“We live the violence, we resist the violence:” violent politics between a school shooting and lithium mining in Serbia

The mental health consequences of mass school shootings: What do we need to know?

BackgroundIn recent years, the United States (US) has witnessed a rise in political violence. Prior research has found that an individual’s social network is associated with their likelihood of engaging in various forms of violence, but research on social networks and political violence in the US context is limited. This study examined associations between social network size and endorsement of political violence in a recent nationally representative survey and explored how the relationship varied by use of social media as a major news source, perceptions of the government as an enemy, and membership in a marginalized or privileged racial or ethnic group.MethodsThis was a nationally representative cross-sectional survey study of adults aged 18 and older in the US, administered from May 13-June 2, 2022. The exposure was social network size, defined by the number of strong social connections. We examined three violence-related outcomes: support for non-political violence, support for political violence, and personal willingness to engage in political violence. We estimated prevalence ratios for associations using survey-weighted Poisson regression with robust standard errors, adjusting for hypothesized confounders and including interaction terms to examine effect measure modification.ResultsThe sample included 8,620 respondents. Median age was 48.4 years (95% CI = 47.9–48.8), 51.5% were female (95% CI = 50.4–52.7%), and 62.7% self-identified as non-Hispanic White (95% CI = 61.4–65.9%). In adjusted models, those with zero strong connections were more likely than those with 1–4 strong social connections to consider political violence usually/always justified in general (PR = 2.43, 95% CI = 1.47–4.01). Those with 50 + strong connections were more likely than those with 1–4 strong social connections to consider political violence usually/always justified in at least one situation (PR = 1.19, 95% CI = 1.03–1.37) and were more likely to report being willing to personally use political violence (PR = 1.52, 95% CI = 1.13–2.04). Associations varied somewhat by social media use, perceptions of the government as an enemy, and racialized identity.ConclusionsIndividuals who reported very few and very many strong social connections were more likely than others to support political violence or be personally willing to engage in it in one form or another. Findings point toward potential intervention and prevention opportunities.

School shootings are a growing public health concern, yet research has largely overlooked race as a factor. This study examines racialized dynamics in school shootings using a mixed-methods design. It combines an in-depth case study with cross-case analyses and descriptive statistics on a full sample of shootings. Findings show school shootings are not racially neutral events. First, situational analyses of how victims are killed suggest racialized differences marked by dehumanization when the victim was Black. Second, while shooters are not disproportionately White, different racial groups show distinct patterns in their context factors for school shootings: Numerous non-Black shooters showed racist convictions. In contrast, racialized bullying was a driving dynamic for Black shooters before 2000, and untreated schizophrenia was central for all Black shooters since 2000. By integrating race into the study of school shootings, findings contribute to broader debates on the intersections of race, political violence, and hate crimes.

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this discussion of Judith Herman's important book Trauma and Recovery and its relevance today. In this volume, published in 1992, Herman developed many crucial dimensions of battering that continue to be essential to work on violence against women. In these brief comments, I want to highlight two of these dimensions. The first is the link between battering, trauma, and larger political and social violence-what I would call the operation of gender violence on a macro level. I remember reading the book for the first time after I had already been doing work on legal representation of battered women for many years. I was amazed by the very first chapters, in which Herman makes the connection between political violence and battering. I realized that my own understanding of violence against women had been limited by my sense of it as being within the context of a relationship between two people. Yes, I had seen it as political, as a part of a larger context of patriarchy and gender subordination, but I had not consistently made the link between larger political violence and violence against women. Herman saw that battering was terrorism in the home and made those links explicit (see Marcus 1994). Aspects of Herman's analogies have been integrated into sociological and psychological accounts of battering, such as the use of the phrase hostage. But the past fifteen years has seen the development and expansion of these insights, particularly in the context of a global women's international human rights movement (see Schneider 2000). This movement has explicitly linked sexual violence and political violence. We now understand gender violence as a form of torture and recognize that violence against women occurs in wartime and as a weapon of national and international conflict (Copelon 2003). Even the United Nations secretary general's In-Depth Study on All Forms of Violence Against Women, submitted to the General Assembly in fall 2006 (and on which I worked as a consultant), recognized gender violence as a human rights violation and as a vehicle of war (United Nations General Assembly 2006). The law school casebook on battering that I coauthored includes a chapter on international human rights and emphasizes that international human rights frameworks expand our understanding of battering as linked to larger political and social violence (see DaIton, Schneider 2001; Schneider, Hanna, Greenberg, and Dalton 2008). …

