Abstract:
School shootings have been traditionally viewed as a unique form of violence in which disgruntled suburban White boys indiscriminately target their peers and cause mass injury; however, a series of recent studies that employ broader definitions of school shootings suggest they more closely resemble community-based gun violence. This study tests the fundamental assumption that school shootings are a unique form of violence using multi-level logistic regression models to compare the individual and contextual correlates of 752 nonfatal school shootings to 28,109 nonfatal public shootings across 1,098 counties and 45 U.S. states from 2015 to 2019. Results indicate minimal differences between school shootings and public shootings, which are likely shaped by the school context. The analysis suggests that school gun violence is not a unique phenomenon from community gun violence and may share a similar etiology.
Authors:
* Kyle G. Knapp is a doctoral candidate in the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University. His research interests include mass violence, gun violence, intimate partner violence, gender, and communities and crime.
* Emma E. Fridel, PhD, is an assistant professor in the College of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University. She received her PhD in Criminology and Justice Policy from Northeastern University. She primarily studies violence and aggression with a focus on homicide, including gun violence, school violence, homicide–suicide, serial and mass murder, and fatal officer-citizen encounters.
David Riedman, PhD is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio and the New England Journal of Medicine.
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