Open Access: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the CC-BY License. doi: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.37394Ĭorrection: This article was corrected on April 25, 2022, to fix an error in the wording used to describe the study sample in the Methods section. Instead, schools must invest in resources to prevent shootings before they occur.Īccepted for Publication: December 24, 2020. 4 The majority of shooters who target schools are students of the school, calling into question the effectiveness of hardened security and active shooter drills. Prior research suggests that many school shooters are actively suicidal, intending to die in the act, so an armed officer may be an incentive rather than a deterrent. 6 Whenever firearms are present, there is room for error, and even highly trained officers get split-second decisions wrong. The well-documented weapons effect explains that the presence of a weapon increases aggression. An armed officer on the scene was the number one factor associated with increased casualties after the perpetrators’ use of assault rifles or submachine guns. However, the data suggest no association between having an armed officer and deterrence of violence in these cases. It is limited by its reliance on public data, lack of data on community characteristics, and inability to measure deterred shootings (nonevents). Results are presented as incident rate ratios in Table 2 and show armed guards were not associated with significant reduction in rates of injuries in fact, controlling for the aforementioned factors of location and school characteristics, the rate of deaths was 2.83 times greater in schools with an armed guard present (incidence rate ratio, 2.96 95% CI = 1.43-6.13 P = .003). An armed guard was on scene in 23.58% of shootings (29 of 123) ( Table 1).īased on theory, multivariate models include the presence of an armed guard and control for region, school type (public, nonpublic), and grade level (high school, elementary, other) location (urban, suburban, rural) use of lockdown drills if the attack was targeted total number of weapons brought to the scene number of shooters and weapon type. A mean (SD) of 1.34 (3.25) people per case were killed and 3.15 (5.06) per case were injured, with a mean (SD) of 1.63 (1.22) weapons per shooting (primarily handguns 68.66% ). There were 134 shootings, 12 with more than one shooter. Of 121 cases with full information, 57 (47.11%) were targeted shootings. Of all perpetrators, 83 (76%) were White and 148 (98%) were male. Ninety-four perpetrators (70%) were current students, and 21 perpetrators (15%) were former students. Perpetrators’ ages ranged from 10 to 53 however, only 16 shooters (11%) were aged 22 years or older. This study examined a total of 133 cases of school shootings and attempted school shootings from 1980 to 2019. Data analyses were performed from November to December 2020. All tests of significance are model parameters in Table 2. 5 All tests indicate significance at the P < .05 level. Negative binomial regression models predicting number injured and killed were used to account for the overdispersion of count data missing data (<12% on any variable) are reported in Table 1 and imputed in multivariate models using multiple imputation in Stata software version 16 (StataCorp). The cases were then divided, independently checked, and sources triangulated. Data were merged and differences were resolved via consensus. Each shooting was investigated twice by separate coders working independently. Following prior work on public mass shootings, 4 the codebook was piloted on a random sample of cases. 3 We focused on offender motive, an armed guard on scene during the shooting, the number and type of firearms the perpetrator used, and other factors. We examined each identified case where more than one person was intentionally shot in a school building during a school day or a person arrived at school with the intent of firing indiscriminately (133 total cases) from 1980 to 2019 as reported by the public K-12 School Shooting Database. This study followed the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology ( STROBE) reporting guideline. This cross-sectional study was deemed exempt by the Hamline University institutional review board and granted a waiver of informed consent because it only used publicly available records for coding. Shared Decision Making and Communication.
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