School Shooting Analysis

This repository contains an independent project focused on analyzing Shooting Incidents at K-12 Schools (Jan 1970-Jun 2022) provided by the Center for Homeland Defense and Security. The goal of this project is to create two models from the data to help us understand the effects of gun and mental health predictors on victimhood outcomes. In doing so, we might be able to provide recommendations on interventions for characteristics that are associated with strong effects on victimhood.

The analysis found that multiple weapons and the use of shotguns and rifles are strongly associated with an increase in victim count outcomes. Specifically, in cases where multiple weapons are used, having a shotgun increases the expected victim count more than having a rifle or a handgun. The analysis of the mental health model suggests that bullying is associated with greater victim counts; there was also a weak, negative association between victim counts and the passing years. However, there was no significant interaction effect between bullying and sex. Although most of the school shootings in our dataset were carried out by males, there is no indication that gender plays a role in how many victims are expected from a shooting incident. 

One possible explanation, and limitation, is that there were very few observations of female shooters and very few mental health-related variables in the dataset. Overall, the mental health model was weaker in comparison to the gun effects model. If our dataset had included more information on the mental health records of shooters, prior incidents, or any other contextualization of the lives of the shooter, the mental health model would have a broader scope of what mental health encompasses.