A researcher pulls three case files from different countries: a vehicle attack in Toronto in 2018, a knife attack in Sagamihara in 2016, and a mass stabbing in a Canadian city in 2023. No firearms. The perpetrator in each case left a digital trail identical in structure to every domestic gun event. Same isolation pattern. Same script adoption. Same archive footprint.

The instrument varies. The mandate does not. Hardware restriction addresses the efficiency of a terminal event. The informational mandate, the drive toward a significance trade that the script makes available, selects the instrument after the decision to act has already been reached. Restricting one instrument shifts the operational variable. The mandate persists and finds another tool.

The Hardware-Agnostic Corollary is the formal statement of this relationship. Every population with near-zero civilian gun access has produced mass violence events of the same structural profile as populations with high gun access, once the 1999 informational architecture became globally available. The causal chain, social isolation, then digital drift, then script adoption, then instrument selection, places hardware at step four. The informational mandate is steps one through three. Prevention at step four is the last possible intervention point. Prevention at steps one through three is where the chain can be interrupted before it reaches the instrument.

Gun policy is a legitimate and separate conversation. The informational vector framework runs on a parallel track that produces results regardless of how the hardware debate resolves.

The researcher's three case files establish the same pattern across three continents. The Hardware-Agnostic Corollary is the instrument that makes that pattern actionable as policy independent of any firearms legislation.

Share the informational vector framework with one person who advocates for gun policy today, as a parallel track rather than a competing one.

Read the full economic framework: Notoriety Arbitrage (DiBella, 2026).

Glossary

Hardware-Agnostic Corollary: The empirical finding that the informational mandate driving mass violence operates independently of the specific instrument available to the perpetrator.

Informational Mandate: The digitally encoded drive toward a significance trade that precedes and survives any restriction on hardware access.

Reference Citations

DiBella, C. J. (2026). Notoriety Arbitrage: Informational Incentives in Violent Acts. SSRN.

Peterson, J., & Densley, J. (2021). The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic. Abrams Press.

Lankford, A. (2016). Public mass shooters and firearms: A cross-national study of 171 countries. Violence and Victims, 31(2), 187-199.

Notoriety Arbitrage Series | Post 11 of 15 | Start here: Why Does Mass Violence Keep Happening?