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The shooting scores of police recruits with night sights and without night sights were compared in four different lighting conditions: front‐lighted target, back‐lighted target, with a flashlight, and intermittent lights. The shooting scores of the recruits with night sights were significantly higher for the four conditions. Night sights improved the scores of both skilled and less skilled shooters. Shooting with a flashlight significantly decreased the accuracy, regardless of the type of flashlight.

Purpose – In the midst of the second wave of data collection for a Comprehensive School Safety Initiative (CSSI) research project, a mass shooting occurred at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. This tragic incident provoked responses across the United States, including intense political discourse, organized student protests, and active shooter drills. In order to assess the potential influence of a major threat to school safety on the perceptions of adolescents, this chapter analyzes the survey responses of middle and high school students in St. Louis County.

Methodology/approach – Approximately one-third of the sample was surveyed prior to the shooting and the remaining students completed surveys within three months after the shooting. The authors examines the potential influence of the shooting on students’ reports on a number of school safety issues, including fear and perceived risk of victimization, likelihood of reporting guns on campus, and engaging in avoidance behaviors.

Findings – Results indicate that the shooting significantly influenced students’ perceptions of school disorder and likelihood of reporting a weapon at school, especially in white, less disadvantaged schools. The results also reflect meaningful effects based on the timing of data collection post-shooting, with many of the significant changes appearing within three weeks after February 14, 2018.

Originality/value – This study explores how external events may influence student perceptions of school safety. Moreover, this study offers a methodological contribution by demonstrating an assessment of the Parkland shooting as a potential threat to internal validity.

Purpose – This chapter is an exploration of how the Canadian media characterize the entire population of Canadian school shootings over a 25-year time period.

Methodology/approach – This chapter uses frame analysis to examine how the media characterize and frame Canadian school shootings within The Globe and Mail, a Canadian national newspaper.

Findings – This chapter demonstrates that the Canadian media utilize a small number of frames consistently over the 25-year period of analysis. Instead of changing their frame use within events over time, Canadian school shootings receive their own “frame emphasis,” reflecting the unique characteristics of each particular shooting. Additionally, the media utilize “exemplars,” or references to past North American school shootings, that serve as rhetorical anchors for future discussion of shooting events as they occur.

Research limitations/implications – As only one Canadian newspaper was utilized, this chapter may not be reflective of all Canadian news media.

Social implications – This chapter demonstrates the need to explore entire populations of school shootings in order to understand media frame use within and across events over time. It also demonstrates the need for international comparisons of school shootings, as the media utilize international exemplars to demonstrate links between school shooting events.

Originality/value of chapter – This chapter is unique in that it examines the entire population of Canadian school shootings to date (n=27), and it is the first to undertake a frame analysis of exclusively Canadian shootings.

This study aims to analyse the effect of gun-related violence on housing values, controlling for the area's crime levels and locational factors. Previous studies that aimed to find a causal connection between crime and housing values used instrument variables to solve the endogeneity problem. Here, the authors have instead been able to take advantage of the fact that shootings have occurred in random time and space. This has made it possible to estimate models to create windows around the shooting (event) and to estimate the causal effects of the shootings. Thus, the authors aim to contribute to the regression discontinuity design method in this context to estimate the short-term effects.

Using the regression discontinuity design method, the authors can estimate the short-term effects of shootings.

Findings from the analysis indicate that shootings directly affect those who are impacted by shootings and indirectly affect the environments where shootings occur. The indirect effect of shootings is momentary as it is capitalised directly in housing values in the immediate area. The effect also appears to be relatively long-term and persistent as housing values have not returned to the price level before the shooting 100–200 days after the shooting. The capitalisation effect is higher the closer one gets to the central parts of the city. On the other hand, the capitalisation effect is not higher or lower in areas with a higher crime rate per capita.

