American uniqueness revisited: A comparative examination of two school shootings using the path to intended violence

ABSTRACT

Although often perceived to be a uniquely American phenomenon, mass shootings in schools across the globe have led to continued concerns about how to keep educational institutions safe. To identify opportunities for intervention and prevention of these tragedies, this study utilises a comparative case study approach. Specifically, we analyse the events leading up to the mass shootings at Municipal School Tasso da Silveira in Rio de Janeiro (Realengo district), Brazil (2011) and Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida (2018). Using the Path to Intended Violence model, we find that the perpetrators’ pre-attack behaviours, escalating from grievances to the attacks themselves, are remarkably similar despite cultural differences and that multiple opportunities for intervention existed. Implications from these findings related to prevention, school security, and broader policy are considered.

KEYWORDS:

• mass shooting
• Parkland
• Realengo
• path to intended violence
• comparative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In keeping with TASSS protocol, the team searched several web-engines encompassing: (1) media aggregators, (2) web-based newspaper archives, (3) legal research services, (4) administrative sources, (5) academic sources, (6) notable incident trackers, and (7) public records. We searched these sources to identify relevant information about each event and the perpetrators.

2. In accordance with the No Notoriety protocol (see also Schildkraut, 2019), the perpetrators of each attack will not be named in this paper. To avoid confusion as there are two cases, they will be referred to by their initials (W.M. in Realengo and N.C. in Parkland) consistent with previous commission reports (see, for example, Sandy Hook Advisory Commission, 2015).

3. It is unclear how much ammunition W.M. purchased in total. The acquaintance sold him approximately 60 cartridges in the transaction (Freire, 2011). During the attack, 62 rounds were fired (Bernardo, 2021).

4. Official records do not provide an exact number of rounds purchased but N.C.’s brother reported that he had a duffle bag filled with shotgun shells and a significant quantity of rounds for the weapon used in the shooting (Schildkraut et al., 2022).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jaclyn Schildkraut

Jaclyn Schildkraut is the Executive Director of the Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium at the Rockefeller Institute of Government and an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice (on leave) at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Oswego. Her research interests include mass/school shootings, homicide trends, mediatisation effects, moral panics, and crime theories. She is the co-author of Mass Shootings: Media, Myths, and Realities and Columbine, 20 Years Later and Beyond: Lessons from Tragedy, and has published additional books, research articles, and policy briefs assessing different facets of school and mass shootings.

Nadine Connell

Nadine M. Connell, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University and a Fellow at the Griffith Criminology Institute. Her research interests include school violence, juvenile delinquency prevention, programme and policy evaluation, and capital punishment. She has received grant funding from state and national agencies to better understand decision-making in at-risk youth, violence and drug prevention in schools, and the aetiology of school-shootings. Her work has been published in several top research journals, including Criminology and Public Policy, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice, and the American Journal of Public Health.

Nina Barbieri

Nina Barbieri, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice and Assistant Department Chair for the Department of Criminal Justice and Social Work. Her research centres around delinquency, adolescence, school safety and climate, criminological theory, and research methods. Additionally, it is often through the critical examination of contextual and intersectional impact(s) of individual experiences to our shared understanding of crime and delinquency.

Rafael de Azeredo

Rafael Azeredo is a PhD Candidate in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University. Rafael is a sociologist of migration whose research interests focus on the Brazilian diaspora and broader relations between Latin America and Australia.