Search results

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.

This study set out to advance knowledge on the reporting of police shootings in print media. Media is the main source of information on criminal justice issues for most citizens. Thus, understanding the presentation of police-involved shooting incidents is important for determining the manner in which media might shape the opinions of readers.

The current study content analyzed relevant newspaper articles gathered from a large database of journalistic documents compiled by Lexis Nexis. Articles pertaining to police shootings published between January 1, 2014 and April 30, 2015, were identified and coded to document various dimensions of how these encounters are portrayed in print media.

Results indicate that explicit racialization of the stories was limited, which is contrary to what was expected. Neither the race of the suspect or officer was mentioned in most stories, making it difficult to assess explicit reporting bias of these incidents. However, results indicate that implicit bias might play a role in shaping the content portrayed in print news accounts of police-involved shootings.

The current study represents one of the first – if not the first – content analysis of news stories centered on police-involved shootings. Given the significant role media plays in delivering information about crime and justice topics to the citizenry, a working knowledge about the media’s portrayal of these events is important for understanding how media consumption may shape citizens’ opinions about police-involved shootings.

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.

Purpose – It is often difficult to assign blame to youthful violent offenders, and journalists may be uncertain how to determine the moral culpability of performers of horrific crimes such as school shootings.

Methodology/approach – In order to examine journalists’ assignation of moral responsibility for school shooting events, this article examines the sequencing dynamic (i.e., the order in which elements of news reportage appear) present in article lead sections from 112 New York Times articles about nine rampage school shootings occurring in the United States between 1997 and 2001.

Findings – Analysis revealed that journalists initially tended to select sequences that more clearly assigned blame. Over time journalists tended to rely on details that highlighted the contextual elements, rhetorically reducing the moral responsibility of the perpetrators. School shootings may ultimately be remembered as horrible events, but the youthful nature of the offenders and other contexts of the events will tend to mitigate the shooters’ moral culpability.

Originality/value of chapter – This study is the first to apply Cerulo's (1998) concept of sequencing to glean information about the moral decision-making process involved in the production of news content about school shootings.

There were 374 mass shootings in the United States between 2013 and 2014 and they were not random occurrences. We expanded the FBI’s definition of mass shootings (four or more injured or killed, not including the shooter), and collected data on every mass shooting that occurred in the United States to observe geographical patterns. Social Disorganization theories state that violence will occur in areas with high levels of poverty, large population density, and little economic opportunity. These theories work well with strain theory, which suggests that blocked goals, the introduction of a negative stimulus, or the removal of a positive stimulus leads to negative emotions, and these emotions can lead to crime in order to resolve the strain felt. From under this framework, we discover with point pattern analysis that there are patterns in the location of mass shootings crime scenes. They are not random. These crimes were far more likely to occur in the South, the Upper Midwest, and in Southern California, while they were considerably less likely to occur in the Pacific Northwest, Upper Midwest, or the Northeast. The lack of random spatial pattern indicates that the structural factors that contribute to mass shootings are more prevalent in certain areas of the United States than in others.

Purpose – The Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings have presented new challenges in how the media covers school shootings. These events have transformed Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, and Seung-Hui Cho not only from disgruntled youth to school killers, but also into actors, writers, and directors of their own narrative.

Methodology/approach – This article focuses on the role of the masculine identity and underlying messages in the communicative process of the shooters. Further examination looks at what particular messages the shooters are communicating through the media. This includes an analysis into their journals, internet postings, and videos that were left behind as archives of the performative scripts. Finally, reflection is presented in terms of which parts of the shooters’ messages are or are not communicated and why.

Findings – This article considers the differences in the Columbine and Virginia Tech cases in terms of who is controlling the information that gets released to the public. In the case of Columbine, information was or was not released by the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office, whereas in the case of Virginia Tech, nearly all decisions regarding material release was made by the media (particularly NBC News).

Originality/value of paper – This article applies Muschert and Ragnedda's (2010) examination of cultural scripts to two benchmark cases, examining the mediatization of the shooters’ own words.

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.

Purpose – The consumption of violent media contents has been discussed as a risk factor for school shootings repeatedly. The results of research on U.S.-American offenders support this notion. However, to date only little is known about the extent to which these findings may be transferred and generalized to perpetrators from other countries.

Method – We analyzed the case files on seven school shootings perpetrated in Germany between 1999 and 2006.

Findings – In five cases, detailed qualitative content analyses revealed a marked interest in media violence during the years prior to the offense. In some cases, the media consumption slowly replaced other leisure activities, focussed on topics related to the offenses as killing sprees or former school shootings, and was partly described as being addictive. One offender even utilized the media for his own purposes in order to present himself postmortem. However, two perpetrators did not show any peculiar interest in media violence.

Practical and social implications – Violent media consumption is no necessary condition for school shootings, but seems to promote the development toward an offense under certain circumstances. Therefore, intensive media consumption, especially if thematically related to an offense, should be taken seriously and considered in prevention and intervention efforts.

Originality/value of chapter – The findings add to the literature on risk factors for school shootings with regard to violent media consumption. The subject is analyzed in detail in a sample of German offenders, thereby widening the scope of analyzed school shootings.

Purpose: The study explores how educators use mass media to sensemake their experiences in relation to school shootings.

Methodology/approach: The present chapter uses content analysis to analyze educator tweets and results from an anonymous online survey.

Findings: Twitter is used by educators in the aftermath of school shootings to sensemake the impact these events have on teaching and learning outcomes. Moreover, educators turn to Twitter to debate larger issues related to gun control and arming teachers. Collectively, educators remain committed to their institutions and students; however, they may struggle to meet the ever-changing demands of what it means to be a teacher in the post-Columbine educational landscape.

Research limitations: While providing a starting point for understanding how educators sensemake their experiences with mass media, there are limitations. The sample size was limited to 55 tweets and 40 survey respondents. Furthermore, researcher bias is a concern. Both researchers work in higher education and have experienced the emotional “heaviness” that comes with discussions of school shootings.

Originality/value: This study provides insights into how educators use mass media to sensemake school shootings as both content producer and consumer. Findings indicate that through the identification of patterns within educators’ sensemaking processes, educational institutions can develop better systems for processing the effect of gun violence on the teaching experience and within the classroom.