The article contributes to the previous literature in several ways. First and foremost, it provides an explicit analysis of shootings in built-up areas and their hypothesised effect on property prices through the impact on attractiveness and perceived safety. As far as the authors know, no study has analysed this issue on the international level or in Sweden. In this way, the authors aim to develop a study that can provide critical knowledge about one of the adverse effects of shootings. The authors also contribute to the literature by utilising unique data material, which allows the authors to merge information from the police about the exact location of shootings in the Stockholm area with data on sales of apartments in the same residential areas. In addition to the exact location of the shootings (coordinates), the authors also have access to data about whether the shootings led to injuries or deaths. Thus, the authors have separated the effect of shootings and fatal shootings, which has not been done before. Finally, the authors set out to highlight the results as a contribution to the debate on shootings.

The purpose of this paper is to examine police shooting accuracy and the factors that influence whether officers hit, or miss, their intended target.

Descriptive statistics explore both incident-level and hit rate shooting accuracy in single officer/single suspect shooting incidents in the Dallas Police Department between 2003 and 2017. Multiple regression models analyze the predictive utility of officer, suspect and situational factors on the two accuracy outcomes.

Consistent with prior research, the results demonstrate that officers are often inaccurate in officer-involved shooting (OIS) incidents. Additionally, several factors emerged as significant predictors of shooting accuracy.

The results are discussed in terms of the practical implications for training and accountability.

It has been more than a decade since the last academic study investigated this important topic using actual OIS data. Acknowledging the general dearth of this literature, this study explores what factors contribute to shooting accuracy.

The purpose of this research is to compare the fatality rate of Black and White subjects shot by police. This comparison is meant to explore whether officer-involved shootings (OIS) are impacted more by perceived threat or by demographic characteristics. Beyond race, contextual and officer-level variables are examined for their influence on lethal vs non-lethal police shootings.

The study utilizes data from the Tampa Bay Times database on police shootings in Florida from 2009 through 2014. Our analysis focuses on the substantive importance of this issue, using the population of OIS in one specific state over a specified time period. The authors also including multinomial logistic regression models analyzing the impact of race, contextual and officer-level variables on the lethal outcome of OIS is clear that the police are shooting at two very different populations.

Although Black subjects are disproportionately represented as the subjects of OIS, there was no significant difference in the lethality of such incidents based simply on race. However, when we compare Black subjects to White subjects, it is clear that the police are shooting at two very different populations. Black subjects were younger, less likely to be armed, less likely to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol, and less likely to have suspected or known mental health considerations than their White counterparts.

Thus, it is possible that any racialized difference in the lethality of police shootings is being suppressed because we are comparing very different groups of subjects to one another.

This paper is the first to examine the racial threat that officers experience past the decision to engage in violence. The authors are looking at how they shoot at minorities vs the decision to shoot at minorities.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between selected physical-physiological parameters and efficiency of pistol shooting.

In all, 237 male volunteers, studying at a Turkish Police Academy within the age range of 19-20 years old were investigated. The physical fitness levels were evaluated by valid and reliable test batteries. The efficiency of pistol shooting was evaluated by the total points of the bullets which hit the target from 10 m.

Significant differences were found between the sets of students according to shot accuracy groups for wrist circumference, biceps circumference, femur diameter, hand grip strength, flexibility, aerobic capacity, reaction time, balance, coordination, state anxiety level, anxiety variability, average heart rate, maximal heart rate and heart rate changes. The correlation coefficient between the pistol shooting result and change in heart rate, anxiety variability, mean heart rate during shooting, coordination, state anxiety, maximal heart rate during shooting, balance, hand-grip strength, biceps circumference, femur diameter, wrist circumference and flexibility was significant.

This research identified parameters which were important in profiling a good shooter. In addition, this result could be used for choosing marksmen and guiding shooting training for athletes and police in which shooting skills are important. It was reported that joining simple field physical fitness tests and simple devices such as heart rate polar meters may have an advantage in selecting good shooters. These would save police departments both time and money.

