Pathways to school shootings : toward a dual-process developmental-situational model of choice / Brent Klein.

Although a significant social problem, school shootings remain seriously understudied and undertheorized. Indeed, the lack of large-scale quantitative data on this phenomenon has stunted scholarship on American school shootings' etiology and prevention. Overcoming the voids in the literature, this dissertation utilizes dual-process models of decision making with life-course criminology and situational theories of violence to investigate the differential pathways to school shooting incidents. Drawing from The American School Shooting Study (TASSS) and five waves of longitudinal data on 249 school shooters' antisocial behaviors in the United States, the current study addresses several research aims. First, this dissertation empirically charted school shooters' antisocial trajectories in the five years before the shooting incident. Second, it examined the situated opportunities (e.g., facilities access, firearms access) and social interactions (e.g., peer effects, victim behaviors) implicated in the school shooting event. Third, the current research examined the degree to which indicators of dual-process decision making (e.g., system one vs. system two) before the shooting remained a function of (a) shooters' differential antisocial development and (b) the situated opportunities and social interactions involved in the shooting incident. Noteworthy findings revealed that school shooters tend to follow two trajectories of antisocial conduct. The dominant trajectory (̃80%) followed an "event proximal" path, such that the probability of observing antisocial conduct remained low until the year of the shooting itself when outward manifestations of antisociality increased sharply. The second trajectory (̃20%) followed a "variable increase" path, such that the probability of observing antisocial conduct was variable but increased until shooting itself. However, membership in the two trajectory classes failed to reliably predict system one versus system two decision making. Additionally, incident-level analyses revealed that school shootings tend to be heterogenous crimes. The presence of police and security guards during the commission of these events varied. However, police or security guards were absent during the criminogenic moment in most cases, and few schools provided working metal detectors. While most school shootings involved the use of handguns, the type action mechanism and caliber varied considerably. Furthermore, most shootings targeted students only, and non-trivial proportions of the violence (40%) involved victims who had a prior dispute or conflict with the shooter. Moreover, results indicated that system one decision processes were more associated with police presence at the time of the shooting than system two decision making. Overall, the current study offers important new directions in school shooting research.

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