Looking Upstream: A Sociological Investigation of Mass Public Shootings

• In Event: Theories of Offending: Considering Strain, Masculinity, Self-Esteem and Public Violence

Abstract

In the last 40 years, social scientists has given us important insights into the prevalence, types, patterns, and individual risk factors that lead to mass public shootings. Despite these insights, we lack a fundamental understanding of the processes that shape its incidence and distribution. Our failure to tap into these dynamics is rooted in our inability to escape the dominant paradigm in which this phenomenon has been examined. During this time, the literature on mass murder, and most recently on mass public shootings, has been trapped by an analytical framework that cares only of individual risk factors. This paradigm assumes that the proximate causes (i.e. factors and events closest to the attack) are the only ones that shape its prevalence and distribution. This study steps away from this paradigm and recast these shootings as a social phenomenon, shaped by social forces. As such, this study couches this empirical investigation on Durkheim’s social integration, and Tarde’s imitation theory. Results support the idea that the incidence of mass public shootings driven, at least partly, by demographic and social processes. Some of the results, however, contradict anecdotal evidence, and myths about mass public shootings.

Author

• Joel A. Capellan, Rowan University