An international committee of experts on aggression and youth violence issued a report urging policymakers to consider the research before arming schoolteachers or implementing other measures in response to the latest school shootings.
Iowa State University’s Craig Anderson and Douglas Gentile, both part of the International Society for Research on Aggression's Youth Violence Commission, have a combined 52 years of research on media violence. The two are routinely asked about its influence following a mass shooting. Gentile, a professor of psychology, says that we usually start with the wrong question.
“After a tragedy like a school shooting, we typically ask, ‘What was the cause of this?’ This is the wrong question because it makes the assumption that there could be a single cause, which is almost never correct,” Gentile said. “Humans are more complicated than that, and aggression is multi-causal.”
Gentile and Anderson stress that multiple risk factors, acting in combination, contribute to violent acts, but too often policymakers, media and the public focus on a single cause. The report provides an overview of the research detailing differences between mass and street shootings as well as the known risk factors – individual and environmental – of all forms of youth violence. According to the report, although mass shootings have become more common in America, they are still a rare occurrence.
Mass shootings tend to differ from other gun homicides in many ways. For example, mass shootings typically occur in rural or suburban middle class communities, the shooters usually do not have a history of criminal violence, and they often use multiple guns including legally purchased semi-automatic rifles with high-capacity magazines.