On 16 September 2013, a shooter roamed Building 197 with deadly effect. One Navy employee was shot and survived. Emergency physicians called her survival "a miracle." Jennifer sustained a point-blank shotgun blast, yet by the grace of God, she survived. More than a story of survival, this is a story of faith, of healing and of triumph.

The New York Times bestseller about the extraordinary young survivors who took on the gun lobby: “One of the most uplifting books you will read all year.” —The Washington Post Back in 1999, Dave Cullen was among the first to arrive at Columbine High, even before most of the SWAT teams went in. While writing his acclaimed account of the tragedy, he suffered two bouts of secondary PTSD. He covered all the later tragedies from a distance, working with a cadre of experts cultivated from academia and the FBI, but swore he would never return to the scene of a ghastly crime. But in 2018, Cullen went to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School because something radically different was happening. After nearly twenty years witnessing the mass shooting epidemic escalate, he was stunned and awed by the courage, anger, and conviction of the high school’s students. Refusing to allow adults and the media to shape their story, these remarkable adolescents took control—pushing back against the NRA and feckless Congressional leaders, organizing the massive March for Our Lives demonstration, and inspiring millions to join their grassroots #neveragain movement. They used their grief as a catalyst for change, and galvanized a nation. Cullen unfolds the story of Parkland through the voices of key participants. Instead of taking us into the mind of the killer, he takes us into the hearts of the Douglas students as they cope with the concerns of high school students everywhere—awaiting college acceptance letters, studying for midterms, competing against their athletic rivals, putting together the yearbook, staging the musical Spring Awakening, enjoying prom—while moving forward from a horrific event that has altered them forever. Deeply researched and beautifully told, Parkland is “a moving petition to America that it not look away from the catastrophes at Columbine, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, and, yes, Parkland. It succeeds as an in-depth report about the ‘generational campaign’ in the aftermath of the Parkland tragedy, a bi-partisan movement advocating serious gun reform” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution). “[A] page-turner. . . . Both realistic and optimistic, this insightful and compassionate chronicle is a fitting testament to a new chapter in American responses to mass shootings.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Groundbreaking." ―Rachel Louise Snyder, bestselling author of No Visible Bruises An examination of the phenomenon of mass shootings in America and an urgent call to implement evidence-based strategies to stop these tragedies Winner of the 2022 Minnesota Book Award Using data from the writers’ groundbreaking research on mass shooters, including first-person accounts from the perpetrators themselves, The Violence Project charts new pathways to prevention and innovative ways to stop the social contagion of violence. Frustrated by reactionary policy conversations that never seemed to convert into meaningful action, special investigator and psychologist Jill Peterson and sociologist James Densley built The Violence Project, the first comprehensive database of mass shooters. Their goal was to establish the root causes of mass shootings and figure out how to stop them by examining hundreds of data points in the life histories of more than 170 mass shooters—from their childhood and adolescence to their mental health and motives. They’ve also interviewed the living perpetrators of mass shootings and people who knew them, shooting survivors, victims’ families, first responders, and leading experts to gain a comprehensive firsthand understanding of the real stories behind them, rather than the sensationalized media narratives that too often prevail. For the first time, instead of offering thoughts and prayers for the victims of these crimes, Peterson and Densley share their data-driven solutions for exactly what we must do, at the individual level, in our communities, and as a country, to put an end to these tragedies that have defined our modern era.

From the recent shootings at Virginia Tech University to the tragedies at Columbine and Oklahoma City, certain common traits can be traced through all of these events. In Guys and Guns Amok, media and cultural critic Douglas Kellner provides a fascinating diagnostic reading of these acts of domestic terrorism. Skillfully connecting each case with the current environment for male socialization and the search for identity in an American culture obsessed with guns and militarism, Kellner's work is a sobering reflection on these tragedies and the pervasive power of media and popular culture as well as a wake-up call for the future.

