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AJPH LETTERS AND RESPONSES
SEASONAL INFLUENCE ON MASS SHOOTINGS
Mass shootings have become a terribleproblem across the world, especially in the United States. In the aftermath of mass shootings, it has been observed that popular and political discourse frequently focuses on the causal impact of mental illness, conveying a message that people with serious mental illness (SMI) are “dangerous people” often reduced to “dangerous weapons,” thereby negatively influencing public attitudes about individuals with SMI.1,2 Such widely held, if simplistic attitudes, have been challenged by Metzl and MacLeish, who recently proposed that notions of mental illness emerging in relation to mass shootings frequently reflect “larger cultural stereotypes and anxieties about matters such as race/ethnicity, social class, and politics.”3(p240)
They also showed that mass shootings result in a complex interplay between numerous factors from gun policy to risk factors, such as alcohol useorthemalegender,whicharemorestrongly correlated with gun violence than mental illness alone. We also believe that seasons might have an influence on these mass shootings. Indeed, seasons have a demonstrated affect on mood, hostility, anger, irritability, and anxiety in populations with and without SMI.4,5
We therefore decided to analyze the freely available public data on all mass shootings, defined as when four or more people are shot in one event, that occurred in the United States since January 2013 (http://www. shootingtracker.com). Figure 1 shows a clear increase in the number of mass shootings as well as the numbers killed and injured during the summer, which is replicated in all of the three years that were investigated. The peak begins in May and finishes around September–October. We statistically examined this seasonal effect by using the cosinor model, which captures a sea- sonal pattern using a sinusoidal wave (analyses made with the “Season” R package, made by Barnett & Dobson, and used with R 3.2.2; http://www.R-project.org). Usingan adjusted significancelevelof.025,wefounda significant seasonality effect for the numbers of injured and killed in 2013, 2014, and 2015. We also found a significant seasonality for number of such events in 2013 and 2015, which did not achieve significance in 2014. We did not observe any particular increase in these events for 2015 compared with 2013 and 2014.
Reproducing our results in two different countries would have strengthened our hy- pothesis. However, no reliable data exist on mass shootings besides in the United States. On the other hand, we replicated our findings for the three years investigated by using ex- actly the same definition of mass shootings in the only existing reliable public database. Such data indicate a seasonal influence, both on the frequency and the intensity, of mass shootings, with seasonal effects opening new avenues for the understanding and prevention of this major public and political issue.
Pierre Alexis Geoffroy, MD, Ali Amad, MD, PhD
ABOUT THE AUTHORS Pierre Alexis Geoffroy is with the French Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM), and the Paris Diderot University, Sorbonne Paris Cité, UMR-S 1144, Paris, France. Ali Amad is with the Institute of Psychiatry, Psy- chology and Neuroscience, King’s College London, London, UK, and the University of Lille, Lille, France.
Correspondence should be sent to Pierre Alexis Geoffroy, Service de Psychiatrie Adulte, Hôpital Fernand Widal, 200 rue
du Faubourg Saint Denis, 75475 Paris Cedex 10, France (e-mail: [email protected]). Reprints can be ordered at http://www.ajph.org by clicking the “Reprints” link.
This letter was accepted December 29, 2015. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2016.303065
CONTRIBUTORS All authors contributed equally to this letter.
REFERENCES 1. McGinty EE, Webster DW, Jarlenski M, Barry CL. News media framing of serious mental illness and gun violence in the United States, 1997-2012. Am J Public Health. 2014;104(3):406–413.
2. McGinty EE, Webster DW, Barry CL. Effects of news media messages about mass shootings on attitudes toward persons with serious mental illness and public support for gun control policies. Am J Psychiatry. 2013; 170(5):494–501.
3. Metzl JM, MacLeish KT. Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms. Am J Public Health. 2015;105(2):240–249.
4. Geoffroy PA, Bellivier F, Scott J, Etain B. Seasonality and bipolar disorder: a systematic review, from admission rates to seasonality of symptoms. J Affect Disord. 2014;168: 210–223.
5. Harmatz MG, Well AD, Overtree CE, Kawamura KY, Rosal M, Ockene IS. Seasonal variation of depression and other moods: a longitudinal approach. J Biol Rhythms. 2000;15(4):344–350.
METZL RESPONDS
Mass shootings are horrific acts that seemto defy the rules that govern everyday life. A stranger shoots strangers. Fatalizing violence occurs seemingly out of the blue in the context of safe spaces such as schools, movie theaters, or workplaces. Death comes in ways that it seems as unpredictable as it is unavoidable.
Given this terrain, it makes complete sense that we, as a society and also as smaller subset societies of scholars, attempt to place some sort of grid over mass shootings to render them more sensible, predictable, and ulti- mately preventable. Mental illness was widely considered such a schema until it became clear that, as MacLeish and I showed,1 the category of “mental illness” revealed more about cultural and racialized myths and stereotypes than it did about the causal factors that led to mass violence. Age, race, society, and family have also been posited as potential
Letters to the editor referring to a recent AJPH article are encouraged up to 3 months after the article’s appearance. By submitting a letter to the editor, the author gives permission for its publication in AJPH. Letters should not duplicate material being published or submitted elsewhere. The editors reserve the right to edit and abridge letters and to publish responses.
