Title:Using Analytics to Demonstrate Gun-Violence Patterns

Frederic Lemieux is professor of practice and faculty director of the Master’s of Professional Studies in Applied Intelligence program at the School of Continuing Studies. His research interests focus on intelligence, national security, homeland security, and cybersecurity. A criminologist by training, Lemieux has been studying since 2012. [Editor’s Note: Congress defines a mass shooting as the murder of three or more people in a single incident.]

How do you study mass shootings?

I bring different methodologies to questions about crime and security, including mass shootings. My research team and I are putting out the first nationwide database on mass shootings integrating data from various sources. We can now give an overview of mass-shooting data from 1966 to 2016. We’re finalizing the 2017 data and entering the 2018 data now. We will have the most up-to-date and comprehensive database available.

Which sources do you use?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is barred from studying firearm injuries and deaths. But data is tracked by some private places: Stanford University, The Washington Post, Mother Jones magazine, and Georgetown University. An FBI database has tracked 2000–2016. Not all the data collection uses the same rules and definitions, and so we work to ensure that all the data was consistent.

What does the data show?

Between 1983 and 2013, the U.S. had 78 mass shootings. That’s nearly double the number of mass shootings recorded in 24 Western countries for the same period. Gun ownership and mass shootings are highly correlated. It is important to mention that the 24 Western countries have more restrictive gun laws in terms of availability of certain types of firearms and more comprehensive background checks.

How are you sharing your findings?

We’ve generated some academic publications. In June, the National Institute of Justice, an arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, invited me to participate in a one-day seminar. Despite the ban on research, people in the government really do want to study this phenomenon, so they need data like ours.

What’s next for your research team?

We’re looking at integrating topics like social media into the data. What is the role of social media in the shooter’s decision-making process? Does social media create a kind of alternative reality that bolsters potential shooters?

We also plan to map the data to find specific communities with repeated events. Are there any factors that will predispose a community to experience mass shootings? What in the community generates the conditions for shootings? We don’t know, but it is something to be studied.