Profiling School Gun Violence Offenders using Latent Class Analysis

• In Event: Youth Violence

Abstract

Since the shooting at Columbine High School, gun violence in K-12 schools has come to be characterized as a pressing public safety issue. A growing body of research in this area has identified perpetrator characteristics that are associated with more casualties and fatalities in school shooting incidents, however there is little empirical knowledge of how these characteristics cluster together to form identifiable homogenous subgroups that are associated with varying school shooting incident severity within the heterogenous school shooter population. To bridge these gaps, this study creates a typology of fatal and non-fatal school gun violence perpetrators using Latent Class Analysis (LCA), a statistical method that can identify latent classes or “hidden groups” within a given population. Data for this study come from The American School Shooting Study (TASSS), a national-level, open-source dataset that includes over one hundred incident, perpetrator, and school-level variables on all publicly known K-12 school shootings in the United States between 1990 and 2016 (N = 354). Theoretically relevant variables selected from TASSS are included in the LCA model. The findings report the size and nature of each class as well as the average likelihood of individuals being assigned to each class.

Authors

• Tiana Gaudette, Michigan State University

• Steven Chermak, Michigan State University

• Joshua Freilich, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY

• Brent Klein, University of South Carolina