Contextualising mass school shootings in the United States

Abstract

The data from the K-12 School Shooting Database (K-12 SSDB) of 1,544 school shootings were used to explore patterns of mass school shootings in the United States, with particular focus on the interplay between relevant predictors of these tragic events. Through a conjunctive analysis of case configurations (CACC), results from the current study show that (1) mass school shootings are relatively rare and (2) cluster significantly among two dominant situational profiles: lack of hostages, and a general absence of preplanning behaviors. Current findings are discussed in light of existing school shooting scholarship and recommendations for policy and future areas of research are offered.

Definitional Discrepancies: Defining “School Shootings” and Other Incidents of Gunfire Affecting Schools

“…Similar problems are evident when comparing the two definitions of "mass school shootings" in Appendix B (see Katsiyannis et al 2018;Paez et al 2021). Despite the fact that both studies use the exact same term, the definitional requirements do not add up.…”

“…Depending on which data source or scholar is being considered, however, the definition of "school shooting" differs to varying degrees. As a result, it has become commonplace for scholars to state something along the lines of "there is no consensus on what constitutes a school shooting" or something similar (see for example Elsass et al 2015;Fridel 2019;Gerard et al 2016;Jonson 2017;Paez et al 2021;Poland and Ferguson 2021;Reeping et al 2022).…”

“…Another glaring issue concerns essential terminology from which definitions stem. More specifically, the term "school shooting" has been swapped out for other terms, including "mass school shooting", "active school shooting", "rampage school shooting", "targeted school shooting", "school massacre", "classroom avenger", and "mass murder", to name a few (see Blair and Schweit 2014;Farr 2018;Gerard et al 2016;Harding et al 2002;Katsiyannis et al 2018;Levin and Madfis 2009;Muschert 2007;Newman et al 2004;Paez et al 2021;Reeping et al 2022). The proliferation of terminology used to describe gun violence at schools represents yet another precursor to the current definitional Figure 1 shows the process by which the population of school gun violence events is collected differently according to various data collection platforms, which are subsequently used and modified by individual scholars.…”

“…Numerically speaking, the count of necessary victims for an incident to be considered a mass school shooting, according to Katsiyannis et al (2018), is four or more. In contrast, Paez et al (2021) require three or more, and their definition does not stipulate whether the perpetrator(s) is included in that count or not. This particular issue of victim counts and what constitutes a "mass shooting" is a hotly debated issue in current gun violence scholarship that focuses on mass violence collectively (Booty et al 2019;Huff-Corzine and Corzine 2020).…”

Theft Victimization in Urban Settings: Comparison of Tourist and Resident Case Profiles

“…CACC can be used for exploratory data analysis, as well as hypothesis testing, and it provides the opportunity to examine complex relationships of combinations of categorical variables. In the past few years, a growing body of literature has used this technique to identify dominant situational profiles and to explore patterns within case configurations in a variety of topics, such as violence against college students, street robbery and bus stops, terrorism, mass school shootings, sex offenses, and online harassment, among others (Cook et al 2020;Gruenewald, Drawve, and Smith 2019;Hart andMiethe 2011, 2014;Moneva, Miró-Llinares, and Hart 2020;Paez, Capellan, and Johnson 2021). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that CACC has been applied to the study of tourist victimization, and to a dataset with hundreds of thousands of cases.…”