Mental Illness and Mass Shootings: A Quantitative Treatment of Risk Factors and Mitigation Strategies

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.220110.191How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Mental Illness; Mass Shooting; Risk Factors for Gun Violence

Abstract

This research paper aims at examining whether shooters with records of mental illnesses kill more people compared to mentally non-ill counterparts. The study also explores risk factors such as depression and schizophrenia, which might increase mass shootings’ incidences. The research applies Python packages such as Seaborn, NumPy, and Matplotlib to visualize and categorize various mental illnesses that shooters experience. Independent samples’ T-test was employed to observe whether shooters’ prior signs of mental illness were related to the number of people they tried to kill. Results show that shooters have prior sign mental illness had higher values for the variable total victims (M = 16.55, SD = 14.34) than shooters without prior sign mental illness (M = 11.82, SD = 8.91). The independent samples’ T-test indicated that the difference was statistically insignificant, t(41.32) = 1.67, p =.102, 95% Confidence Interval [-0.98, 10.43]. However, it is worth noting that the substantive significance (effect size) was calculated to be (0.46), which is a medium effect. Medium effect size indicates there might be a more significant relationship between the two variables.

Copyright

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jiahua Wu
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/01/28
TI  - Mental Illness and Mass Shootings: A Quantitative Treatment of Risk Factors and Mitigation Strategies
BT  - Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Public Art and Human Development ( ICPAHD 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1012
EP  - 1017
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.220110.191
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.220110.191
ID  - Wu2022
ER  -