School shootings comprise a small proportion of childhood deaths from firearms; however, these shootings receive a disproportionately large share of media attention. We conducted a root cause analysis of 2 recent school shootings in the United States using lay press reports. We reviewed 1760 and analyzed 282 articles from the 10 most trusted news sources. We identified 356 factors associated with the school shootings. Policy-level factors, including a paucity of adequate legislation controlling firearm purchase and ownership, were the most common contributing factors to school shootings. Mental illness was a commonly cited person-level factor, and access to firearms in the home and availability of large-capacity firearms were commonly cited environmental factors. Novel approaches, including root cause analyses using lay media, can identify factors contributing to mass shootings. The policy, person, and environmental factors associated with these school shootings should be addressed as part of a multipronged effort to prevent future mass shootings.

BackgroundSeveral past studies have found that media reports of suicides and homicides appear to subsequently increase the incidence of similar events in the community, apparently due to the coverage planting the seeds of ideation in at-risk individuals to commit similar acts.MethodsHere we explore whether or not contagion is evident in more high-profile incidents, such as school shootings and mass killings (incidents with four or more people killed). We fit a contagion model to recent data sets related to such incidents in the US, with terms that take into account the fact that a school shooting or mass murder may temporarily increase the probability of a similar event in the immediate future, by assuming an exponential decay in contagiousness after an event.ConclusionsWe find significant evidence that mass killings involving firearms are incented by similar events in the immediate past. On average, this temporary increase in probability lasts 13 days, and each incident incites at least 0.30 new incidents (p = 0.0015). We also find significant evidence of contagion in school shootings, for which an incident is contagious for an average of 13 days, and incites an average of at least 0.22 new incidents (p = 0.0001). All p-values are assessed based on a likelihood ratio test comparing the likelihood of a contagion model to that of a null model with no contagion. On average, mass killings involving firearms occur approximately every two weeks in the US, while school shootings occur on average monthly. We find that state prevalence of firearm ownership is significantly associated with the state incidence of mass killings with firearms, school shootings, and mass shootings.

In recent decades, the number of people exposed to traumatic events has significantly increased as various forms of violence, including war and political upheaval, engulf civilian populations worldwide. In spite of widespread armed conflict, guerrilla warfare and political violence in the Latin American and Caribbean region, insufficient attention had been paid in assessing the medium and long-term psychological impact and additional burden of disease, death, and disability caused by violence and wars amongst civilian populations. Following a review of the literature, a few central questions are raised: What is the short, medium and long-term health impact of extreme and sustained forms of violence in a given population? How political violence is linked to poor mental health outcomes at the individual and collective levels? Are trauma-related disorders, universal outcomes of extreme and sustained violence? These questions lead us to reframe the analysis of political violence and mental health outcomes, and reexamine the notions of trauma, after which a research and action agenda for the region is outlined. In the concluding sections, some basic principles that may prove useful when designing psychosocial interventions in post-conflict situations are reviewed.

Despite the high number of cases of overt political violence in the Mediterranean and the richness of media art in the region, there has been no comprehensive research about political violence and contemporary media art production in the region. Departing from the question of networks in media art from the Mediterranean, this research looks at the artists’ imagination of the region informed by practices of various forms of violence through critical outlook on the issues of visibility. In doing so, it inquires into treating the Mediterranean itself as a medium. It conducts four case studies whose common focus is on the networks of relations that reproduce, strengthen, and reinforce models of political violence at various levels, using anecdotal evidence and content analysis methods. The case studies give a a) microscopic view of a computer virus; b) life-size view of an individual human body; c) landscape view of urban transformation; and d) bird’s eye view of occupation, consumption and destruction. Taking Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics as its theoretical framework, the study analyses the contemporary blend of disciplinary, sovereign, biopolitical, and necropolitical practices within granular and grand levels across the region and claims that temporality is the key element in the transformation and survival of forms of violence.

