to shoot him.”

Adults can leave indirect warning signs, but juveniles shooters are more likely to have “leakage,” Muscari said. She said they may intentionally or unintentionally give warning signs in their speech, writing or drawing.

Stephen Boehm, assistant professor of psychology in the behavioral neuroscience department, said he’s pushing for more research on the matter.

“In order to test a hypothesis to determine possible traits, you would need to compare a group of individuals that would engage in this act to those who would not,” he said.

Boehm said it would be tough to do such an experiment.

“It’s difficult because it is problematic to get a group of these people together and it is tough to define what is considered normal,” he said.

Muscari agreed, saying that while some people are more prone to having homicidal tendencies than others, there’s no clear way to detect them.

“There is an extremely small population to study, and the dangerousness risk assessment is difficult to begin with,” she said.

There could be a solution: the brain.

If you did have access to the brain of such individuals, it may be possible to detect certain similar traits in the brain, Boehm said.

“But we are so far away from anything like that,” Boehm said.

However, Boehm said, data to link brain abnormality to these acts is close to nonexistent, unless you categorize these people by other neuropsychological conditions.

“A high percentage of perpetrators would express various psychological conditions,” he said. “These conditions include such disorders as bipolarity, schizophrenia, depression and anxiety disorders.”

The combination of a person’s environment and genetic traits may lead to these incidents.

“There is interplay,” Boehm said. “However, the environmental effects can be enormous on the effects of the genes.”

Assuming there is a genetic predetermination for this behavior, people may be prone to committing an act like this but never do it because they haven’t been exposed to the appropriate environmental stimulus, Boehm said.