Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 6

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

An evaluation of completed and averted school shootings

Winch, Ashley T., Alexander, Kristi, Bowers, Clint, Straub, Frank, Beidel, Deborah C.·2024·Frontiers in Public Health
DOI 10.3389/fpubh.2023.1305286
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Introduction: For over two decades school shootings have become a significant concern, especially in the United States. Following a rampage school shooting, extensive resources are devoted to gathering all of the information surrounding the event. To date, few studies have compared completed to averted, or near-miss, school shootings. This study utilized the largest known sample of cases based in the United States in an effort to identify potential targets for prevention. Method: Data were derived from the Averted School Violence database of incidents occurring between 1999 and 2020. Statistical analyses were conducted to determine how age, co-conspirator involvement, engagement in leakage warning behavior, and motives – in isolation and in combination – varied between groups. Results: In insolation, age, co-conspirator involvement, engagement in leakage warning behaviors, and motives were significantly different between groups. However, when these variables were combined into a logistic regression, co-conspirator involvement, engagement in leakage warning behaviors, and motives involving suicidal intent emerged as statistically significant predictors of group membership. Age no longer differentiated the two types of events. Conclusion: This study demonstrates that regardless of suspect age, threats of school violence must be taken seriously and investigated fully. Further, students reporting their peers’ engagement in shooting-related behaviors (e.g., bringing a gun to school, mapping school, etc.) was one of the most significant predictors that a plot will be thwarted. While perpetrators who planned with others had increased odds of their plot being identified, those acting alone still demonstrated leakage behaviors. If individuals in the school environment are educated regarding warning behaviors, lone perpetrators can still be identified and reported to authorities. The perpetrator’s emotional distress, in particular depressive or suicidal thoughts were also a significant predictor of a completed school shooting. Future research efforts should focus on the development and evaluation of peer training programs to assist in the detection of school shooting warning behaviors.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.3389/fpubh.2023.1305286

Cites

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

No references could be resolved yet.

Research works printed but not linked: 31

  1. Rocque, 2023, Averting tragedy: an exploration of thwarted mass public shootings relative to completed attacks, School Criminol Crim Justice, 48, 277, 10.1177/07340168221117107 · DOI
  2. Silva, 2022, Mass shooting outcomes: a comparison of completed, attempted, failed, and foiled incidents in America, Deviant Behav, 43, 1487, 10.1080/01639625.2021.1991248 · DOI
  3. Baird, 2017, Alone and adrift: the association between mass school shootings, school size, and student support, Soc Sci J, 54, 261, 10.1016/j.soscij.2017.01.009 · DOI
  4. Gerard, 2016, Offender and offence characteristics of school shooting incidents, J Investig Psychol Offender Profiling, 13, 22, 10.1002/jip.1439 · DOI
  5. Langman, 2013, Thirty-five rampage school shooters: trends, patterns, and typology, 131, 10.1007/978-1-4614-5526-4_6 · DOI
  6. Langman, 2009, Rampage school shooters: a typology, Aggress Violent Behav, 14, 79, 10.1016/j.avb.2008.10.003 · DOI
  7. O’Toole, 2000, The school shooter: A threat assessment perspective
  8. Alathari, 2019, Protecting America’s schools : A U.S. secret service analysis of targeted school violence
  9. Bonanno, 2014, School shooters: history, current theoretical and empirical findings, and strategies for prevention, SAGE Open, 4, 215824401452542, 10.1177/2158244014525425 · DOI
  10. Dowdell, 2022, School shooters: patterns of adverse childhood experiences, bullying, and social media, J Pediatr Health Care, 36, 339, 10.1016/j.pedhc.2021.12.004 · DOI
  11. Hawes, 2022, Defining rampage violence across completion status: towards a more comprehensive model, JMVR, 1, 1594, 10.53076/JMVR51594 · DOI
  12. Agnich, 2015, A comparative analysis of attempted and completed school-based mass murder attacks, Am J Crim Justice, 40, 1, 10.1007/s12103-014-92395 · DOI
  13. Cowan, 2022, A mixed-methods analysis of averted mass violence in schools: implications for professional school counselors, Psychol Sch, 59, 817, 10.1002/pits.22647 · DOI · Paper page
  14. 2018, Averted school violence guide
  15. Dugré, 2019, Disentangling compliance with command hallucinations: heterogeneity of voice intents and their clinical correlates, Schizophr Res, 212, 33, 10.1016/j.schres.2019.08.016 · DOI
  16. 2021, Averted school violence (ASV) database: 2021 analysis update
  17. Abel, 2022, Pre-attack warning behaviors of 20 adolescent school shooters: a case study analysis, Crim Delinquency, 68, 786, 10.1177/0011128721999338 · DOI
  18. Meloy, 2011, The concept of leakage in threat assessment, Behav Sci Law, 29, 513, 10.1002/bsl.986 · DOI
  19. Meloy, 2014, Some warning behaviors discriminate between school shooters and other students of concern, J Threat Assess Manag, 1, 203, 10.1037/tam0000020 · DOI
  20. Peduzzi, 1996, A simulation study of the number of events per variable in logistic regression analysis, J Clin Epidemiol, 49, 1373, 10.1016/S0895-4356(96)00236-3 · DOI · Paper page
  21. Faul, 2009, Statistical power analyses using G* power 3.1: tests for correlation and regression analyses, Behav Res Methods, 41, 1149, 10.3758/BRM.41.4.1149 · DOI · Paper page
  22. Cohen, 1988, Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences
  23. Cohen, 2013, Applied multiple regression/correlation analysis for the behavioral sciences, 10.4324/9780203774441 · DOI · Paper page
  24. Robertz, 2013, School shooting threats as a national phenomenon, 105, 10.1007/978-1-4614-5526-4_5 · DOI
  25. Box, 2012, Transformation of the independent variables, Technometrics, 4, 531, 10.1080/00401706.1962.10490038 · DOI
  26. Daniels, 2019, A preliminary report on the police foundation’s averted school violence database
  27. Best, 2009, Executive functions after age 5: changes and correlates, Dev Rev, 29, 180, 10.1016/j.dr.2009.05.002 · DOI · Paper page
  28. Bushman, 2016, Youth violence: what we know and what we need to know, Am Psychol, 71, 17, 10.1037/a0039687 · DOI
  29. Cornell, 2013, The Virginia student threat assessment guidelines: an empirically supported violence prevention strategy, 379, 10.1007/978-1-4614-5526-4_17 · DOI
  30. Madfis, 2013, School rampage in international perspective: the salience of cumulative strain theory, 79, 10.1007/978-1-4614-5526-4_4 · DOI
  31. 2023, Improving school safety: a toolkit for strengthing K-12 reporting programs

Cited by

See all 6

Metadata

Authors
Winch, A. T., Alexander, K., Bowers, C., Straub, F., & Beidel, D. C.
Venue
Frontiers in Public Health
Publisher
Frontiers Media SA
Published
2024-01-09
Volume
11
ISSN
2296-2565
DOI
10.3389/fpubh.2023.1305286
Cited by
6
References
0
Licence
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (vor)

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: An evaluation of completed and averted school shootings. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1305286
The paper
Winch, A. T., Alexander, K., Bowers, C., Straub, F., & Beidel, D. C. (2024). An evaluation of completed and averted school shootings. Frontiers in Public Health. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1305286

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.