Este ensaio objetiva apresentar uma análise da violência presente no livro “Amuleto” do escritor chileno Roberto Bolaño. O romance está contextualizado no início da década de 1970, momento de grandes tensões políticas e de significativa violência no México e do início da ditadura militar-empresarial chilena (1973-1990). Os regimes ditatoriais, embora em circunstâncias diferentes, foram (e são ainda) episódios marcantes que unem os países latino-americanos. Identificaremos as diversas formas de violência ocorridas na América Latina, especificamente, no Chile e no México durante o período mencionado, assim como, qual a relação entre a política e a literatura presentes na referida obra. Os atuais discursos políticos que circulam em nossa sociedade sinalizam que grande parte da população brasileira provavelmente ignora parte significativa da história, inclusive do Brasil, nas décadas de 1960/1970, ou seja, a memória produzida sobre este período não deu conta de fazer conhecer os horrores e as atrocidades cometidos durante os mais de 20 anos de governo militar no país. A partir da abordagem do lugar da poesia e dos poetas na década de 1970, a narradora de Amuleto versa sobre seu papel de defensora da poesia e da memória política do México e do Chile de meados do século XX, de forma indissociável. Com seu discurso circular, calcado na reiteração de eventos traumáticos que presenciou, em especial, à invasão à UNAM, o Massacre de Tlatelolco (1968) e o golpe militar chileno (1973). Neste último fato, relatado pelo personagem Arturo Belano, há um trabalho de escavação memorialística, tanto nas ocorrências históricas mencionadas, como dos intentos poéticos do distrito federal mexicano. Os jovens poetas narrados pela protagonista defendiam o livre trânsito entre vida e poesia, se opunham aos moldes acadêmicos vigentes encarnados na figura de Octavio Paz, como também do poder hegemônico. O movimento poético desses jovens latino-americanos da década de 1970 agrega as muitas inquietações dos seus integrantes. A paixão pela poesia é o princípio básico que dá unidade ao grupo que buscava em cada ato e em cada verso um novo modo de explicar o mundo através de uma poesia sem burocracias, sem espaços de poder e legitimações padronizadas. Este estudo contribui para a indispensabilidade de se manter vivos os horrores e traumas que aconteceram durante os regimes autoritários e as ditaduras militares na América Latina e suas reverberações, considerando, sobretudo, que a memória pode ser um potente instrumento utilizado na reconstrução da história. Serão utilizados textos teóricos e críticos de Paul Ricoeur (1996), Nascimento (2008), Seligmann-Silva (2003), Sarlo (2007) e Rojo (2012), Bolognese (2009), Villarreal (2011), entre outros.

Mass Shootings e phenomenon of mass shootings has loomed larger in the public consciousness recently as such incidents occur with disturbing regularity. In the last six months of 2015, for instance, there were four mass shootings, cumulatively killing and wounding dozens of individuals. Despite a ubiquitous sense that such events are increasing, estimates vary as to their frequency, and whether it has accelerated, due to the conflicting and overlapping constructs used to classify and measure multiple-victim shootings. Terminology A myriad of terms and constructs have been used to describe public, mass acts of violence, the most common of which include mass shooting, school shooting, active shooting, mass killing, and mass murder. e types of events delimited by the various terms and constructs are differentiated primarily by setting (e.g., public, school-based), the number of victims injured or killed (e.g., three or more individuals killed), and the motivations of the perpetrators (e.g., anger/revenge, gang-/ drug-related). Further obfuscating the matter, the same constructs are sometimes differentially termed (e.g., shootings targeting at least three individuals have been referred to as both “rampage shootings” and “mass shootings”), and, conversely, the same terms are often applied to distinct constructs (e.g., “mass shooting” has been used torefer both to shootings producing a certain number of fatalities and to those simply targeting a certain number of people). roughout this chapter, the term “mass shooting” will be used to refer to the various constructs discussed above.

