Mass Shootings: Epidemic or Moral Panic?

We're currently hosting our discussions at Café Walnut, not too far from our summer meeting spot in Washington Square Park. The cafe is near the corner of 7th & Walnut in Olde City. The cafe's entrance is below street level down some stairs, which can be confusing if it's your first time. Our group meets in the large room upstairs.

Since we're using the cafe's space, they ask that each person attending the meetup at least purchase a drink or snack. Please don't bring any food or drinks from outside. If you're hungry enough to eat a meal, they have more substantial fare such as salads, soups & sandwiches which are pretty good and their prices are reasonable.

The cafe is fairly easy to get to if you're using public transit. With SEPTA, take the Market-Frankford Line & get off at the 5th Street Station (corner of 5th & Market), and walk 2 blocks south on 5th and then turn right on Walnut Street and walk 2 blocks west. With PATCO, just get off at the 9th-10th & Locust stop and walk 3 blocks east & 1 block north. For those who are driving, parking in the neighborhood can be tough to find. If you can't find a spot on the street, I'd suggest parking in the Washington Square parking deck at 249 S 6th Street which is just a half block away.

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MASS SHOOTINGS: EPIDEMIC OR MORAL PANIC?

Due to the recent uptick of media coverage of school shootings in the wake of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida and the #NeverAgain movement led by some of the teenage survivors, I figured we could discuss school shootings from a criminological perspective and the news coverage of these shootings from a sociological perspective. Unfortunately, it was hard to separate the material on school shootings from mass shootings, and so I've decided to cover both. (Note that not all "school shootings" qualify as "mass shootings" and vice-versa.) We'll look at the statistics on mass shootings in general and school shootings, and we'll consider whether there's truly a growing "epidemic" of these types of homicides in recent years. With school shootings in particular, we'll look at the average America student's risk of dying in a school shooting as opposed to dying while playing school sports or commuting to/from school, and we'll consider if this focus on school shootings fits the model of a "moral panic" where the media exaggerates the risks of something relatively rare. Lastly, we'll consider whether extensive media coverage of mass shootings might inspire "copycat" killings, leading to occasional upticks in mass shootings even in the long-term data doesn't show a clear upward trend.

As some of you may have noticed, I originally planned to cover some of the conspiracy theories about mass shootings being "false flag" events staged by the government with "crisis actors" and fake bodies in order to justify civilian gun confiscation or some other sinister agenda. I decided that, given the time constraints, we just don't have time to discuss it. However, I may host another discussion in the near future that focuses specifically on these types of conspiracy theories. Let me know if that's something you'd like to see us cover...

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DIRECTIONS ON HOW TO PREPARE FOR OUR DISCUSSION:

The videos you see linked below are intended to give you a basic overview of the scholarly debates surrounding these issues. As usual, I certainly don't expect you to read all the articles linked below prior to attending the discussion. The easiest way to prepare for our discussion is to just watch the videos linked first under each topic, which should take about 32 minutes total to get through.

The articles I've linked are just there to supply additional details. I've done my best to jot down notes that summarize their main points. You can browse and look at whichever articles you want, but don't worry - we'll cover the stuff you missed in our discussion.

In terms of the discussion format, my general idea is that we'll address the topics in the order presented here. I figure we'll spend about 30 minutes on each section.

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I. RACE, PRIVILEGE & MASS SHOOTINGS:

• ARE MASS SHOOTERS DISPROPORTIONATELY WHITE MALES?

• WHAT'S THE EVIDENCE THAT MOST SHOOTERS ARE "PRIVILEGED" MEN WHO FEEL SOCIETY OWES THEM SUCCESS AND WHO SNAP & LASH OUT WHEN THEY'RE UNSUCCESSFUL?

• WHAT CAN CRIMINOLOGISTS & PSYCHOLOGISTS TELL US ABOUT THE RANGE OF MOTIVES OF MASS SHOOTERS, AND HOW DOES THIS TIE INTO RACE?

• DOES A RACIAL DOUBLE STANDARD LEAD THE MEDIA TO LABEL WHITE MASS MURDERERS AS "MENTALLY DISTURBED" & "LONE WOLVES" INSTEAD OF LABELING THEM AS "TERRORISTS"?

