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Policy Solutions to Address Mass Shootings

After a year in which the COVID-19 pandemic significantly changed most aspects of social life—and even mass public shootings seemed to take pause—recent events remind us that these incidents have not gone away. With four mass public shootings (in Metro Atlanta, GA; Orange, CA; Boulder, CO; and Indianapolis, IN) all within a one-month time span this year, the problem has once again taken center stage in the consciousness of the American public.

When particularly deadly mass shootings take place, renewed attention is placed on the possible causes and potential solutions that could help the United States deal with this trenchant problem. Two of the most widely discussed factors often involve mental illness and gun availability. In both areas, claims are often influenced by political and emotional factors.

In this policy brief, we discuss gun control and mass shootings, drawing on a recent empirical study we conducted that focused on a specific type of mass shooting—those that occur in public settings. We first review definitions of mass shootings and then discuss issues related to identifying the effects of gun control measures. We conclude with an overview of our study and the implications it holds for future public policy.

What We Know About Foiled and Failed Mass School Shootings

Tragic gun violence incidents in schools—including Columbine High (1999), Sandy Hook Elementary (2012), Marjory Stoneman Douglas High (2018), and Robb Elementary (2022)—have made mass school shootings one of the greatest social and political concerns of the 21st century. Although these events are rare relative to other forms of school violence and gun violence at large, their negative impact on the emotional well-being of students, teachers, parents, and society cannot be understated. To address this concern, much academic research has been directed at understanding mass school shootings as a subtype of the public mass shooting phenomenon. Public mass shooting research has largely focused on completed incidents involving four or more victim fatalities. Despite these advancements, current research often excludes relevant cases that are characterized by mass shooting intent—resulting in fewer than four fatalities. In other words, research thus far has largely overlooked foiled and failed mass school shootings: incidents that are planned (foiled) or initiated (failed) but never manifest into an attempted or completed shooting (i.e., involving gunshot casualties).

There are a variety of ways that mass school shootings may be foiled or fail. Some mass school shooting plots are foiled before an offender can progress past the planning and preparation stage into actualized attack initiation. For example, in 2019, a 19-year-old student was planning to carry out a mass shooting at his university. He had been studying previous mass shootings for over a year so he could learn how to complete his attack. He purchased two firearms a week before his intended attack; however, his plot was foiled by fellow students who reported him to campus security after seeing the guns. During a search of his dorm room, police found ammunition and detailed plans (including a timeline) for completing his attack in addition to the firearms. In the end, the other students’ recognition of this potential threat and notification to school officials and police lead to the prevention of this mass school shooting attack.

In other situations, initiated mass school shootings may fail due to the rapid response of potential victims and guardians at the scene. For example, in 2018, a 19-year-old student arrived at his high school with a semiautomatic rifle, intending to commit a mass shooting during graduation rehearsal in the gymnasium. At the entrance of the gymnasium, however, the offender ran into a wrestling coach and opened fire, alerting students, faculty, and the school resource officer (SRO), all of whom responded quickly. Students and faculty engaged in lockdown procedures and the SRO pursued the shooter out of the building. Ultimately, the offender’s intentions failed, as he was the only casualty during the attack after being shot and injured by the SRO. This research brief explores what we know about both foiled and failed mass school shootings—referring to plots and incidents that resulted in zero victim casualties. These thwarted mass shootings—whether foiled or failed—are the ideal outcomes of a planned mass shooting. They are particularly useful for determining effective strategies to prevent incidents or intervene before innocent victims are harmed.

Lockdown Drills: A Widely Used Yet Often Misunderstood Practice

The May 24, 2022, mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX, where 19 fourth grade students and two of their teachers were killed and 17 others were injured, reignited a national discourse about preparing school communities for similar tragedies. Proposals ranging from armed teachers to clear backpacks were circulated, despite the lack of empirical evidence to support their efficacy in situations like Uvalde. This leaves an important question for stakeholders charged with keeping school communities safe: what is the best way to reduce the harm caused by these events that is evidence-based?

One strategy that has received considerable attention in the aftermath of these tragedies are lockdown drills, which are currently used in more than 95 percent of public K-12 schools in the US each year. These practices became commonplace after the April 20, 1999, shooting at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, CO. Even without a formal intruder protocol, hundreds of students and teachers engaged in the act of locking down during the shooting, an action that the Columbine Review Commission credited with saving countless lives. Although the perpetrators had an unprecedented 50 minutes that they were in control of the school and were armed with four firearms and nearly 100 improvised explosive devices, they never attempted to breach a locked door.

