Mental Illness and Mass Shootings: A Quantitative Treatment of Risk Factors and Mitigation Strategies

Abstract

This research paper aims at examining whether shooters with records of mental illnesses kill more people compared to mentally non-ill counterparts. The study also explores risk factors such as depression and schizophrenia, which might increase mass shootings' incidences. The research applies Python packages such as Seaborn, NumPy, and Matplotlib to visualize and categorize various mental illnesses that shooters experience. Independent samples' T-test was employed to observe whether shooters' prior signs of mental illness were related to the number of people they tried to kill. Results show that shooters have prior sign mental illness had higher values for the variable total victims (M = 16.55, SD = 14.34) than shooters without prior sign mental illness (M = 11.82, SD = 8.91). The independent samples' T-test indicated that the difference was statistically insignificant, t(41.32) = 1.67, p = .102, 95% Confidence Interval [-0.98, 10.43]. However, it is worth noting that the substantive significance (effect size) was calculated to be (0.46), which is a medium effect. Medium effect size indicates there might be a more significant relationship between the two variables.