Mass Shootings and Masculinity

Abstract

This is an expert report prepared for The Joint Federal/Provincial Commission into the April 2020 Nova Scotia Mass Casualty. We summarize definitional debates surrounding how mass shootings are operationalized in existing research, address how this impacts what we are able to know about the burden of mass shootings in any society, and summarize the relationship between guns, gun culture, mass shootings, and masculinity in American society.

“Husband, father, coward, killer”: The discursive reproduction of racial inequality in media accounts of mass shooters

“…Indeed, scholars are sometimes not talking about the same incidents when they operationalize the concept of “mass shootings.” In an analysis of discrepancies between 4 of the largest datasets relied on in academic research on the topic, Booty et al (2019) discovered that, for the year 2017, only two incidents were included in every dataset for that year (of a total of 425 incidents from all of the databases combined). A subsequent analysis involving five of the largest databases discovered a total of 3,155 incidents between 2013 and 2020 (years for which all five databases have data) discovered that only 25 of those incidents were in all five databases ( Bridges et al, 2022 ). We follow Booty et al’s (2019) recommendation and agree that existing research operationalizes “mass shootings” in an arbitrarily conservative way, producing smaller samples from which we can analyze data.…”