Twenty Years of School-based Mass Shootings in the United States: Columbine to Santa Fe is an examination of twenty years of school-based mass shootings, from Columbine to Santa Fe, exploring the larger environmental framework within which these incidents occurred. Angelyn Spaulding Flowers and Cotina Lane Pixley use a mixed-methods approach to examine a diverse set of factors, identifying risk and protective factors along with specifically desired public policy responses by evaluating the convergence of variables from the range of school-based mass shootings included in this study. These variables include the type of weapon used, the availability of that type of weapon, perpetrator characteristics, school characteristics, as well as the geospatial and demographic characteristics of the school neighborhood. These school-based mass shooting incidents are explored at both the state and regional level and are further discussed in comparison to leisure time gun use, homicide rates, and suicide rates in the geographical area. The overarching geospatial analytical framework for this research also includes an examination of the manner in which existing policy enactments such as state gun laws vary by geography. Spaulding Flowers and Lane Pixley argue that the increased number of fatalities in school-based mass shooting is largely due to the increased lethality of the weapons, and they propose alternative solutions. Scholars of criminology, sociology, political science, and history will find this book particularly useful.

Mass shootings have become the “new normal” in American life. The same can be said for the public debate that follows a shooting: blame is cast, political postures are assumed, but no meaningful policy changes are enacted. In After Gun Violence, Craig Rood argues that this cycle is the result of a communication problem. Without advocating for specific policies, Rood examines how Americans talk about gun violence and suggests how we might discuss the issues more productively and move beyond our current, tragic impasse. Exploring the ways advocacy groups, community leaders, politicians, and everyday citizens talk about gun violence, Rood reveals how the gun debate is about far more than just guns. He details the role of public memory in shaping the discourse, showing how memories of the victims of gun violence, the Second Amendment, and race relations influence how gun policy is discussed. In doing so, Rood argues that forgetting and misremembering this history leads interest groups and public officials to entrenched positions and political failure and drives the public further apart. Timely and innovative, After Gun Violence advances our understanding of public discourse in an age of gridlock by illustrating how public deliberation and public memory shape and misshape one another. It is a search to understand why public discourse fails and how we can do better.

Mass Shootings and Civilian Armament provides the first comprehensive multi-methodological analysis of the relationship between mass shootings and firearm purchases (as proxied by background checks) in the US on national level data from 1999-2020. Since 1994, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US has doubled to around 398 million while the population only grew by 70 million. On average, mass shootings have occurred once every two weeks over the last decade which is a major factor behind why social scientists have started to ask whether mass shootings play a causative role in civilian decisions to purchase guns. Utilizing a multi-methodological approach featuring quantitative, comparative/configurational, and qualitative methods, this book puts forward a theoretical framework and argues that mass shootings do increase civilian armament, but that this repetitious effect is historically contingent, asymmetric, and non-linear. Particular types of mass shootings are hypothesized to have driven and continue to bring about increased levels of civilian firearm purchases through different pathways and combinations of variables – those that feature high fatality counts; arise in areas of cultural importance, are ideologically motivated. First, inquiry into background check data (1999-2020) and data on 213 mass shootings and attempted mass shootings is carried out to find out which shootings (as well as controls) are significantly correlated with background check increases. Second, the findings are utilized in a theoretically driven comparative configurational assessment to test if the noted theoretical pathways are associated with the outcome of increased post-shooting armament. Third, the empirical analyses are complimented by three case studies – the 2011 Gabrielle Giffords shooting (illustrative of the high fatality pathway), the 2012 Colorado movie theater shooting (illustrative of the cultural pathway), and the 2015 Charleston Church shooting (illustrative of the ideologically driven pathway). Interdisciplinary in nature, Mass Shootings and Civilian Armament will not only be of great interest to scholars of Criminology, but will also speak to sociologists, economists, public policy scholars, political scientists, historians, as well as cultural studies and American studies scholars.