1a) David Sirota, "Why Are Most Mass Shootings Perpetrated By White Men?" (video - 3:53 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phot_KGMJF4

1b) Adrian Ghobrial, "Why white mass shooters aren't considered terrorists" (video - 2:47 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eWIMA51WHk

In terms of the link between race and mass shootings, many left-leaning media outlets have made arguments that claim that white males are very overrepresented as mass shooters (committing 62% of the mass shootings in Mother Jones’s study). There's various theories as to why, but they're all rather similar in linking it to systemic problems in White America - i.e. it's due to "white privilege" or a "crisis of masculinity" or right-wing extremism:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mvxv9y/why-are-so-many-mass-shootings-committed-by-young-white-men-623
https://www.salon.com/2015/06/18/its_not_about_mental_illness_the_big_lie_that_always_follows_mass_shootings_by_white_males/
https://jezebel.com/5928584/why-most-mass-murderers-are-privileged-white-men

However, when you actually compare the racial demographic data from the Mother Jones study with the racial makeup of the US population, you see that whites (regardless of gender) are not overrepresented. It's only when you look at white MALES that you find they're overrepresented among shooters, but the same applies to males of all races. The only racial group that seems to be overrepresented among mass shooters is Asians, which is odd considering that Asian-Americans typically have a very low violent crime rate:
https://theconversation.com/are-mass-shootings-a-white-mans-problem-85286
https://www.cnn.com/2015/06/27/us/mass-shootings/
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2014/06/are_most_mass_murderers_really_white.html

A recent article at Slate tries to resolve this debate over a possible link between race & mass shootings by pointing out that while white people are not overrrepresented among mass shootings, the racial disparity in mass shootings isn't nearly as wide as it is in standard homicides, where black men are highly overrepresented. It also notes that a study by the criminologist Adam Lankford using a database of mass killings from the years 2006 to 2012 compiled by USA Today found that white & Asian males perpetrated crimes with more victims, on average, and they were more likely to carry out those crimes in public places. Nearly one-fourth of the white mass murderers and one-fifth of the Asians in the group engaged in public killings. Among the black mass murderers, this proportion was just 6 percent. Lankford suggests the relative whiteness of public killings, in particular, could result from structural advantage and “aggrieved entitlement.” At the same time, he says, those public crimes get far more media coverage than any others—a factor that might reinforce the false belief that mass murder is a mostly white phenomenon:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/10/what_the_white_mass_shooter_myth_gets_right_and_wrong_about_killers_demographics.html

Shortly after the mass shooting in Las Vegas, an article at the New Yorker clarified the different ways in which political scientists & law enforcement agencies use the term "terrorism" and how the common factor is a political motive. The article argues that people who want all mass killings to be classified as "terrorism" are confusing cause and effect - i.e. the fact that people are terrorized doesn’t necessarily mean that an act of terror has been committed. Of course, there's bigger political forces at work here. Demands that Trump apply the term “terrorism” to events like the Las Vegas shooting is an attempt by left-wing pundits to fit violence committed by armed white men into the broader political debate about terrorism, which after 9/11 has tended to focus on Muslims, and increase FBI monitoring of white men who express generalized rage:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-we-should-resist-calling-the-las-vegas-shooting-terrorism

II. MASS SHOOTING STATISTICS & MEDIA COVERAGE: ARE WE SEEING THE "MEAN WORLD SYNDROME" OR HABITUATION?

• WHY ARE THERE SUCH HUGE DISCREPANCIES IN THE TOTAL COUNT OF MASS SHOOTINGS AS REPORTED BY THE MEDIA?

• ARE MASS SHOOTINGS IN GENERAL INCREASING IN RECENT YEARS? HOW ABOUT THE SPECIFIC SUBSET OF "ACTIVE SHOOTINGS" WHERE A SHOOTER TARGETS MEMBERS OF THE PUBLIC?

• COULD DEATH TOLLS FROM MASS SHOOTINGS BE RISING EVEN IF THE FREQUENCY OF MASS SHOOTINGS IS RELATIVELY STABLE?

• IS THE NEWS MEDIA OVER-REPORTING MASS SHOOTINGS & DISTORTING THE PUBLIC'S SENSE OF THE RISK?

• CONVERSELY, IS HABITUATION LEADING TO GROWING PUBLIC APATHY ABOUT MASS SHOOTINGS & MEDIA UNDER-REPORTING?

2a) Daily Caller, "Fact Check: 1,600 Mass Shootings?!" (video - 1:53 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HfZSPBdX2A

2b) Jake Tapper w/ James Alan Fox", "Are mass shootings on the rise?" (video - 4:54 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P59mGKT7te4

2c) Trace Dominguez, "Why Have We Stopped Caring About Mass Shootings?" (video - 5:33 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2K2IP_Vz4kM

In terms of counting mass shootings, a NY Times articles back in 2015 explained that different recording methods & definitions of "mass shooting" have led to widely varying counts. The discrepancy is due to the fact that Mother Jones is using the FBI definition of a single shooting where 4+ people were killed, and excludes domestic violence, robberies & gang-related shootings. They're specifically trying to look at the "active shooter" scenarios where random members of the public are targeted. Meanwhile, WaPo & the other news outlets quoting far more mass shootings than MJ are looking at a crowd-sourced site called ShootingTracker.com which is counting every shooting incident where at least 4 people were injured (not just killed), and is including all those non-active shooter scenarios the FBI & MJ are excluding:
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/opinion/how-many-mass-shootings-are-there-really.html