Although research has independently examined the characteristics of mass school shootings and school firearms violence, few studies compare mass to non-mass school shootings. We quantitatively examined how social (e.g. peer bullying), behavioral (e.g. behavioral health), contextual (neighborhood disadvantage), and situational (e.g. acting alone, firearm type and access) factors associated with school firearms violence differed between mass and non-mass incidents. Using data from TASSS (n = 389), we analyzed two measures of mass shootings: incident outcomes and violent intent. Findings show mass shootings are rare. Only 10% caused four or more total bullet wound injuries, while 16% displayed indicators of mass-violence intent. Behavioral health issues, lower neighborhood disadvantage, and high-powered firearms increased the likelihood of mass shootings, while peer bullying had limited influence. These findings have policy and theoretical implications, as behavioral health was linked to casualties and premeditated intent, and less disadvantaged communities may face distinct pathways to large-scale violence.

Urban violence and health—South Africa 1995

Is the American public more likely to favor stricter gun legislation in the aftermath of deadly mass shootings? The authors leverage the occurrence of several mass shootings during multiple survey waves of the General Social Survey between 1987 and 2018 to examine whether exposure to a mass shooting sways public opinion on gun legislation. The results reveal that mass shootings increase support for stricter gun permits among Democrats but not for individuals of other political orientations. An exception to this finding occurs with school shootings, which mobilize broad support for firearm legislation among both Democrats and Republicans.

Mass shootings, like other extreme events, have long garnered public curiosity and, in turn, significant media coverage. The media framing, or topic focus, of mass shooting events typically evolves over time from details of the actual shooting to discussions of potential policy changes (e.g., gun control, mental health). Such media coverage has been historically provided through traditional media sources such as print, television, and radio, but the advent of online social networks (OSNs) has introduced a new platform for accessing, producing, and distributing information about such extreme events. The ease and convenience of OSN usage for information within society’s larger growing reliance upon digital technologies introduces potential unforeseen risks. Social bots, or automated software agents, are one such risk, as they can serve to amplify or distort potential narratives associated with extreme events such as mass shootings. In this paper, we seek to determine the prevalence and relative importance of social bots participating in OSN conversations following mass shooting events using an ensemble of quantitative techniques. Specifically, we examine a corpus of more than 46 million tweets produced by 11.7 million unique Twitter accounts within OSN conversations discussing four major mass shooting events: the 2017 Las Vegas concert shooting, the 2017 Sutherland Springs church chooting, the 2018 Parkland School Shooting and the 2018 Santa Fe school shooting. This study’s results show that social bots participate in and contribute to online mass shooting conversations in a manner that is distinguishable from human contributions. Furthermore, while social bots accounted for fewer than 1% of total corpus user contributors, social network analysis centrality measures identified many bots with significant prominence in the conversation networks, densely occupying many of the highest eigenvector and out-degree centrality measure rankings, to include 82% of the top-100 eigenvector values of the Las Vegas retweet network.

This study examined public comments on Twitter in the wake of three mass shootings in the United States during the summer of 2022. A total of 1,500 tweets were assessed (N = 1,500) for sentiment, risks presented, attribution of blame, and outrage. A sample of 500 tweets was taken following the Buffalo, New York, supermarket shooting; a sample of 500 tweets was taken following the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting; and a sample of 500 tweets was taken following the Highland Park, Illinois, Fourth of July parade shooting. Results show that risk, blame, and outrage differed significantly between the three situations in a variety of ways. These differences and possible reasons for them are further discussed. This study provides valuable insight on social media conversations about mass shootings – a timely subject that continues to plague the country and lead to polarizing opinions and divisiveness. The study also serves a practical function, as the findings can be presented to government organizations and social media organizations alike as critical insight into public perceptions, it can assist in identifying problematic speech online, and it can inform the development of social media guidelines in maintaining civil discord.