Text is limited to 400 words and 7 references. Submit online at www. editorialmanager.com/ajph. Queries should be addressed to the Editor-in- Chief, Alfredo Morabia, MD, PhD, at [email protected]. ◢
May 2016, Vol 106, No. 5 AJPH Geoffroy and Amad Letters and Responses e15
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FIGURE 1—Monthly Data From Mass Shootings in the United States by (a) Number of Mass Shootings and (b) Number of People killed or Injured: 2013–2015
AJPH LETTERS AND RESPONSES
e16 Letters and Responses Metzl AJPH May 2016, Vol 106, No. 5
frames.2 And now, as the authors laudably suggest, we may add seasonality to the list.
I have no implicit problem with linkages that connect mass shootings and seasonal effects. After all, chart trends appear notable, and on some level perhaps it makes sense that shooters might be sensitive to the weather just like everyone else.
At the same time, a number of factors should give us pause before we pursue this line of inquiry in a more sustained way. Perhaps most importantly, the very definition of a “mass shooting” is in no way stable or value-free, and a great deal of controversy3
surrounds different definitions of the term. Even the Federal Bureau of Investigation does not have a stable definition of a mass shooting,4 and controversy has also surrounded the shifting definitions used by the anything-but-systematic database com- plied by the crowd-sourced Web site shootingtracker.com.5 This is not to suggest that effort and thought don’t go into these databases, but that their framing, inclusions, and exclusions depend on a host of variables made all the more complex because of Congressional bans on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention–funded research6
that might produce uniformity. Put suc- cinctly, we need a stable definition of a mass shooting that results from research, not from media reports or crowd sourcing, before we can begin to biologize the substrates that may underlie the phenomenon.
So too, it seems possible that seasonal trends may not hold as mass shootings exponentially rise7—February 2016 saw a number of high-profile events.8 Perhaps most importantly, these seasonal trends would seem salient only if linked, not to patterns beyond the United States (our gun culture is nothing if not unique), but to reflective patterns in the epidemic of everyday gun violence that kills or injures tens of thousands of Americans each year.9
Jonathan Metzl, MD, PhD
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jonathan Metzl is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Medicine, Health, and Society, the Director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, and Professor of Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN.
Correspondence should be sent to Jonathan M. Metzl, Director, Vanderbilt Center for Medicine, Health, and Society, 2301 Vanderbilt Place, Nashville, TN 37235
(e-mail: [email protected]). Reprints can be ordered at http://www.ajph.org by clicking the “Reprints” link.
This letter was accepted March 3, 2016. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2016.303173
REFERENCES 1. Metzl JM, MacLeish KT. Mental illness, massshootings, and the politics of American firearms. 44. Am J Public Health. 2015;105(2):240–249.
2. Isaksen JV. Why do people commit mass shootings? Popular Social Science. Available at: http://www. popularsocialscience.com/2013/01/04/why-do- people-commit-mass-shootings. Accessed March 10, 2016.
3. Kelly G. Here’s Why no one can agree on the number of mass shootings. New Republic. 2015. Available at: https://newrepublic.com/article/123027/ heres-why-no-one-can-agree-number-mass-shootings. Accessed March 10, 2016.
4. Federal Bureau of Investigations. A study of active shooter incidents in the united states between 2000 and 2013. US Department of Justice. 2013. Available at: https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2014/september/ fbi-releases-study-on-active-shooter-incidents/pdfs/ a-study-of-active-shooter-incidents-in-the-u.s.- between-2000-and-2013. Accessed March 10, 2016.
5. Mascia J. How Redditors are changing the way the media counts mass shootings. The Trace. October 8, 2015. Available at: http://www.thetrace.org/2015/10/mass- shooting-tracker-redditors-challenge-fbi-data. Accessed March 10, 2016.
6. Quietly, Congress extends a ban on CDC research on gun violence [transcript]. The Takeaway. Public Radio International. July 02, 2015. Available at: http://www. pri.org/stories/2015-07-02/quietly-congress-extends- ban-cdc-research-gun-violence. Accessed March 10, 2016.
7. Schmidt MS. FBI confirms a sharp rise in mass shootings since 2000. New York Times. September 24, 2014. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/25/us/ 25shooters.html. Accessed March 10, 2016.
8. Kalamazoo rampage marks 27th mass shooting in 2016. RT. February 23, 2016. Available at: https://www.rt. com/usa/333405-mass-shootings-of-2016. Accessed March 10, 2016.
9. Key Gun Violence Statistics. Brady campaign to prevent gun violence. Available at: http://www. bradycampaign.org/key-gun-violence-statistics. Accessed March 10, 2016.
AJPH LETTERS AND RESPONSES
May 2016, Vol 106, No. 5 AJPH Metzl Letters and Responses e17
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