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Overview of The American School Shooting Study

Although rare events, school shootings remain a pressing public policy issue in America. Importantly, available data show a modest upward trend in multiple-casualty school shootings. Few crimes are as shocking as the recent mass shooting attack at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022, in which 19 students and two teachers were murdered. These high-profile events have led to heated debates about gun control, gun rights, mental health, and privacy rights.

Surveys suggest that Americans today tend to view schools as unsafe, and public fear over school violence has deepened. Indeed, the adverse costs of school shootings go well-beyond the terrible loss of life and grief of the families and communities immediately impacted. The effects reverberate throughout the nation. Not only are teachers and schoolchildren directly exposed, but parents, police, first responders, nurses, surgeons, pastors, counselors, and custodians, to name a few, are also vicariously affected. In the wake of traumatic attacks, schools struggle to cope, and surviving students’ school performance may suffer.

Although research on school shootings has increased recently, much of the literature is inconsistent, primarily due to variations in datasets and school shooting definitions. Most studies employ small nonprobability rather than randomly selected samples of US school shooters or prioritize mass shootings and lethal gun violence. By contrast, the limited quantitative studies tend to be more inclusive by studying fatal and nonfatal gun assaults. Even here, there are disparities in inclusion criteria, as some studies examine school-associated violence that transpires both on and off campus property.

While extensive data have documented school crimes more broadly, there is far less information on school shootings. For instance, the Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey’s (NCVS) School Crime Supplement provides homicide numbers but exclude precise statistics on school shootings. This lack of consistent, national-level data has hindered the development of systematic research, limiting our capacity to create and implement public policy that is directed toward reducing school shootings and is rooted in rigorous social science. Accordingly, we created a national-level database using open-source information to examine school shootings in the United States and provide stakeholders with the information they need to develop meaningful policies.

Choose to Change: Your Mind, Your Game

Research Brief

Gun violence disproportionately affects youth and young adults living in our city and our country’s most historically under-resourced neighborhoods. The fundamental disparities in basic safety that exist mean that young people growing up in some Chicago neighborhoods are exposed to gun violence at rates almost 30 times higher than their peers just a few miles — or even a few blocks — away. For the children and families living in the communities most affected, consistent exposure to violence and trauma can be detrimental to their mental health, emotional development, and academic engagement.1 While undoing the decades of systemic disinvestment that have created inequity in opportunity will take time, in the immediate term we need to find ways to better support the young people bearing the greatest burdens of violence. Recent research from Chicago and elsewhere suggests providing behavioral and mental health supports can help decrease violence involvement and increase academic engagement.2 These programs, based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) principles, seek to give young people additional tools to navigate their difficult environments — return a sense of safety, slow down their decision-making processes, and increase their social-emotional skillset. Despite the promise of these approaches, there is a dearth of programming for youth who are no longer consistently attending school and those who are already interacting with the justice system.

Employment and Earnings of Men at High Risk of Gun Violence

Since Becker (1968), economists have modeled crime as resulting from higher returns to criminal activity than legal work. Yet contemporary employment data for people engaged in crime is scarce. We surveyed men at extreme risk of gun violence in Chicago about their work in the formal, informal, and criminal sectors. Noncriminal work is common. Two-thirds of respondents specialize solely in the criminal or noncriminal sectors, both earning about minimum wage at the median. Those who mix across sectors typically earn higher wages. We describe workers by type to demonstrate how better understanding sectoral specialization could inform program design.

In Search of Common Ground: Expert Judgments on Gun Policy Effects

As our review of the existing literature demonstrated, there is very little scientific evidence available to support the decisions that policymakers and the public must make about whether to implement or change various gun policies. Without strong scientific evidence, policymakers and the public rely heavily on what advocates or social scientists believe the effects of policies are most likely to be. The opinions of these gun policy experts are an important influence on gun policy debates and decisions because people believe that the experts have an especially well-informed understanding of the gun polices under consideration, how similar laws have performed historically, and how specific policies would affect particular stakeholder groups.

Different communities of gun policy experts have sharply divided views on many gun policies, as often becomes clear in the debates that occur when states and the federal government consider new gun legislation. Less clear is whether there are laws or policies for which such differences are less stark, or whether there may be a combination of policies that experts of every stripe could regard as an improvement over existing policies. Finally, it has not been clear whether experts disagree about which objectives gun policies should be trying to achieve or whether experts agree on the objectives but disagree on which policies are most likely to achieve those objectives. If the experts chiefly disagree on the latter, this suggests a role for new and better scientific study of the true effects of gun policies.

To begin to answer these questions, RAND researchers surveyed 173 gun policy experts (across two fieldings in 2016 and 2020) on what they believed the effects of the following 19 gun policies would be on ten different outcomes.

Does the disclosure of gun ownership affect crime? Evidence from New York

While the social costs of gun violence are high, opponents of gun restrictions argue that gun ownership deters crime and creates a positive externality by increasing unobserved risk to criminals. This paper investigates the evidence for these two deterrence channels, exploiting the sudden disclosure of all handgun permit holders’ names and addresses in two New York counties. Permit holders have more crime incidents at their homes relative to non-permit holders in the baseline, which is not driven by selection into neighborhoods. I find little evidence in favor of direct deterrence, and little evidence of peer deterrence. Instead, I find that victimization is associated with a higher likelihood of future gun ownership.

Guns and violence: The enduring impact of crack cocaine markets on young black males

The violence associated with crack cocaine markets in the 1980s and 1990s has repercussions today. Using cross-city variation in when crack cocaine arrived and an older comparison group, we estimate that the US murder rate of black males aged 15–24 was still 70 percent higher 17 years after crack markets had emerged. Using the fraction of gun-related suicides as a proxy for gun availability, we find that increased access to guns led to persistently higher murder rates. Our estimates imply that more guns due to crack-related violence explains approximately one-tenth of the current life-expectancy gap between white and black males.