Despite the widespread use of lockdown drills in US schools, the conversation about their efficacy remains contentious and often is not guided by empirical evidence. This brief provides an overview of the scholarly evidence surrounding lockdown drills, as well as considerations of best practices, an important foundation for policymakers tasked with keeping students and staff safe and for the public to better understand their utility in schools.

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.

Schools and Gun Violence: What Do We Know About the Prevalence and Effects?

As the 2021-22 academic year came to a close, the United States was rocked by the news of another school mass shooting, this time at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Nineteen fourth-grade students and two of their teachers were killed when an 18-year-old former student entered the school through an unlocked door, made his way to his former fourth-grade classroom, and opened fire during a 77-minute rampage. Seventeen others were injured in the attack.

The tragedy in Uvalde conjured up memories of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Nearly 10 years earlier, 20 first-grade students and six of their educators, including the school’s principal, were killed after a 20-year-old shot his way into the building. Two others were injured during the six-minute attack.

In the aftermath of the shooting in Uvalde, administrators and policymakers struggled to implement policies and procedures that would prevent a similar attack in their schools or minimize the loss of life if one did occur. These included, but were not limited to, increases in the numbers and presence of school resource officers, authorization to arm teachers, and even supplying schools with ballistics shields, despite the lack of evidence to suggest these measures would achieve their intended goals in situations like Uvalde.

Amid growing fear and apprehension about another Sandy Hook or Uvalde happening and the proliferation of purported school safety measures, two questions occupy the minds of many: Are schools a safe place for children to be? And what actually works to make them safer?

As policymakers, school administrators, and other vested stakeholders continue to grapple with these questions, it is critical to plan for every instance of firearm violence on school grounds. In doing so, it is important to implement strategies that are based in research where evidence supports their efficacy in achieving prevention and/or harm mitigation. At the same time, it is imperative to consider not only the short-term effects but also longer-term impacts of both gun violence and the associated strategies for prevention and response on students. Researchers will be key in cultivating this evidence and must continue to work closely with policymakers, school administrators, and the public to protect children from the harmful effects of gun violence.

Can Mass Shootings be Stopped?

Over the last two years, there have been a number of high-profile mass public shootings in the United States that have dominated the headlines and captured the attention of the public and policymakers alike—from Buffalo, New York (May 14, 2022; 10 dead) to Uvalde, Texas (May 24, 2022; 21 dead), Highland Park, Illinois (July 4, 2022; 7 dead), Monterrey Park, California (January 21, 2023; 11 dead), and Louisville, Kentucky (April 10, 2023; 5 dead). Although mass public shootings rarely made headlines during the height of the pandemic, the frequency of events has since rebounded to pre-COVID levels. Consequently, these and other mass public shootings have reinforced the need to do more to prevent these tragedies from occurring and to mitigate the harms to individuals and communities if and when they happen. To achieve these goals, it is important to understand the trends associated with the phenomenon of mass public shootings.

The Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium (the Consortium) first published a report in 2018 analyzing 51 years (1966–2016) of mass public shootings data. In order to better understand the phenomenon of mass shootings, the report presented information on the location of shootings, weapons used, and demographics of the perpetrators. A follow-up report released in 2021 integrated an additional four years of data (2017–20). These reports were based on a comprehensive database of US mass public shootings from researchers Jaclyn Schildkraut and H. Jaymi Elsass.

As the United States continues to face record rates of gun violence, with mass public shootings also increasing in frequency, the need for evidence-based policies is all the more important. A starting point, however, is understanding the different contexts and characteristics of various forms of firearm violence. Mass public shootings, although among the rarest forms of gun violence, require different strategies for prevention and response from other incidents. These shootings often involve considerable planning, which can provide important opportunities for identification, intervention, and de-escalation of the threat before it is carried out, unlike other forms of more spontaneous gun violence. Additionally, mass public shootings often are random in nature and occur in large, open public spaces, which present different challenges—including preventative security measures and law enforcement responses—from targeted incidents and those that occur in private locations.

