Social Contagion in U.S. School Shootings: A Network Perspective

• In Event: Social Network Perspectives on Violence and Co-offending

Abstract

Rampage school shootings in the US are a vital issue in criminology and public health. Previous research has highlighted individual level characteristics of school shooters and suggested that temporal contagion exists. Yet, potential feature-based contagion – meaning specific shooters that may inspire other individuals to commit an attack due to their characteristics and regardless of temporal proximity or remoteness – has received less attention. Employing such a perspective thus promises new insights into dynamics of school shootings, and may help identify avenues of prevention. Using a full sample of school shooters in the United States, we apply a network perspective, with shooters as nodes and inspiration as links. We find that more than half of shooters were part of the network, i.e., they were inspired by or inspired someone else. Among them, a handful of perpetrators inspire a large number of others. Further, shooters in the network killed and injured significantly more people, and those perpetrators who injure and kill many and those who show fame interest, on average, inspire more subsequent shootings. Our findings suggest that prevention strategies may be highly effective if they were able to prevent very specific, high-profile attacks, given their high number of victims and highly contagious nature.

Authors

• Anne Nassauer, University of Erfurt

• Nicolas M. Legewie, University of Münster