School Shootings Are More Common When The Economy Is Bad

Episodes of gun violence at America’s schools are both heartbreaking and disturbingly frequent, but the circumstances that inspire them remain elusive. A new Northwestern University study comes up with at least a partial answer. It finds such incidents are more common during periods of high unemployment. During an economic downturn, the assumption that a diploma leads to a good job is revealed as false (at least for the moment), leading to frustration, disillusionment, and, sometimes, violence. “In the last 25 years, there have been two periods of elevated gun violence at schools in the U.S., and the timing of such periods significantly correlates with increased economic insecurity,” writes a research team led by data scientists Adam Pah and Luis Amaral and sociologist John Hagan. “We posit that gun violence at schools is a response, in part, to the breakdown in the expectation that sustained participation in the educational system will improve economic opportunities and outcomes.” The study, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, features a newly build data set that identified 381 incidents of gun violence at American schools (all the way from elementary schools to colleges and universities). The list “includes all instances of gun usage, whether someone dies in the course of events or not” between 1990 and 2013. The researchers found higher rates of gun violence at times of high unemployment. This correlation was found whet...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news