In terms of frequency, James Allen Fox - a professor of criminology at Northeastern University - has looked at the FBI's data on mass shootings (all shootings with 4+ victims) and there seems to be a lot of fluctuations but no clear trend up or down over the last 35 years. Grant Duwe, a criminologist with the Minnesota Dept of Corrections, has also pointed out that there has not been an overall upward trend in the total rate of mass shootings in the 2000s, and that the peak in mass shootings for the 20th century wasn't in the 1990s as most believe but in 1929:
http://archive.boston.com/community/blogs/crime_punishment/2012/08/no_increase_in_mass_shootings.html
https://reason.com/blog/2012/12/17/are-mass-shootings-becoming-more-common
http://m.nydailynews.com/new-york/no-rise-mass-killings-impact-huge-article-1.1221062

However, an article at the Washington Post notes that the Mother Jones study looked only at "active shooter" type mass shootings and excluded domestic violence, robberies and gang-related shootings. (Keep in mind, the type of random mass shootings in public areas that the media covers the most accounts for only about 20% of all mass shootings.) When the domestic, robbery & gang incidents are removed, a recent upward trend emerges among the remaining types of mass shootings. Whether "active shooter" scenarios should concern us more than domestic violence, robberies & gang warfare is central to this debate:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/12/17/graph-of-the-day-perhaps-mass-shootings-arent-becoming-more-common/

A more recent article at Politico argued that the data shows that mass shootings are not becoming more frequent, but the overall death toll has risen since the mid-2000s. This may help to explain why shootings seem more common, even though they aren’t, since the number of victims killed & wounded is the strongest predictor of media coverage. As for why mass shootings have become more deadly since the mid-2000s, the article has no firm conclusions but mentions that many people assume it's due to the expiration of the Clinton-era assault weapons ban in 2004. The limited research we have suggests the assault weapons ban had little short-term impact on gun violence, and that research on existing bans on large-capacity magazines and right-to-carry concealed firearms laws have found they would have little or no effect on mass public shootings:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/04/mass-shootings-more-deadly-frequent-research-215678

III. SCHOOL SHOOTINGS - RATES & RELATIVE RISKS:

• WHY ARE THERE SUCH HUGE DISCREPANCIES IN THE TOTAL COUNT OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS AS REPORTED BY THE MEDIA?

• WHAT PERCENTAGE OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS ARE "MASS SHOOTINGS?

• ARE SCHOOL SHOOTINGS INCREASING RECENTLY? HOW DOES THE ANSWER DEPEND ON THE CRITERIA WE USE?

• HOW DOES THE AVERAGE AMERICAN STUDENT'S RISK OF DYING IN A SCHOOL SHOOTING COMPARE TO OTHER RISKS, LIKE DYING WHILE COMMUTING TO SCHOOL OR DYING WHILE PLAYING SCHOOL SPORTS?

3a) CBS, "Florida shooting: Why are school shootings happening more frequently?" (video - 2:09 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL5zv4iluRM

3b) Ben Shapiro, "Debunking False School Shooting Statistics In Two Minutes" (video - 2:10 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJb-fr1EhDQ

While many skeptics probably know, if only in the back of their mind, that an average American child's risk of dying in a school shooting is relatively low, a recent Washington Post article gives you a clearer idea. It claims a student's daily risk of being shot is roughly 1 in 614 million, so with 180 school days per year the annual risk is under 1 in 3 million. The risk of getting killed in an accident driving to & from school, catching a deadly disease at school, and suffering a fatal injury playing interscholastic sports are all greater than that:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/school-shootings-are-extraordinarily-rare-why-is-fear-of-them-driving-policy/2018/03/08/f4ead9f2-2247-11e8-94da-ebf9d112159c_story.html?

There's a recent article at NY Magazine that comes to a similar conclusion, arguing that school shootings are actually decreasing and that schools are among the safest places for children:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/03/there-is-no-epidemic-of-mass-school-shootings.html

The criminologist James Alan Fox has focused on the specific issue of school shootings as well. He's found that America's schools are actually safer today than they were in the 1990s, and school shootings are not more common than they used to be:
http://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/26/schools-are-still-one-of-the-safest-places-for-children-researcher-says/

Fox has also written an article at is USA Today, where he talks about relative risks. He points out that over the last 25 years, an average of 10 children are killed in a school shooting annually while an average of 100 children are accidentally killed walking or riding their bike to school:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/02/19/parkland-school-shootings-not-new-normal-despite-statistics-stretching-truth-fox-column/349380002/

