This study utilizes crisp-set qualitative comparative analysis to assess 306 mass shootings. We compare non-extremist and extremist mass shooters according to characteristics that capture mental health histories of offenders, their grievances, and strains. We discover that offenders who sympathized with extremism were driven by grievance against a social group and were suffering from either mental health issues or from general strain. Extremist sympathizers differ from non-extremists in the nature of their grievances and the strains they experience. These results imply there may exist different causal mechanistic activity underpinning extremist and non-extremist violence, specifically with regards to mass shootings.
Scholars argue that nonviolence is likelier to cause political change in comparison to other strategies, including violence. This study identifies issues throughout this literature ranging from coding procedures, observational sampling, to interpretations of phenomena. If unarmed violence, reactive violence, and omitted cases are analyzed, nonviolent success rates are worse than formerly considered. Inclusion of 19th century (1800–1900) cases and previously unanalyzed cases from the 20th century reveals that nonviolent campaigns experienced a 48% rate of success, whereas campaigns that adopted unarmed violence were 61% successful, campaigns utilizing reactive unarmed violence were 60% successful, and 30% of fully violent campaigns were successful. Nonviolence is not a causal determinant of political change, but rather, its implementation falls short of a probabilistic coin toss. There is reason to presume this literature is biased toward elite interests in similar ways to how scientific inquiry on dietary and substance guidelines has historically been skewed by corporatism.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.