Are School Shootings a Unique Form of Violence? A Comparison of the Individual and Contextual Correlates of Nonfatal School Shootings and Youth Gun Violence

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.

Keywords

school violence school shootings: gun violence communities and crime

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