Taken together, understanding the unique context of the mass public shootings phenomenon is necessary for policymakers, practitioners, and other vested stakeholders to work to reduce these incidents and their impacts. This updated report includes two additional years of data and identifies changes in trends related to mass shootings, particularly as Americans resumed activities like work and school outside of the home amid the rollout of the COVID vaccine. Specifically, this brief presents analyses of a total of 57 years of mass shootings data (1966–2022). The analyses include the frequency of events, fatalities and injuries, distribution of location types, patterns of weapon usage, and perpetrators’ demographic characteristics. The appendix reports the findings for only the two most recent years of data and compares them to the patterns for the previous 55 years.

K-12 School Shootings in Context: New Findings from The American School Shooting Study (TASSS)

Although statistically rare, fatal and nonfatal shootings in the United States at elementary, middle, and secondary schools remain important crime problems with significant public policy implications. Indeed, the impact of such violence exceeds the devastating fatalities and immense sorrow that survivors, families, and communities experience. Even one gunshot fired at a school can subject numerous individuals to the traumas of gun violence. Recent polls indicate that school shootings can also sway broader public views on crime, including attitudes toward violence reduction. As a result, school shootings have become a focal point of US politics, sparking crucial debates on the most effective strategies for preventing and responding to gun violence, both inside and outside K-12 schools.

While there has been a recent surge in school firearm violence studies, discrepancies persist in the research due to variations in definitions and datasets. Initially, our comprehension of school shootings originated from narrow studies focused on small samples of highly publicized mass killings where attackers indiscriminately fired upon multiple victims in their schools. By contrast, recent progress in quantitative studies and the establishment of extensive databases have provided alternative perspectives on the characteristics of school shootings more broadly. Within this domain, however, there are disparities in inclusion criteria, as some studies encompass school-related violence occurring both within and outside of school premises, leading to an inconsistent research base.

We created The American School Shooting Study (TASSS) in 2016 to address these incongruencies in the existing research. Previously, we reported findings from TASSS on the patterns and nature of US school-associated gun violence between 1990 and 2016, defined as the firing of a gun anywhere on K-12 school property, resulting in one or more gunshot injuries or fatalities, irrespective of the time of day or season. Our findings suggested critical nuances in school firearm violence regarding the situations they encompass, the characteristics of the perpetrator and victims, and the location of the incident on school grounds. For instance, this violence encompassed various scenarios, including interpersonal assaults, self-harm incidents where the shooter was the only victim, accidental gun discharges, and legally justified shootings. At the same time, mass casualty shootings (defined as four or more fatalities) were exceptionally infrequent, representing around 5 percent of all interpersonal assaults at schools. The other 95 percent of these shootings involved one or two victims, most of which were nonfatal incidents.

Even among the fatal and nonfatal interpersonal assaults involving known perpetrators, we found that gun violence at American schools displayed considerable variability. Although adults were responsible for almost 29 percent of such incidents, a significant majority (71 percent) involved young individuals aged between 6 and 19. Interestingly, many school shootings were carried out by individuals not enrolled in the schools, often occurring outside school buildings and outside school hours. These incidents were largely fueled by nonacademic concerns, such as personal disagreements or gang-related activities. Therefore, contrary to popular belief, multiple-victim attacks by troubled students account for just a minority of total cases. As such, it is beneficial for policymakers to differentiate between incidents of school shootings that take place within the school during school hours and those that occur outside the school buildings when the school is not in operation. Depending on the specific nature of each incident, tailored intervention strategies are essential. Just as responses to premeditated mass shootings differ from spontaneous assaults, there will be important qualitative differences here between cases that affect how officials prepare, prevent, and respond to school shootings.

In this brief, we present new insights from TASSS, diving deeper into the database’s potential to examine the locations, timing, and student involvement of youth-perpetrated gun violence. In the end, our goal is to equip stakeholders with the essential data they need to formulate effective policies that mitigate school violence.

Local Exposure to School Shootings and Youth Antidepressant Use

While over 240,000 American students experienced a school shooting in the last two decades, little is known about the impacts of these events on the mental health of surviving youth. Using large-scale prescription data from 2006 to 2015, we examine the effects of 44 school shootings on youth antidepressant use in a difference-in-difference framework. We find that local exposure to fatal school shootings increases youth antidepressant use by 21.4 percent in the following two years. These effects are smaller in areas with a higher density of mental health providers who focus on behavioral, rather than pharmacological, interventions.