FiveThirtyEight has a recent article that also notes the extreme rarity of school shootings, but suggests that they could be increasing depending on what criteria you use. The article mentions a 2016 paper that defined a school shooting as a "premeditated incident of gun violence that took place in an educational setting, killed or wounded at least three victims (not counting the perpetrator), was unrelated to gang activity and was not an act of domestic violence." This paper includes incidents that occurred at colleges or involved adult perpetrators, resulting in a larger total number of school shootings in its data set than in studies limited to primary & secondary schools. This data suggests that school shootings, though still extremely rare, are more common today than they were 40 years ago. Nevertheless, their rarity makes them hard to study & predict, although perpetrators often share some warning signs with teen suicides which are far more common:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/school-shootings-are-still-rare-and-that-makes-them-hard-to-stop/

IV. MEDIA COVERAGE, SOCIAL CONTAGION & COPYCAT KILLERS:

• EVEN IF MALCOLM GLADWELL ISN'T RIGHT THAT MASS SHOOTINGS IN GENERAL ARE INCREASING & WE'RE MERELY SEEING PERIODIC RISES & FALLS IN THEIR ANNUAL RATES, COULD HE BE RIGHT THAT THE RISES ARE DUE TO SOCIAL CONTAGION - I.E. "COPYCAT" KILLINGS?

• DO SCHOOL SHOOTINGS FOLLOW A PATTERN SIMILAR TO MARK GRANOVETTER'S "THRESHOLD MODEL" OF RIOTS, LEADING OTHERWISE NORMAL PEOPLE TO GET SUCKED IN VIA THE "MOB MENTALITY"?

• DOES HEAVY NEWS MEDIA COVERAGE OF MASS SHOOTINGS INSPIRE THIS "COPYCAT" BEHAVIOR AMONG DISTURBED PEOPLE SEEKING RECOGNITION? IF SO, SHOULD WE CENSOR THE NAMES & FACES OF MASS SHOOTERS?

4a) CBSB w/ Malcolm Gladwell, "Why mass shootings keep happening" (video - 7:10 min, listen til 3:40)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lOlefNtFlw

4b) Trace Dominguez, "How Mass Shootings Are Contagious" (video - 4:44 min.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUSw3TCJ2Nc

Malcolm Gladwell has been rather hit-or-miss in terms of his track record of accurately reporting social science research, but it seems like there's enough research on social contagion & mass shootings to suggest that he might be onto something... Shortly after he wrote his article in 2015 (discussed in the video above), he was taken to task in an article at The New Republic that argued that the patterns in mass shooting are nothing like a "slow-motion, ever-evolving riot" since riots are fueled by impulsive behavior whereas mass shootings are typically planned well in advance. Instead of a riot, the article argues that the loose connections between mass shooters who idolized each other makes the phenomenon more like a revolutionary social movement without a clear ideology, fed by disillusionment & social isolation and shaped by a vague desire for social recognition & respect:
https://newrepublic.com/article/123139/malcolm-gladwell-wrong-about-school-shooters

However, an article at the Washington Post argued that Gladwell's argument, while perhaps wrong in some of its specifics, did make sense in light of psychological research that has shown that violence can be socially contagious through both personal history of violence and/or exposure to violent images in the media, including TV & videogames:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/15/why-violence-is-so-contagious/?utm_term=.86deed6c5ab1

A more recent article at The Atlantic mentioned research by Sherry Towers at ASU that found "significant evidence that mass killings involving firearms are incented by similar events in the immediate past" and theorized that television, radio, and other media coverage of mass shootings might be the vectors through which one mass shooting infects the next perpetrator. Towers's study found the heightened probability of a copycat mass shooting lasts for about two weeks, which is similar to what previous studies have found with copycat suicides shortly after the suicide of a major celebrity:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/11/americas-mass-shooting-epidemic-contagious/545078/

However, another recent study by the criminologists Adam Lankford & Sara Tomek made comparisons between the observed chronological clusters of mass killings in the U.S. from 2006 to 2013 and clusters in simulations with randomly generated dates. They then looked at the level of correlation between observed mass killings receiving varying levels of public attention to see if the apparent real-world clusters might be the product of chance, and concluded that "no evidence of short‐term contagion was found, although longer term copycat effects may exist."
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/sltb.12366

Nevertheless, several scholars have begun to call for the news media to stop reporting the names & images of mass shooters to remove the notoriety incentive. Jaclyn Schildkraut, a professor of public justice at SUNY Oswega, argued in a recent article at Vox that the existing research on the subject should be enough to convince the media that they should exercise more caution in their reporting on mass shootings. She admits this may go against the grain of press traditions, but it wouldn’t hurt the dissemination of useful information, such as the "how" of the attack (the methods through which the perpetrator was able to carry it out) and the "why" (motivation, mindset), both of which could help us craft public policy moving forward:
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/2/22/17041382/school-shooting-media-coverage-perpetrator-parkland