Dinur Blum - Critical Mass: Understanding and Fixing the Social Roots of Mass Shootings in the United States

This book examines social patterns in 2,000 mass shootings in the United States between 2013 through 2020. While mass shootings are often described as psychological, the authors show that there are social factors that produce the anger needed to commit a mass shooting. These factors are fairly common and can be addressed to stem the anger earlier. The factors include chronic poverty, sudden unemployment, relationship problems, domestic violence, social isolation, and alcohol. Common social strains can metastasize and be lethally dangerous. By understanding the social factors, we can reduce the anger and frustration people feel that would drive them to killing others.

Dinur Blum is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at California State University, Los Angeles. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Riverside. In addition to the social causes of mass shootings, he has published School, Sports, or Sleep: Student-Athletes and the College Dilemma, exploring obstacles student-athletes face to help them in school. He has also co-authored and published with Dr. Adam G. Sanford and Dr. Stacy L. Smith on the sociology of the COVID-19 pandemic, edited by J. Michael Ryan. Dinur co-hosts the Learning Made Easier podcast with Dr. Adam G. Sanford, offering effective learning and teaching techniques. He has been interviewed by various news outlets as an expert on mass shootings.

Christian Gonzalez Jaworski is a researcher and a writer. His research interests are crime, drug addiction, opiates, and rural sociology. He and Dinur have researched mass shootings since 2012. Christian has taught at the College of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas. He lives in New England with his wife.

First published 2022

by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Blum, Dinur, author. | Jaworski, Christian Gonzalez, author.

Title: Critical mass : understanding and fixing the social roots of

mass shootings in the United States, 20132020 / Dinur Blum

and Christian Gonzalez Jaworski.

Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Includes bibliographical

references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021006914 | ISBN 9780367470630 (hardback) |

ISBN 9780367470586 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003033134 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Mass shootingsUnited States. | Violent crimes

United States. | Firearms and crimeUnited States. | Firearms ownership

United States. | CrimeSociological aspects.

Classification: LCC HV6536.5 .B58 2021 | DDC 364.152/340973dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006914

ISBN: 978-0-367-47063-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-47058-6 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-03313-4 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003033134

Typeset in Garamond

by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Dinur Blum and Christian G. Jaworski

DOI: 10.4324/9781003033134-1

Mass shootings are single-place, single-time events in which four or more people are killed or injured. This does not include the shooter or shooters. This definition is broader than the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBIs) definition, which is four or more people killed, regardless of injury. As the name defines, mass shootings involve firearms. Our analysis in this book focuses on mass shootings and gun violence, and while we do not focus on mass murders committed with knives, vehicles, or other means, some of the underlying social conditions leading to mass shootings also lead to similarly violent responses, even if the method of expressing that violence and weapon used is different.

Much of the existing literature on mass shootings in the United States focuses specifically on school shootings since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado (Schildkraut and Muschert 2019; Klaveras 2016; Bckler et al. 2013; Fast 2009; Lebrun 2009; Larkin 2007; Newman et al. 2004). These analyses of school shootings typically focus on the psychological health of the shooters and look at reducing school shootings through physical security measures such as introducing metal detectors and armed security guards at school or through having students and faculty participate in active shooter drills. These methods involve increasing surveillance at schools as part of the solution and assume shooters suffer from psychological problems that make them prone to committing acts of violence. While increased surveillance at schools has had some success in terms of stopping potential shootings (Silva 2020), we suggest alternative ways to reduce school shootings in public venue shootings.

School shootings receive extensive news media coverage partly due to their rarity. School shootings such as Columbine (1999), Virginia Tech University (2007), Sandy Hook (2012), and Marjory Stoneman Douglas (2018) dominate news coverage because schools are assumed to be safe places for everyone, and mass shootings scare people into thinking if a shooting happened at one school somewhere in the United States, then there must be a high risk of schools in their immediate areas also being lethally violent places. Further, focusing on schools as a broad location lumps in K12 campuses with university and college campuses, both in terms of geography and students or faculty. Despite generating news coverage, school shootings have dropped drastically since the early 1990s, with typically ten or fewer school shootings since the 20062007 academic year (Fox and Fridel 2018). Out of these, high schools are more likely to be scenes of mass shootings compared to universities and elementary schools. High school campuses tend to be more crowded and because students do not have the option of avoiding people or classes in high school, there are fewer ways of mitigating tension between students than a university would offer. These stresses of seeing someone unwanted and having no way of avoiding them can result in violence, including mass shootings. By hyper-focusing media attention on the relatively rare school shootings, workplace shootings, and public location shootings, news coverage and analysis ignore other social settings of mass shootings and thus ignore avenues to explore in order to lower the number of these incidents and victims.