4 ms·

It's not clear to me why this study would set those thresholds for the underlying data (4+ Victims & 2+ deaths), this seems to downplay the number of incidents

It's not clear to me why this study would set those thresholds for the underlying data (4+ Victims & 2+ deaths), this seems to downplay the number of incidents. At the very least there should be some explanation of why this limit is in place, as it has a significant impact on the findings. Closest thing I can find to an accurate data-set is here: https://www.kaggle.com/ecodan/us-school-shootings-dataset/notebook https://www.kaggle.com/ecodan/us-school-shootings-dataset/no.... Data seems to be a blend of a northwestern study and the wikipedia list of shootings.

xg15 9y ago
Absolutely. Even if there is some research question by which this criterion would be useful, it doesn't lead the underlying conclusions that school shootings in general are a rare event, declining in frequency. Interestingly, according to [1], the criterion used by the FBI to assess mass shooting used to be "at least 4 persons killed or wounded" - until it got changed to "at least 3 persons" in 2013. So the criterion the study uses is stricter than both the old and the new way of counting the FBI uses. Note also that, according to [2], even though the rate of mass shooting at schools seems to be decreasing, the rate of mass shootings in general is increasing. See also [3] for more information about the different definitions and ways of counting. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shooting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shooting [2] https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/active-shooter-study-2000-2013-1.pdf https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/active-shooter-study-200... [3] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/02/another-school-shootingbut-whos-counting/553412/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/02/anothe...