Looking Upstream

Abstract

In the last 40 years, social scientists have provided important insights into the different characteristics of mass public shootings. Despite these efforts, we still lack a fundamental understanding of the processes that shape its incidence and spatial distribution. In this chapter, the author argues that the failure to tap into these dynamics is rooted in our inability to escape a risk-factors paradigm in which this phenomenon has been examined. The goal of this study is to step away from this paradigm and recast these shootings as a social phenomenon, shaped by social forces. This investigation is couched on two major sociological/criminological theoretical perspectives: social integration and social disorganization. A continuous-time event history model (or hazard/survival model) is used to test the influence of social integration and social disorganization forces on the prevalence of mass public shootings in the contiguous United States for the 1970-2014 period. The results paint a mixed but rather interesting picture.

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