This is the most comprehensive study to date which has evaluated physical fitness in relation to shooting efficiency.

Purpose – This chapter analyses social networks and discourses in relation to YouTube videos and user comments relating to the traumatic event of a school shooting.

Methodology/approach – First, general patterns in the YouTube responses are mapped. What was the overall structure of the flow of videos posted in response to a shooting? Second, social network aspects are discussed. Which systems of interrelated (re)actions emerge through the videos? Finally, a set of three videos representing key texts in the analysed discursive formation are further analysed as regards the written discourse of their comment threads.

Findings – Participants were organised in the form of relatively autonomous and isolated islands of meaning making, but one could still identify a core public engaging in the creation, maintenance and negotiation of the branching and relatively open-ended narratives that recount and try to make sense of what happened and why.

Implications – The main result is that, also in relation to largely dramatic and tragic events such as a school shooting, there are patterns to support the idea of an emerging new media landscape where audiences play an increasingly active role as co-producers of content and interpretations.

Originality of paper – The paper deals with comments as well as video content, and on analysing them from the joint perspectives of social network analysis and discursive network analysis. This means that results give knowledge about two things; how the YouTube audience(s) to videos about the Virginia Tech shooting is/are organised, and what topics are discussed in relation to the videos.

The purpose of this paper is to generate information about the contours of police responsiveness, focussing on how quickly and precisely police make firearm arrests after a shooting incident.

Using a modified version of the Knox close pair method, a spatio-temporal clustering technique, over 11,000 shooting incidents and firearm arrests between 2004 and 2007 in Philadelphia, PA were analyzed.

Police are responding quickly and in a geographically targeted fashion to shootings. Across Philadelphia elevated patterns of firearm arrests were approximately two and a half times greater than would be expected if shootings and firearm arrests lacked a spatio-temporal association. Greater than expected patterns of firearm arrests persisted for roughly one-fourth of a mile and for about one week from the shooting incident but the strength of these associations waned over space and time. The pattern of police response varied slightly across different police divisions.

The current method uncovered spatio-temporal patterning and determined when these patterns were significantly different from what would be expected if the events were completely independent. Specific events and processes surrounding each event are not known.

Findings can help inform the knowledge about police behavior in terms of how police produce arrests.

The patterns observed here provide more micro-level detail than has been revealed in previous studies regarding police responsiveness to firearm violence while also introducing a more integrated spatially and temporally specific framework.

Clearance rates for nonfatal shootings, especially cases involving gang- and drug-related violence, are disturbingly low in many US cities. Using data from a previously completed project in Boston, we explore the prospects for improving gang/drug nonfatal shooting cases by investing the same investigative effort found in similar gang/drug gun murder cases.

Our analyses primarily focus on a sample of 231 nonfatal shootings that occurred in Boston from 2010 to 2014. Logistic regressions are first used to analyze differences in the likelihood of case clearance for gang/drug nonfatal shooting cases relative to other nonfatal shooting cases. Independent samples t-tests are then used to compare the investigative characteristics of these two different kinds of nonfatal shootings. Next, independent samples t-tests are used to compare the investigation of gang/drug gun assaults relative to the investigation of very similar gang/drug gun homicides.

Results demonstrate that the odds of clearing gang/drug nonfatal shootings are 77.2% less likely relative to the odds of clearing nonfatal shootings resulting from other circumstances. This stark difference in clearance rates is not driven by diminished investigative effort, but investigative effort does matter. Relative to gang/drug gun assaults, gang/drug gun homicides have much higher clearance rates that are the result of greater investigative resources and effort that produces significantly more witnesses and evidence, and generate more forensic tests and follow-up investigative actions.

Gang- and drug-related violence generates a bulk of urban nonfatal shootings. Low clearance rates for nonfatal shootings undermine police efforts to hold offenders accountable, disrupt cycles of gun violence, and provide justice to victims. Police should make investments to improve investigative effort such as handling these cases with the same vigor as homicide cases.