Using Open-source Data to Better Understand and Respond to American School Shootings: Introducing and Exploring the American School Shooting Study (TASSS)

ABSTRACT

This study uses open source information to examine school shootings in the United States for the 1990–2016 period. We innovatively created a national-level database to address the gaps in existing research and identified 652 school shootings. These shootings included 473 intentional shootings (encompassing 354 with known offenders and 119 with unknown perpetrators), 102 suicide only shootings, 73 accidental discharges and 4 legally justified shootings. Most school shootings were committed outside of the school building (e.g., school yard), by non-students, during non-school hours and were sometimes motivated by non-school issues such as gang disputes. Almost 56% of the intentional shootings resulted in no deaths and mass homicide shootings were outliers. No clear time trend emerged. Importantly, proportionally more of the non-juvenile offenders committed fatal shootings. While the vast majority of attacks targeted high schools, those against elementary schools were more deadly. We outline how these findings could aid policymakers, and highlight issues that future research could address with these data. We also describe our open source collection procedures, the amount and type of information uncovered, and how we assessed their quality. We aim to set a standard for more transparent open source data collection processes and enhance the data’s rigor to provide important context to the larger policy discussions about school shootings.

KEYWORDS:

• School shootings
• school violence
• open source research strategies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Please see Appendix 1 that lists each source we reviewed, provides its reference or link, and explains how we searched it.

2. Please see Appendix 2: TASSS Open-Source Search Protocol.

3. Indicators include: (i) Shooting clearly on school grounds (inside the building; explicitly stated as occurring on school grounds – like the parking lot; or there is picture illustrating it on school grounds & there is no contradictory information); (ii) Court opinion that contains a factual description of the case; (iii) Department of Correction or official police/government information on the perpetrator; (iv) News or other source contains profile/background information on perpetrator or victim; (v) News articles and/or other sources contain information from key actors (investigating police; surviving victims; witnesses) that provide information close in time to the attack.

4. Timing codes whether the shooting occurred during scheduled school hours. One rater’s interpretation loosely considered school arrivals and school departures (before or after scheduled classes were in session) as being during school hours. The second rater was stricter, interpreting “during school hours” as when regular classes were officially in session. As discussed, the data presented in this study leans toward the latter interpretation.

5. We used the following website to access the continuum codes: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/rural-urban-continuum-codes/documentation/ We coded the data occurring closest in time to the school shooting date.

6. Our analysis here focuses on one perpetrator per incident. The majority of incidents only involved one shooter. If there was more than one perpetrator, then we randomly selected one of the perpetrators for analysis.

7. It is important to contextualize these findings due to the high percentage of missing values for adult perpetrator’s race, education level, employment status, and socioeconomic status.

Additional information

Funding

* This study was supported by the National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice (awards 2016-CK-BX-0013; 2018-R2-CX-0002). The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Justice. We thank Dr. Gary LaFree and Dr. William Parkin for their assistance and consulting help. We also thank Dr. Sarah Gammell, Dr. Jason Silva, Meagan Abel, Noah Turner, Anna Buzhor, Manuel Martinez, Emily Taylor, Stephanie Dew, Rebecca Klestzick, Z Sabrina Mitnik, Matt Issa, and the other members of our teams.

Notes on contributors

Joshua D. Freilich

Joshua D. Freilich is a Professor of Criminal Justice at John Jay College. Freilich's research has been funded by DHS and NIJ and focuses on the causes of and responses to bias crimes, terrorism, cyber-terrorism, and school shootings; open source research methods; and criminology theory, especially situational crime prevention.

Steven M. Chermak

Steven Chermak is a Professor of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University. Dr. Chermak's research on rare events focuses on activities in the area of school shootings, terrorism, and mass shootings. Chermak’s research has been published in Justice Quarterly, Crime & Delinquency, and Terrorism and Political Violence.

Nadine M. Connell

Nadine M. Connell is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University. Her research interests include school violence, juvenile delinquency prevention, and program and policy evaluation. She has received grant funding from state and federal agencies to better understand decision-making in at-risk youth, violence and drug prevention in schools, and the etiology of school-shootings. Her work has been published in several top research journals, including Criminology and Public Policy, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, and the American Journal of Public Health.

Brent R. Klein

Brent R. Klein is an assistant professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Klein’s professional and research interests center on generating more refined explanations of aggression and violence and producing empirical evidence to guide public policy. His interdisciplinary research draws from developmental and life-course criminology, situational theories, and decision-making processes to better inform understandings of aggressive actions, including homicide, gun violence, school violence, mass violence, bias crimes, and political extremism. His recent research has appeared in Crime & Delinquency (CAD), Criminology & Public Policy (CPP), the Journal of Interpersonal Violence (JIPV), the Journal of School Violence (JSV), and Justice Quarterly (JQ), among other refereed journals.

Emily A. Greene-Colozzi

Emily Ann Greene-Colozzi is a doctoral candidate in criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Her work focuses on extreme forms of violence, in particular public mass shootings, using situational and environmental perspectives. Recent publications include Justice Quarterly, Aggression and Violent Behavior, and Journal of Child Sexual Abuse.